The last recession - if you were a software developer, or in tech, you had a great deal of immunity. I remember having spending power when everyone else was unfortunately suffering and taking time to find jobs, etc.
Now it feels like the same is true of machine learning. And to some degree other specialist roles within software engineering. If you're a generalist software developer, you're in a vulnerable position. If you have more specialized skills (AI, etc) you're going to be in a better, more robust position. Being a developer is more commoditized than it ever has been (of course good developers are still hard to find, but a lot of work doesn't really need good developers)
It makes me think that specialization over time is telescoping. At one point computer engineering was a specialization of electrical engineering. Then computer science / software became a specialization out of computer engineering. Now other specializations are being born out of general software developers.
Specialisation is a risky long term bet though. The amount of companies a good generalist software engineer can work at is orders of magnitude more than an ML engineer and I imagine it will remain like that for a long while. Same thing for more extreme niches like compiler engineers - the number of opportunities is substantially less.
This has not been my experience. I have seen plenty of people with generic backend/full-stack keep their jobs, while my Linkedin is full of impacted infrastructure, security and data engineering specialists. Although I do agree that the developer world is becoming increasingly commoditized, I do not think that specialization is really the way to escape it.
Now it feels like the same is true of machine learning. And to some degree other specialist roles within software engineering. If you're a generalist software developer, you're in a vulnerable position. If you have more specialized skills (AI, etc) you're going to be in a better, more robust position. Being a developer is more commoditized than it ever has been (of course good developers are still hard to find, but a lot of work doesn't really need good developers)
It makes me think that specialization over time is telescoping. At one point computer engineering was a specialization of electrical engineering. Then computer science / software became a specialization out of computer engineering. Now other specializations are being born out of general software developers.