The fears about AI are real – I feel them too!
This is my first blog post on my new personal website, which I had abandoned for many years. It was a reply to someone I can feel is going through a lot right now, like I am, and I empathize greatly. I tried to post it directly on LinkedIn, but it wouldn’t let me because it was too long. Well, here we go, hope you all enjoy it…
Feel you! But there are some, I promise! I often feel the same! There are some! I know it’s hard because I have dealt with this myself… I love reading the news, using social networks, and staying up to date; I consider myself a very ethical person. For many months now, I have stopped following the news and have decided to uninstall most of my social networks. I now use them very methodically when I can, and I just close them if they aren’t helping me. It’s hard because we want to change the world, right? And no one seems to be looking at the situation through your lens, or mine. People often say, “Focus on what you can control.” And that’s very hard, I promise!
But if we learn and master that ability (something I’m still trying to do today), we will be able to let go more easily.
Being a Software Engineer these days isn’t easy. We are on the front lines of what is coming, and we are highly misunderstood. When I see companies laying off people because of… AI… And then their stock goes up… Wild times. I have also seen conversations about reducing operational overhead with the use of AI. I kind of describe my current situation as a love/hate relationship with it. Being fully transparent, I have been going through a challenging season personally. It has taught me how important it is to take care of yourself. I know what’s going on, and it’s exactly what you said… Fear.
When I chose Computer Science, I was around 15 years old, and all I wanted was to send an email from a web form I built using Microsoft FrontPage. At that moment, I found that it wasn’t possible and joined a web development channel on IRC Hispano (I’m originally from Puerto Rico). Made good friends there from Spain. I learned a lot from them, and that’s how I got introduced to PHP, the first “real” programming language I learned… A couple of years before, I also saw my father do a lot of mIRC Scripting… He had a bartender bot on an IRC Hispano channel that was… an “online” bar. The bot that my father built “served” cocktails to people as they wanted; everything was just a stupid message in the IRC channel, haha.
I love those memories because they marked the beginning of my journey in this field. I never chose it because of the money; I chose it because I was good at it. I may have done some things on Notepad++ or even Notepad… Never vim (those years) because I was a Windows guy, it was what my father could afford, and Linux/Unix wasn’t what it is today; it was very hard to get a distro running. Over the years, I learned that Computer Engineering is a highly paid field, and I learned it the hard way after experiencing how much your background can affect how you are valued.
Where are we now? Let’s face it. I am fortunate with where I am in my career, I can’t complain! But I see our Comp Sci graduates not getting jobs. Now people only hire “Seniors”. I have advocated for hiring more Juniors and Mid-levels, even Interns. I think everyone is important. But what do the CEO/CTO founders want, especially those building the AI Frontier Models? We all know it, right? Reduce costs, and I promise (and I know you know), Software Engineers are very highly paid. People are happy because they saw us doing great things, and it was so natural, you know… Bean bags, shirts, shorts, snacks… We were very happy… the black window with white letters and us coding, manually.
I’m only 37; I haven’t experienced all the things others have… But I do still remember my father’s first computer with DOS. Or me configuring Debian or CentOS to try something else, it was a pain in the butt. The kernel had many issues, and we had to fix them. Wild times! At that moment, there weren’t many internet things… It was a lot of manual debugging.
Across all stages of my career as a Software Engineer, I have seen many changes (as you are seeing them, too). And I can tell you, this is one of the wildest ones. Over the past year, I went from being seen as an “AI advocate” to becoming more of an “AI skeptic”. I read a lot, people are saying things about AI that are simply not true, overhyping it… Even think about some of these fully vibe-coded projects… How can people make those codebases run? I have tried a few, and I get it… No real human brain behind them.
But I’m seeing a shift. I’m trying to adapt. I feel like I’m going through a season of deep reflection. I would love to be valued more for what I was hired for… As a “great” Software Engineer, what do people want from us now? Talking all day to agents, right?
Those who over-hyped this want more. And they don’t care about society, and that’s a fact. And while our leaders are focused elsewhere, everyone is ignoring the fact that energy demand has gone through the roof, that we gotta build data centers for massive compute, and we don’t have infrastructure for that… But we are pushing on it 100%, nonstop, like a bus going 150 mph toward a brick wall.
Who knows what will happen to all of us in one, two, or three years? Your guess is as good as mine. I hope we find a healthier balance, and we are needed more than ever. I studied AI many years ago at UPR Mayagüez. Our goal was to build an automated vacuum or a domino player (some of this codeis on GitHub – melimarpr/domino-ai). I also built a sentiment analysis project on Twitter data back then, well before LLMs were a thing – omarpr/bigdata_p3… I don’t see computers being more brilliant than humans… What I do see is a lot of people being impressed by AI without understanding its limitations. And the bandwagoners will take advantage of that in favor of reducing costs and becoming billionaires quickly. I read someone here saying that AI will really expose the bad engineers, and I can clearly see it right now!
Anyway, I wanted to be vulnerable, like you are, because I also carry the weight of knowing what it is like to have nothing, as I did when I was a kid. Not good times. As I have told you in a few posts, I hear you, and I’m here for you! Be strong!