AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
Follow-up to Tuesday Oct 27: Microsoft buyouts, Dutch cuts, Proton re-interviews: jobs under pressureSREs, or site reliability engineers, are the people who keep online services running. A post from the SigNoz newsletter argues AI is not replacing them. It is slowly taking away their skills instead. It got 598 points and 448 comments on Hacker News.
Other stories show the same tension. Fortune says Cisco's president gave a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite old code, and the headline links it to entry-level jobs. Tuesday, we mentioned Proton's AI 're-interviews' of staff. Now 404 Media reports that Proton's CEO has cancelled them.
An 'Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?' thread also got 144 points. Many people feel the pace.
If humans stop practising, who fixes things when the AI is wrong or down? After today's backdoor story, that question is not theoretical. Proton's reversal shows that pushback from workers can still change decisions.
