Note: Science Fiction Short Story (These events may have no basis in reality)
Johnny almost forgot what it was like to code. The last five years he had been elbow deep in toilets, sinks and general plumbing. The day Nvidia crashed and crashed still burns a hole in his memory. One day the stock was worth three trillion dollars and a week later it was trading as a penny stock on the verge of bankruptcy. The implosion took several other tech giants with it, including Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. Other tech startups like OpenAI sank even quicker, and employees fled in a panic to secure another position at a bank, or retail store.
The perfect storm that sank Nvidia started with the first lawsuit that required immediate model disgorgement. The plaintiff refused financial compensation and instead asked for a “pound of flesh”, i.e. the destruction of the LLM and then other lawsuits quickly closed with similar results. These actions quickly caused panic selling of Nvidia stock and related tech stocks. The results were soon to be even more devastating.
Startup incubators heavily invested in GenAI went belly up. Investors stopped putting money in VC funds and parked their money in the safety of T-Bills and bonds. Soon, there were no tech jobs, other than maintenance coder jobs and there were hundreds of applicants for just one position. Things would get even worse for the Bay Area, and housing went into a free fall. Houses that used to sell for 5 million dollars barely sold for 500K.
Several years later, silicon valley was officially dead. Mechanics, landscapers, paid much better, to the point that eventually plumbing paid better than coding. Johnny used to be an AI programmer specializing in Python based deployment of LLMs, but now he is a certified plumber, who in many ways, had a better life.
Sure, coding was fun, but so was plumbing. Another benefit to plumbing was that it was actually a useful skill that helped humanity. When Johnny was working in tech, most of his projects involved addicting humans to technology that hurt them. He could actually feel good about his work as a plumber and he got to work with real people who appreciated him. The cherry on the sundae was that he never had to hear the word “Scrum” again. His only daily standup was getting off the floor after fixing a clogged toilet. Silicon Valley was dead, but it didn’t really matter. Software didn’t end up eating the world, it ended up eating itself.
The End