Forbes : 10 Highest-Paying Tech Jobs In The U.S.

George Toft george at georgetoft.com
Sun Dec 10 16:30:34 MST 2023


Read two articles this week that claimed AI will reduce human work to 
3.5 or 4 days per week.  Cheer!!!  Wait - two things are going to happen:

1. 20-25% layoff and those that remain pick up the jobs of the fired.

2. Everyone goes to 28-32 hours per week and guess what you'll get 
paid.  That's right - 28-32 hours.  The State of Connecticut has a 32 
hour work week, and the employees get paid for 32 hours.

If 10 years is an accurate assessment, that will let us old farts age 
out and retire so the younger don't get fired.


On another note, I just wrote a movie script.  Okay, no I didn't - Bard 
wrote it for me.  Bard gave me three choices, and I liked #2.  I 
reformatted it into a two-column script, had to fix two errors 
(apparently Bard doesn't know that the first word following a colon is 
capitalized, and it didn't know the difference between cocoa and 
cacao).  Bard also snuck in something about ethical sourcing of 
chocolate. So I began researching it.  So now the script is 70% AI 
written and I rewrote the last 30% in a revolutionary twist at the end.  
This is in contrast to a short short film I had in the First Annual AI 
FilmFest in October where the script was 70% human and 30% AI written.

In both cases, the actual script generation was done in about 15 
seconds.  In the October film, it took me 40 minutes to reformat it.  In 
the current project, it took me 3 hours to reformat/research.

AI is our friend, but we really need to keep a tight leash on it.

Regards,

George Toft

On 12/6/2023 2:00 PM, trent shipley via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> If AI can take over junior level knowledge jobs now, it stands to 
> reason AI will mature fast enough to keep pace with the rate at which 
> junior level practitioners would have gained experience to do 
> mid-level and senior jobs.
>
> It's an eventuality that the robots make people obsolete. The only 
> questions are
> 1) whether it happens in 5, 20, or 200 years.
> 2) a) whether all humans live affluent fulfilling lives, b) 
> whether Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos live affluent, 
> fulfilling lives, and the rest of us live in Darfur. c) Skynet suffers 
> no primates to live.
>
> On Sat, Dec 2, 2023 at 2:35 PM George Toft via PLUG-discuss 
> <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>
>     Thanks for posting.
>
>     IMHO, the future is not in tech, as this article defined it, but
>     closely
>     related: Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access
>     Management (PAM), Mainframe operations (yes, mainframes are still
>     here),
>     Red Team (ooooh - sexy :) ), and Data Analytics and Machine Learning.
>     The pay is definitely comparable to this article's top 5, if not
>     higher.
>
>     Whereas I liked being a sysadmin, my job got shipped to Argentina for
>     $6/hr (last I heard, they were up to $10/hr).  That's a really bad
>     place
>     to be.  If you want to live a nice lifestyle ... and I've been saying
>     this since 2005 ... you have to do something that can't be
>     off-shored.
>     Do something that must be done in this country.  Lately, this has
>     come
>     to mean:
>
>     1. Be inquisitive.  How can I make this cheaper, faster, less
>     resource-intensive?  Why did it break?  How do I keep it from ever
>     breaking again?  Will this failure happen elsewhere?  Three
>     principles
>     for success: Make it easier for the User; make it cheaper; make it
>     more
>     efficient.
>
>     2.  Challenge the status quo.  Just because it has always been
>     this way
>     doesn't mean it's the best way now.
>
>     3. Write the solutions flowcharts.  If you follow a script (AKA
>     flowchart) to arrive at solutions to problems, you can be replaced
>     by an
>     AI, specifically, an expert system, and in 5 years, a Generative
>     AI like
>     Bard or ChatGPT.  Expert systems been around since the 60's. Hell, I
>     wrote an AI (simple machine learning) in 1990 that corrected spelling
>     errors at the command line based on user performance.  You need to be
>     the one generating the flow chart for the folks to follow.
>
>     4. Be able to create metrics on everything you do.  "If you can't
>     measure it, you can't manage it" is the mantra of management this
>     decade.  I've had to become really creative with my metrics to show
>     improvement over time, especially when I begin to alter User behavior
>     before I figured out the metric.  Oopsies.  I've also discovered
>     how to
>     create metrics that track the adoption and consumption of our
>     services,
>     which helps management when they choose insane paths like replacing a
>     Gartner Magic Quadrant product some some Open Source stuff that's
>     "freeeee."  For those that don't know me, I've been an OS advocate
>     since
>     1998, but there ain't no such thing as a free lunch and when Managers
>     see $0.00 licensing costs, they oftentimes fail to understand the
>     local
>     engineering effort required to meet that Proprietary product's
>     capabilities.  Yes, this is my hot topic this week as I battle three
>     levels of management on a fool-hardy decision whose ramifications
>     they
>     don't understand.
>
>     I'm in the process of changing careers.  The biggest problem I see is
>     the total lack of people that can do the above.  Our replacements
>     don't
>     exist.  My whole US team is within 5 years of
>     retirement/resignation and
>     we have nobody to replace us.  Wanna thrive in the next 20 years,
>     be the
>     one that can do the above.  Be our replacements.
>
>     BTW - I just had a film in the First Annual AIFilmFest and I
>     interrupted
>     the film to sound the alarm about Generative AI taking over junior
>     level
>     jobs.  But I rant ...
>
>     Cheers!
>
>     George Toft
>
>     On 12/2/2023 7:30 AM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>     > Hi,
>     >
>     > Found thins interesting:
>     >
>     >
>     https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/12/01/these-are-the-10-highest-paying-tech-jobs-in-the-us/?sh=276f0e8c515a
>
>     >
>     >
>     > Keith
>     > ---------------------------------------------------
>     > PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org
>     > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
>     > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>     ---------------------------------------------------
>     PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org
>     To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
>     https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list:PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20231210/ebd90e12/attachment.htm>


More information about the PLUG-discuss mailing list