Everyone with your exact job title in your industry vanishes, how long until awful things happen?
I'm a support engineer for dental software. So difficult issues won't get immediate resolutions, and instead development will actually have to fix things because offices will be crying at them for a fix instead of at me.
But the world won't end.
I'm a sysadmin. So like two days tops before absolutely everything stops working, and we resort to loin cloths and spears.
I came here to make this exact comment except I was gonna mention the Stone Age and I’d give it about a week.
Honestly if the AWS system admins all died at once I think that'll probably be enough to take us down at this point.
Senior SysAdmin here.
48 hours sounds about right. I usually get an email on day 1 of any holiday, and a panicked call on day 2 because something is down.
By day 3 all the gaps are covered by other admins after I point them at the existing documentation, that noone even looked at.
I am in Management. Everything will carry on fine.
It absolutely would. But eventually someone will start filling your tasks.
Lots of dead people. Paramedics help many.
Thank you for what you do!
You betcha.
I'm a student... the world wouldn't end but it also wouldn't have a future.
earth_irl
I'm a digital marketer. The world would instantly start improving probably. you're welcome.
My job title is "Team Member" my industry is "Warehousing" the world literally ends before the day is out.
Since you're now unemployed, wanna join my gang and try to take over the local ware house district full of rice so we can try and survive until humanity has fallen and we can survive on foraging?
Farm worker. Food shortage, widespread food shortage. People would have to change their diets within a few weeks, and learn to hunt to avoid starvation in a few months. Unstaffed farms would be cleaned out for immediate food over time, and the price of anything edible not raised on a farm of some kind would shoot to the moon. Any automated farming that a landowner could run would be the way to go, for lack of workers.
I'm an IT director. Things begin running more smoothly.
Oh no, the Business Systems Analysts are gone. Whatever shall we do. Society won't survive like this. Who's gonna analyze business requirements for systems. A tragedy, to be sure. 😶
Just reminds us of how much of a luxury you are and how much we appreciate having you around :)
Yeah. My team will keep producing software, but from now on its whatever the hell we feel like writing.
The good news is everything comes with a pinball mini-game Easter egg.
The bad news is nothing actually works.
Actually... This might be another one where I'm already living in this timeline and every BA I've met was my personal delusion created by my own brain trying to protect itself from the madness...
Please tell me the mini-game will work at least!
Sewage in the street by days end. Resurging preventable diseases long thought vanished by the developed world shortly thereafter.
I love you and greatly appreciate the potentially smelly and possibly unsafe work you do.
Thank you. It's not as bad as most people think. But there is a cornucopia of smells that one must acclimate to.
There would be a lot fewer old people by the end of the month... (ICU Nurse)
Thousands of deaths within seconds. Airline pilot
Would auto pilot not keep them in the air for awhile?
I'm not saying it'll be okay, just wouldn't it be more of a creeping dread as panicked flight staff would call air traffic control for help? Then they would be in utter disarray and overwhelmed trying to guide hundreds of planes to land without an experienced pilot? Maybe a few would have retired pilots on board that with a bit of guidance from air traffic they could land...
En-route nothing would happen for a while correct. Plane goes on as long as it has a programmed route to follow and fuel to stay in the air. But keep in mind that, around the planet, thousands of airplanes are about to land right now. Landings are like 95% flown manually so if all those are suddenly empty in the cockpit they’ll crash pretty much immediately.
I'm a software dev.
Looking at this thread, Lemmy's userbase would halve.
Software developer. Some software would break down immediately, some would break down over time.
We don't know when everything will have broken down. That's where the fun lies 😈
A slow and painful death.
What will get us here in the US first? Exploits discovered to banking infrastructure that can't be patched? A new virus or ransomware that AVs and firewalls can't be updated to stop? Navigation software for satellites and boats not being able to be updated to deal with ever changing environments stopping trade world wide? All our medical data going poof because an auto purge feature of old data forgets how to count?
Who knows! Tomorrow may look the same as today, 3 weeks from now might look about the same, but sooner or later we'll basically all be running windows XP.
Holy shit my job is worthless
I'm an adjunct professor. If every adjunct professor disappeared today, universities would instantly be better for students and professors. Administrators would hate it, though.
You'll all be fighting in the streets for food by the end of next week. Logistics literally moves the world. 🚚
You mean the rice I eat that is grown mostly on other side of the world didn't appear at my door step magically???
I'm a forklift operator. A lot of things would stop outright. That, or become so slow it might as well have stopped.
Yup. I'm a warehouse manager. The logistics/ transportation/ warehousing industry is already stretched disturbingly thin. If we take away the people who run the places, the world will grind to a halt.
Software Engineer. Things might improve, actually.
There are applications where we actually have to adhere to standards.
