Join us, become a tradie. Get a company vehicle. Work with your hands. Become enough of an expert in your trade that you can tell customers to go fuck themselves if they're dicks. Have every company in the area be desperate to hire you because every trade is short handed. Work with people who barely understand the concept of a computer. Spend half of every paycheck on milwalkee packout tool boxes. Never have to work with AI again.

My preference is HVAC-R but plumber or electrician are also good choices. Building automation may seem attractive but then you're getting close to the AI danger zone again.

AI will never be able to throw bricks at cops. Something to consider

Anything that requires physical work. Manufacturing, trades, etc... But, there's the caveat that AI may still indirectly affect these too.

I did this 9 years ago. I make 2/3rds of what I did in software, but I don't regret it. pivoted to environmental work. My job satisfaction is like, a thousand percent better.

Anything that's based on physical work or human contact. Trades, medical/social work, psychology, emergency workers...

I'm in building maintenance. It's not affected at all by AI. Most of the trades are safe. Basically anything which would require both advanced LLM and advanced robotics to replace.

I feel ya. But the pendulum will probably swing back the other way soon and we’ll have a ton of companies hiring to undo/replace slop code. That’s how it has been for previous coding fads, anyway.

a career in poisoning AI

I work in a datacenter. I rack servers, I look after the cooling system, the generators, the ups's, etc. I won't ever be replaced by AI. Without me there is no AI. And I barely interact with it. I play with toys all day.

The environmental impacts still bother me. But IT has always been wasteful, even before AI. I hate recycling days when I see exactly how much plastics, styrofoam and metals are going to the dump.

I'm picking up furniture making. Handcrafted furniture will always be needed

Also a software eng (for now), genuinely thinking of starting my own barbershop lmao.

Plumbing is fairly safe from any kind of automation and also well paid.

They do use robots for pipe inspection and minor repairs, but that's about the extend of what the clankers will ever be able to do.

There is the (more difficult) option of finding a dev job for an older tech conservative company. My workplace has just barely rolled out access to copilot chat. Our devs are still doing things without the slop.

Look at the more heavily regulated business sectors, they tend to be more resistant to tech fads.

I was going to say my industry, sewer and water but now they're forcing cameras with AI in them into our with vehicle to "save on insurance." More like spy on us and figure out why we're messing around with one fire hydrant so long.

I hate it here.

I’m an electrical engineer and I deal mostly with medical equipment. Not even this field is safe. People are going to die.

I'm in tech but in the non-profit sector. For what we do, there is virtually no use case for ai. I basically just make sure everything runs properly. No one is expecting me to turn out code that will turn into profits. I'm not rolling in the dough like a lot of tech workers, but im not micromanaged, I get to make all the decisions, and im not working for an evil corporation. So I suggest looking at non profits. They are typically run by people who know very little about tech. You'll be an easy hire if your resume is as good as it sounds.

"AI can't replace you but an AI salesman can convince your boss to replace you will AI."

Being a kindergarten teacher is not really something that AI can help with.

I'm a lathe operator. No AI there yet. And my lathe runs Linux too...

Horticulture is nice. You get most of the benefits of a trade and honest manual work (outside of union protections in most cases), but it's also a deeply interdisciplinary science that lets you impact the world in a lot of different ways while forcing you to touch and understand grass. With the same garden I get to do creative, intellectual, manual, and political work with really interesting spatiotemporal angles. There's public education and anthropology and ecological utility in choosing one plant over another based on analysing the site across all the physical sciences, then lifting heavy rocks to achieve something that benefits my neighbours and wildlife pets. Most of my coworkers are natural scientists of some kind so we spend all day in the sun having interesting conversations about the landscape and urbanism.

I’m there too. But not because AI. I just reviewed a PR by a newb. Code was fine. I could reason about what they did. It worked correctly. Then I read the other devs comments and what they requested done and now code that worked correctly and was easy to reason about is buried in abstraction that isn’t really needed but it “makes the code much better”. No it doesn’t.

That’s what I’m sick of. If I’m reading code and the logic that actually does something is buried that irritates me.

Some abstraction is great. Otherwise we would program with physical switches. But abstraction just because you think it makes the code look better is shit.

[off topic?]

I recommend this book to anyone thinking about a career change.

"Discover What You Are Best At." Linda Gail. Six self tests you can finish in half a day, and a list of jobs that use those skills. Jobs range from zero new training to post college.

Really helped me when I was looking for career advice.

I’m a tax lawyer. I’m gonna be very busy fixing the messes people make using AI-assisted do-it-yourself tax planning lol. And by fixing I mean telling them to beg for penalties to be forgiven lol

Plumber

Also pays very well

Working in the trades is probably somewhat safe for a while.

Honestly I'd just go for something that you're interested in. If AI displaces a ton of white collar workers, the system will probably collapse and we'll all go mad max. In the meantime have fun!

Prostitution.

I am not saying it's the ideal career choice for most people, however it isn't something ruined by AI...
And there are opportunities to progress into a madam or pimp. Plus you get a funky hat with a feather, I'm unsure how this process goes though (I would imagine there must be some sort of application process for the hat).

Wish I could tell ya. Im like just old enough that changing careers is rather monuental since I don't really have time enough to get established. Something has to eventually give with the ai. either it goes away which I doubt or we need to restructure our societies.

Airline mechanic. AI is not going anywhere near us and if it does it will be trained on absolute garbage and be wrong 100% of the time.

CAD specialist.

It's gonna be a while, but I don't expect it to be completely safe.

My backup is construction management which I am also very much qualified to do. I very much doubt that's in any danger in the near future.

If both of those get completely taken over by AI, I'll revert to being a carpenter. Not ideal, but if that gets taken over by AI, we're at the point where workers have become entirely obsolete, at which point either universal basic income is a thing, or it's time for a violent uprising against our AI overlords.