That’s right. AI took my job. It has happened and it’s not just scare-mongering by the anti IT types.
After working for a small marketing agency as the sole web developer/IT admin/person for everything electronic for over 14 years, my time has come to pass. The rise of AI assisted design and coding has left the agency with ever diminishing income and no easy way to find new ways of finding new revenue streams.
Starting from the beginning, I took this position around 14 years ago when they realised that they needed to have a person that knew about WordPress and how to put a website together. The most knowledge that anyone else had about anything web was that a website was something that someone else did.
Since that time I was in charge of 100% of everything related to building and maintaining websites for our clients. There was no outside help. I did it all, and I did it well. The designers came up with some amazing looking sites, and I made them look great as well as working correctly. This worked well for so long and was something that I enjoyed then, and still enjoy.
Then around a year ago, AI started booming. Since then the steady high-speed advances have overtaken what any normal web developer can produce. Sure, the quality is not as good, and it’s a problem to maintain, but it takes less time so it’s cheaper so when clients don’t want to pay for a real developer, that’s the answer that’s left.
Since then I’ve seen the AI systems that we use get better and better. They are still behind what a real person can do, but again it all comes down to the bottom line. Clients are seeing that AI can do it all cheaply, and they don’t care about the quality of the design or development as long as it’s cheaper. I can’t blame them though because they aren’t designers or developers so they don’t know what it takes to do these things well.
Don’t get me wrong. I use AI in my job now and it is a great help, but it’s only a tool to get things done. It helps with faster development and can answer some tricky questions faster than I could research them myself. The problems occur when the people using the AI systems don’t understand what they are producing. Developers don’t trust AI code without reviewing it. Designers don’t trust AI designs without tweaking them. Accountants don’t trust AI book keeping without verifying that the numbers are correct.
So now we’re left with an ever-increasing reliance on AI to do everything that we used to do ourselves. I’m the first casualty because my role can be absorbed into others more easily… on paper at least. Of course, when no one knows what you do every day, it’s easy to see that what you do can easily be done by someone else without your knowledge in the field. Right?
To a point, yes it can be. But there’s still times when what I know will be missed and whoever is left will be relying on their AI assistant to fix the issues that come up that they’ve never seen before and have no idea what they are let alone where to start looking to fix them.
For now I think I’ve got another week, maybe two, left where I am. There’s still final discussions to be had after the management formally starting the whole big legally required redundancy process but I already know that there’s nothing for me to do here and nothing that they can offer that can keep me in any sort of position here.
So what’s next? Who knows. I’m a 53 year old IT guy that’s specialised in WordPress and hosting so that means that I’m virtually unemployable in today’s IT job market. Is it time to get out and do something else? To be honest I think so. But the question is what? What’ s left out there that I can do that won’t be replaced by AI in the next 2-5 years? What is there left that any of us can do that won’t be replaced by AI in 2-5 years? At this point I wish I knew. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll have my head a bit more clear and be able to think things through more then I’ve had time to do today.