The difference is that choice to live out in the woods costs you. Choice to not have a phone costs you. A choice to not pay ai at this point ... does not cost you unless you live in special situation.
Not getting a phone didn't really cost you either for the first 5-10 yrs.
But the people that didn't definitely had a harder time adjusting when it got increasingly annoying to live without a smartphone.
It's ultimately a choice you can make, but it definitely also comes with consequences - especially if your dayjob is software - as this is an industry that loves to discriminate against people that aren't aboard the hype train and don't have "10 yrs of experience in d̵o̵c̵k̵e̵r̵ LLMs"
I really dont think analogy works at all. If you did not had phone phone first 15 years of their existence, there was very little to pay. Nowhere near anything close to "living in the woods".
And no one was forcing phones on you first 5-10 years of it existing. There was advertisement and competition like with any other product. You was certainly not getting free phones and there was no real top down push to have them like we see with ai.
You forget that the vast majority of software engineering in the real world is boring tech, not the new hotness that’s being peddled on Hacker News.
There is a large market for Java, C++ and COBOL engineers to this day, despite all startups on here are talking about React and Rust. There will still be a large need for actual engineers that use their meat brain and are not paid by line committed for the foreseeable future. Not everyone is writing junior-tier boilerplate that benefits from LLMs.
Ok I didn't forget. As a matter of fact, most LLMs are outright banned at my workplace.
However, the writing is on the wall and it's likely going to become one of the bullet points you'll be expected to have significant experience in when changing jobs. And I doubt that's gonna take 10 yrs
Or unless you work for Coinbase, where people who refused to use AI got fired.
Think that's rare? Nope. It's coming everywhere. Most companies are at the stage of trying to monitor AI usage and encourage it, but eventually it'll stop being optional.
I doubt it will become as usual. It scream innefective management in the first place and is not defense of ai at all.
Company trying to get rid if innefective people would make sense, but if you measure it by ai usage all that happens is that your ai usage will go up - and price of using it along with it.
There are always irrational managers enjoying power trips. But the norms normally dont become that irrational
Imagine you had a job doing ordinary database backed web app written in Java, and you found you had a coworker who wrote all their code in Notepad. They also refused to run linters or open code reviews, viewing it all as modern nonsense. Would you find that acceptable? Would you be surprised if a few months later that guy got let go for performance reasons? No.
Developers are given a lot degree of freedom, but in return are expected to use that freedom responsibly to deliver as much value as they can for the company. People refusing to use powerful tools had better have a watertight explanation for why. Mere negative vibes aren't good enough.
