The author basically tries to argue that not only corporate talent with low pay (e.g. customer service), but high impact talent pools will go from being scarce to being replaced by AI agents (e.g. PhD level researchers discovering new pharmaceuticals).
I don't think this has played out thus far. It still takes a qualified individual to ask the right questions of an LLM or Agent and then refine the results.
What I do agree with is that it's made talented individuals more productive, but that's less eye catching than claiming that it will cause companies to entirely restructure because educated labor will be replaced by LLMs.
Database Provisioning builds the tools that safely operate and manage the databases running within ServiceNow data centers.
The CLI interface tools that we create are used by internal operations and support teams and by every automation running in a ServiceNow data center. As a team, our challenge is to deliver high-quality solutions that operate reliably without interruption at a massive scale. Our work is fundamental to ServiceNow’s reliability, reputation, and success.
As a team, we believe that ease of use, quality, scale, and customer feedback are the pillars of our development process. We work within a very collaborative environment with distributed teams that empower you to be successful in your work.
We're looking for:
- 6+ years of hands-on experience with backend development
- Experience in Linux: CentOS, RedHat, etc.
- Some experience with: Ruby, Puppet, Python, or Go.
- Database experience, particularly with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, or Oracle
What I’ve found is that pure “DevOps” roles have become a way for recruiters to sell people on being the ops person without them realizing it.
I once worked at a place that hired me in as a software dev working in DevOps and the position quickly became consumed by the on-call workload.
The system we were managing constantly had fires that needed to be put out but we could never fix the underlying problems because someone needed to answer the page which often times was a false alarm.
So we’d quickly slap on band-aids to band-aids and management gave lip service to fixing the underlying problems with on-call. And the job became about reading the Jenkins build logs because the “devs” thought that was our job. They even forgot how to build and test their own software locally in some cases…
Needless to say I left pretty quickly and it made me not want to do a pure DevOps job again.
> What I’ve found is that pure “DevOps” roles have become a way for recruiters to sell people on being the ops person without them realizing it.
Way waaaay back when I first heard of DevOps, it was described along the lines of "bringing developer best practices like automation and testing to ops". What you're seeing could be a remnant of that.
Might I suggest that maybe having imposter syndrome is not such a bad thing. You could interpret it as being keenly aware of gaps in your understanding. It's also much better to admit when you don't know something than to act as if you do.
It's also important to recognize that just because you're competent in one aspect of software engineering, doesn't mean that you would be in another. That being said, maybe you're weighing technical skills too highly. By now you must've realized that technical chops are only one variable in the equation that makes a good software engineer. Other things such as communicating through writing and speaking, understanding the needs of the business, being able to get different teams in an organization to work together are important. One could even argue that they're more important as you get promoted and move up the career ladder and are tasked with more leadership tasks.
Yeah, I think I need to keep that in mind -- that some of the "softer" skills are just as important. I can see how leadership pushes you away from some of the nitty-gritty of the code.
I've found that the best problems to solve are the ones you're most interested in. What do you wish existed? What do you wish were better? Don't worry about making money at first. Just find something that you're passionate about creating.
I don't think this has played out thus far. It still takes a qualified individual to ask the right questions of an LLM or Agent and then refine the results.
What I do agree with is that it's made talented individuals more productive, but that's less eye catching than claiming that it will cause companies to entirely restructure because educated labor will be replaced by LLMs.