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Ask HN: Software folks, what’s your Plan B?

7 points by biohax2015 ↗ HN
If LLMs are as disruptive to our industry as some predict, do you have a fallback profession in mind?

I am thinking of switching to a health profession, as those still have enough human interaction and legal guardrails to prevent automation from being a serious threat for the next few decades.

14 comments

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kaesar14
I’ve been thinking hard about it and my best current plan is hoping my Series B startup moons and I have enough of a nest egg to work a service job and live day to day off wages. Retraining efforts are gonna hit us all. There will be no escape.
TechnicolorByte
FIRE for me. Been saving up good chunk of earnings for the past several years just for the financial independence aspect even without the potential of AI displacement. Having said that, if disruption really does get that bad, then I question what my investment portfolio will be worth.
kaesar14
FIRE is definitely attainable, easily moreso without children. Also lucky enough to have an even higher earning fiance. Hope our futures can work out before OpenAI destroys half the economy.
crop_rotation
If you have seen recent threads, the most popular plan is denial.
turtleyacht
You'll only be allowed to do what the LLMs prescribe, even if you're an MD. Legal, compliance, and insurance may overwhelmingly favor that.

On the other hand, a HIPAA-compliant white-label LLM could be really useful to a doctor. Could this disrupt or enhance PA and NP roles?

turtleyacht
I can't go back to edit, but I understand the downvote. It seems like I am saying only LLMs will be the sole authority. And that doesn't make sense, insofar as a model without the latest data may make the wrong recommendation, and--more importantly--the doctor would have the final say in the treatment plan.

What I mean is, if LLMs are able to match "here is what any reasonable person of equal experience would have done in the circumstances," [1] it would be very risky to try something counter to that.

The Large Language Model as Liability Limiting Machine.

[1] https://himpro.ca/reasonable-care-vs-standard-of-care/

> Reasonable care is the caution and concern used by an average, rational person in any given situation to prevent the harm of others.

> Standard of care is the acceptable standard of care acceptable in society or in a profession.

biohax2015
Truthfully, if LLMs make an MD career unviable, then we are simply fucked. I do think that day will come, but if I need a career for the next 30 years then I believe that MD is a safe choice. Not even for technical reasons. I think there are legal and bureaucratic hurdles that will take decades to adjust.
turtleyacht
You'd be in good company as a post-bacc.

Among those from merchant marines and commercial real estate; the son of a psychiatrist, an ankle ruined and a star throw; a cancer survivor with a metal arm; and others. From backgrounds divers but with a single aim.

Hope they are all doing well. They should be out of residency by now.

biohax2015
Just curious, did you take this route yourself? If so, at what age?
turtleyacht
It has to have been... 16 years ago. Oof. Time flies.

The post-bacc folks ranged in age from late 20s to early 40s.

MeteorMarc
Think I need a plan C, because B was on quantum computing.
hotpotamus
Life of crime seems pretty popular already.
gregjor
I'll hang around until I retire, picking up the work abandoned by programmers leaving the field. LLMs can't do everything. Any programmer who doesn't advance their skills (technical, business, and people) enough to compete with LLMs won't survive long-term competing with human programmers. In my own (40+ years) career in programming I've seen many people get stuck at the expert beginner[1] stage, if they even got that far. LLMs can replace them in some contexts, and perhaps in more contexts before too long. I don't worry about LLMs putting me out of business, though.

[1] https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

the_only_law
Unfortunately not, if programming gets automated away, or if increases in productivity push me out of the field, then I can’t imagine the other things that intrigue me aren’t going to face the same fate. I had planned on going back to school for a while for something else, but the process would be very difficult and very expensive, and frankly I’ve given up on that idea as anything but a pipe dream.

Funny enough programming was always my Plan B. I never wanted to become a software developer, at least not the time/way I did, but I’ve been stuck here because the old golden handcuffs. I’m uneducated so I guess it’s back to unskilled labor.

I suppose when the time comes I’ll just have roll with the punches and figure things out then. I tend to do better with that sort of thing in a crisis than I do in the good times anyway, where I mostly just get complacent.