As I wind down my 36 year career in information technology I feel that I am in a nostalgic loop, which is probably inevitable particularly when I am closing down my career 37 years to the dates when it started. I find myself thinking all the way back to high school and reasons why I decided to go to Michigan Technological University (MTU) for a degree in Computer Science.

In the early 80s computer science was just becoming a thing, in fact Computer Science was a part of the Mathematics department at MTU and not the separate college that it is today. If when I was starting college I was asked what it was that I was studying to become I would have answered “a programmer.” Of course, over the course of my five years at MTU I learned Computer Science was more than programming, but that was still its core competency.

I think nearly everyone who I may have told I was going to be a programmer would have had an appreciation for my career choice because while they may not have understood exactly what that meant they likely knew that computers were the “hot thing” and programming was done on computers.

The irony is, of my 36 year career programming turned out to be the least of what I did, what programming I did was done during the first three years and then fate moved me on to more broader topics like the SEI Capability Maturity Model and technology architecture. Turns out my learning to program a computer was merely a foot in the door.

In 1984 nobody would have questioned my choice to be a computer programmer, nor my choice to become employed by an information technology services provider in 1989. At the beginning of my career it seems I made the right choices, however, now at the end of my career I also think that a choice to be a computer programmer would be a bad choice. It might be that the programming “career path” itself is winding down, seeming to be replaced by Artificial Intelligence, or put another way, computers programming themselves. If that sounds ominous to you, I agree, it sounds like the story line of The Terminator coming to life.

The Internet was the key disruption during my career because it enabled the work of programming to be done from anywhere. In particular, companies like the one I worked for determined they could move work from the United States, where the cost of labor was expensive, to lower cost labor areas around the world. The chase for higher profits driven by lower costs of labor that managers of U.S. companies never even saw face to face lead to a change in how people who were programmers were viewed. The offshore programmers became “task rabbits” known by a cost rate rather than an experienced, skilled human being.

All of this brings me to today. Every manager and CEO of every company, particularly information technology companies, are planning to wring out even more profit by replacing the bulk of their remaining labor costs with Artificial Intelligence. It is obvious to these people that this can be done because they had long ago started viewing employees as replaceable widgets, if any person can simply be replaced by another person they hire off the street then surely those same people can also be replaced by an AI bot.

Consequences are not a consideration because the people who make the decisions face no consequences. Every CEO who was fired from the companies I worked for left with large, multi-million dollar “golden parachutes.” If the biggest consequence of doing a bad job and being fired is millions of dollars, then there is simply no reason to think about the long term implications of your decisions.

I honestly don’t think I could recommend a job in the I.T. industry at this point in time. If it is something one wishes to do, I recommend seeking jobs from small businesses and avoid corporations. Seek working for companies led by people who value human experience and abilities. We are moving toward a world where human interaction will be a premium service. For example, if you want to talk to a real human at a bank or an insurance company, not to mention any company that makes the products you use every day, you will have to pay extra money. Have you noticed how nearly every you now pay the fee for using your credit card nearly any where? That is what we are going to see in the future for any time you want to talk with a human in hopes of getting something we used to call customer service.