The Great Displacement.

I was going to write a little piece about using Perplexity.ai to save myself hours of frustration when I realised a manuscript I was formatting was littered with both kinds of quote marks, curly and straight. I tried a simple find and replace to make them all curly but that work because I ended up with copy “like this“.

I googled for a solution, but you can imagine how that went.

Then Perplexity solved the problem for me in one search.

So, yay for the AI powered answer machine. Then I read this on Substack:

As I climb into my little twin sized bed in my small RV trailer on a patch of undeveloped deep rural land in the Central New York highlands, exhausted from my 6 hours of doordash driving to make less than 200$ that day, I check my emails one last time for the night: no responses from the 745th through 756th job applications that i put in over the last week for engineering roles i’m qualified or over-qualified for. I’m not that surprised or disappointed at this point, as I close in on the 800 application mark in over the last year of being an unemployed software engineer.

It’s a little weird living in a small trailer when I’m a homeowner, in fact I own three houses: A fixer-upper starter home in a rust belt upstate New York university city, and a patch of beautiful remote rural land with 2 pretty humble and simple cabins on it an hour from the city house. It was an altogether pretty manageable feat to pay for these properties for a working professional, considering the cost per month of all these properties combined is less than say, a decent modest 1 or 2 bedroom apartment rent in California’s bay area.

In the beginning, I paid basically nothing for the properties. A roommate’s monthly rent at the city house covered that house’s mortgage, and a renter of one of the cabins covered most of the rural property’s mortgage, with my disabled single mother’s meager amount of government assistance just about covering the rest.

I left behind everything and everyone i know and love on the west coast to come to New York specifically for this opportunity of helping care for my family and growing long term equity with real estate. No such opportunity exists on the west coast, and hasn’t for more than 15 years.

With my full time engineering job bringing in around $150k, a salary that I clawed my way slowly and steadily for 20 years, I could just about manage covering all the expenses, maintenance, and planned improvements for the long-term vision of the properties, maintain my 16-year-old daily driver car, and maybe even have four or five thousand dollars left over each year to take one little camping trip and make a couple stock and crypto investments. It was a simple life, but a decent one, and one I worked hard for more than 20 years to reach. 20 years of continuous professional grinding and long-term planning and thinking.

I’m now in the trailer because something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years. Something that caused myself and a large portion of the talented dev teams let go at a time when our company and parent corp were doing great. Something that I’ve known was coming since beginning my study of the topic since around 2005. Something that makes getting my resume even seen to begin with a sisyphusian task. Something that has warped an already broken technical interview process into a PTSD-inducing minefield. Something that now, still only in its infancy, is already touching basically every aspect of almost all of our lives (whether you realize it or not): AI.

It’s a long essay and kind of scarifying. You can read it here, if you want. But, yeah, made me love the bots a bit less. On the other hand, Perplexity did save me from having to manually swap over about 200000 quote marks.