Yeah, my post was mostly tongue-in-cheek. (I used to be the official-ish PCI guy where I worked, so I know about the standards to which you refer.) But at the same time, if software engineers didn't exist, we soon wouldn't have NFTs or DRM on cars, coffee makers, and garage doors or secret TV signals for spying on you via your smartphone etc.
Trucks dont get dispatched so give it a few days and grocery stores will run out, every store will out.
Truck doesn't get driven, same result here.
True
I feel called out... like probably nothing bad will happen. Is this what a mid-life crisis feels like? Or is it a stroke?
Payroll admin so... if you hadn't specified that's it was just within my industry I think the whole world would come to a standstill by Friday. Lol.
Let the riots begin!!!
could be next Friday
Yeah, within the next two weeks for sure. Lolol
Ah cripes, I'm literally a "software developer." Modern civilization is so, so fucked.
That would be a very strange death as well.
I feel like biggest problem would be hackers wouldn't vanish, but no developers would be around to fix issues.
Like tomorrow and the next day would feel the same as today.
But what about when a new Microsoft exploit is found? Or a medical software can't handle a new treatment?
We wouldn't die instantly, but first world country tech would just slowly start to betray us day by day without updates.
Trade, logistics rely on software maintenance, I guess.
Systems administrator. I am the "OS mechanic" for the computer world. Within weeks, cascading failure on a scale that would last a decade or more
If all machine operators vanished anything mass produced would stop getting made.
If we thought catalytic converters were being stolen now, now no new ones are being made!
Working in science, so I guess nothing bad would happen. However, humanity will stop progressing for a while, until people are replaced.
Oh no, the self proclaimed scientists who never tried to disproved their hypothesis in their life will get even worse!
Childcare educator, a large amount of people suddenly wouldn't be able to work because they have no one to watch their children.
Pretty sure the internet would collapse in a matter of hours.
(Cloud Infrastructure and Security Engineer)
I do SAP development writing ABAP and making forms.
SAP would go bankrupt because their core product is written in an internal language that's ridiculously complicated and takes decades to fully learn.
The businesses would keep using their systems for many years and eventually migrate to better solutions.
So the world definitely won't end for me either.
10 minutes?
I am IT technician and I can’t have a meeting without a user feels their whole world is crashing if I don’t click the scary button for them.
So I don’t want to imagine if suddenly we all disappeared how they would get on. Probably back to paper and pencils.
Quality engineer. Eventually someone would get around to the work I do. But there would be a lot of avoidable slowdowns and stoppages as parts and processes breakdown without the function that intentionally searches out and fixes problems.
Eventually problems would get painful enough, a person would get assigned to fix them.
And then another problem and eventually another person assigned to fix.
And then hey, wouldn't it more efficient if we assign a person to go after all these problems? And what if they could even be proactive enough to fix problems before they got out the door? And what if we called that person's function Quality?
Paramedic. A lot of people would die at home or on the streets. Many hospitals would be overwhelmed with patients that can't leave. Nursing homes would have to actualy take care of and treat people for once. Drunk collage kids will be allowed to go home peacefully. Police will not be able to pass off uncooperative people to hospitals for a psych evaluation as easy.
For real though, it would not be fun for the world.
Would be nice if we where treated and paid like we matter.
If it's just paramedics and not EMTs then it won't be as bad. People will still die though.
I'm a help desk technician... so immediately.
Plan ahead with aggressive demands to turn it off and on again. Good PR be damned.
I could always just set all 1300 computers to reboot on their own in the middle of the night and then schedule and email to send the next day lol
Corporate IT manager
I'm not sure anyone would notice
Yeah. I was gonna say, could be centuries, could be never.
The great IT managers build teams that can keep working without us. The lousy ones will be doing everyone a favor when they vanish.
That said, if I'm the last one, I'm gonna make a killing as a management consultant.
It wouldn't be more than a few days. You all don't realize what I do for you. I'm out there every night fighting the night man. Bringing in the day man. I am the fighter of the night man, ahhhhhhaaaayhaahhaaa, champion of the sun, master of karate and friendship for everyone.
I'm a web developer, so... Not me, but there are people who manage important web portals, for healthcare and security stuff.
Cashier & Customer Service. Who are Karens gonna yell at without us?! Society would collapse immediatly.
I would literally just hide. If I'm not too panicked I'll think to take snacks with me.
As an addiction therapist, I think it would be a long time. As a nurse, about 6 hours before the number would start rising awfully quick.
Graphic designer. AI is getting pretty crazy so you all could be just fine. AI will make you what you want but will it make you what you need? Just sayin.
I could best be described as an "emergency draftsman". And potential damage could be far reaching in scale.
