If you are very fortunate you might find a career that excites you. That has certainly been the case for my career in software development but I am not sure it will be for much longer, and in a way “It’s payback time”.
Even if you have managed to snag your dream job, in the majority of cases there will still be tasks you don’t like doing. You also probably spend more than half of your working life doing tasks you don’t mind doing but don’t “push your buttons”. Well, it could be about to get worse due to AI.
As long as the amount of time you get to do the tasks you enjoy exceeds the time you spend on the tasks you hate, most people can cope. A little advice if your job falls short in tasks you enjoy:
If (and it’s a big if) you have a good manager, you should discuss the situation. There might not be opportunities to change things but if there are, a good manager realises a happy employee is more productive than a reluctant one.
Alternatively, you might have to take more drastic action and find a new role, maybe in another company. I realise this is far easier to type than done but life is too short to be doing what you don’t like if there is the slightest chance there could be something better.
Finally, you might want to consider that there might be a different career path that offers you more opportunities to engage in the tasks you enjoy but that is the biggest leap of all, and very few have the option for one reason or another.
These days we have to consider that AI might take your job, if the hyperbole from our tech overlords is to be believed. What is almost certain is AI will impact our jobs and take tasks off us “so we can be more productive”!
If the tasks being taken away are ones we rather not do anyway, that’s a good thing and means we will hopefully have more time to do the tasks we actually enjoy. However, it is just as likely that AI will take the tasks we relish, replacing them with more tasks we loath. This will drastically impact the quality of our working life.
It is with this realisation that I fear my career might have been built doing this even before AI entered the picture. Truth be told, this realisation dawned on me some time ago but I cowardly chose to bury it in the back of my mind. I suspect this fact is now coming back to haunt me.
As a developer of bespoke business applications my primary focus has been on simplifying the business process, delivering business efficiencies and producing "business value" (whatever that means) with scant regard for the potential impact such changes might have on the end-user’s enjoyment of their job, that was none of my concern.
Well, I could regard the way AI is likely to negatively impact my job as payback, guilty or not, and I would hazard I am not alone.