I work for a company that, among other things, makes replacement parts for things like power plants, chemical plants, any large industrial installation. In many cases, the thing that breaks is a one of a kind part, or something last manufactured in the 1960's, or some other thing that you aren't going to be able to just go buy a replacement. So what happens is someone will occasionally drop a broken something or other on my desk, and I have to figure out what it used to look like, then make a 3d model and a drawing of the part so it can be reproduced.
Ahh so you're who is keeping all thr cold war stuff running!
That actually sounds like a fun job.
It's not bad, but it can be boring.
How exact are we getting? I'm an "assistant term professor", but I'm not an associate or tenure-track position, nor am I an adjunct. So i imagine if just people in my middling position disappeared, we might be fine, a bunch of adjuncts get a raise and a stable job, universities might have to reduce admissions or pack their classes, but we'd probably be fine in the long run. If all college professors disappeared, though, society might collapse. Suddenly you have millions of college students with incomplete educations who need to go somewhere. The brain drain on the world would be immense, and with the death of university-led research, we'd probably enter a dystopian future where all new research is being done by corporations.
Wholesale food buyer. A lot of people die from starvation.
Admin paper pushers coordinate so others can have frictionless meetings. Most likely all meetings will be awful, and initiatives will not have approvals so fraud will propagate quickly
Oh so business as usual then?
You say this as a joke, but it will not be business as usual. Trust is HUGE when it comes to investments. Without admin, trust goes down, investors become misers, total wealth decreases, and everyone will have the same credibility as a scammer on the phone talking about Nigerian princes etc. So it may not go to a barter economy, but several parts will stagnate because they can't trust investing in their own company's growth.
I don't even want to imagine a world without associate editors.
within a few hours. water and wastewater don't treat themselves. water would stop coning out of taps. wastewater would back up into people's homes and without a way to deal with it the environment would go to shit.
damn this makes me feel like i might be doing something important. i should be paid more
Social Worker, so maybe some parts of society would come crashing down at first but maybe turn out for the better in the long run. More specifically, working in a hospital currently, helping set up support structures for after the patient is discharged. Maybe we'd end up with people staying in hospitals for longer or visiting more frequently, could be a big hit to our Healthcare system, could force some much needed changes.
So is your thought that social workers are like a band aid that hospitals use?
"We don't need to worry about how patient feels, social worker has that covered."
Just a heads up, I work in Germany. There's a couple different interests involved. Most patients don't want to stay in the hospital for longer than needed (for various reasons, e.g. loved ones at home or less people around in general..), even if they can afford it financially. Then there's the hospital that can only bill the insurance for a certain amount per diagnosis. Also every free bed means another patient we can take care of that might need treatment more than the one we could discharge if only he had a caretaker at home. So by helping patients organize treatments and care after they are discharged we help the patients directly but also the hospital financially and future patients indirectly. The sad part is that it takes a lot of effort to find a caretaker, organize treatments etc. So much so that many relatives or friends of patients aren't able to do it and hand it off to the professionals. It would be these relatives and friends rioting if all of a sudden this burden would be back on them and the still sick patient. So to sum it up I might feel like a bandaid because our system has made it so hard for the laypeople to do what should be more easy.
Senior software engineer. Lots of bugs and mistakes from juniors and associates. Good luck lol.
Are we 100% certain we're not already in this timeline.
I believe that the many senior SWEs I have met were real - but the state of the Internet does not provide strong evidence that I'm not delusional on that point...
That's an interesting point. I think that maybe customer facing apps have an issue acquiring or retaining talent because the jobs often suck so badly. I've only done one customer facing software job and it was awful. Long hours, insane demands, and harsh management.
It's less bad in corporate environments surprisingly.
Software engineer. It's better this way /s
Alot of people with mental health issues would be wandering the streets. Some would simply die at home due to not being able to look after and feed themselves. A fair few would be going around sexually assaulting young girls/boys (not understanding they're adults & it's wrong) and alot would be so pissed off and confused they be trying to kick the shit out of anyone they'd see. The world wouldn't end but it'd be a pain in the arse to navigate.
Oof yeah we would over night go back to the days of sanatoriums where having mental health issue is more or less just prison with a different name.
Suddenly games wouldn't see a localised version anymore. To play anything that requires language comprehension, you'd have to study the source language.
This thankfully doesn't impact me personally, but people would lose out on some cool content. Not everyone finds it fun to spend years to acquire a language to the degree some games require.
Maybe arcade would make a comeback.
I'm the political advisor to a politician....
You don't want to know
That's the scariest timeline yet:
"Hey where's that piece of paper they gave me before they all disappeared?"
"Which one?"
"The one that said not to do crimes, or whatever. I need to check something."
"Is it a crime sir?"
"Uh...Nevermind. I'm sure it'll be fine. Let's go do this."
Why?