What does everyone here actually do for work, and how much has AI changed your day to day

[Ellie22]

Figured it would be good to get a sense of who is actually on this forum. We talk about AI and quantum all day but I have no idea if the people I am arguing with are researchers, engineers, students, enthusiasts or journalists. So, what do you actually do, and has any of this tech meaningfully changed how you work in the last twelve months.

For me, I am a backend engineer at a fintech company. Claude and Copilot have genuinely changed my output, not replaced me, but I ship code probably 40 percent faster than eighteen months ago. The job is different though. More reviewing, less writing from scratch. Some days I feel like a senior editor rather than a developer.

Curious whether anyone here has had a more disruptive experience. The numbers going around about 92,000 tech layoffs in Q1 2026 are real and I know people who got caught in those cuts. Would be good to talk about it openly rather than just sharing articles about it

[ArVeeDee]

Quantum hardware research at a national lab, AI has changed my literature review workflow completely but has not touched the bench work

[Dan]

Senior data engineer, honestly my job has gotten weirder not easier, the models generate so much data that I now spend most of my time on data quality rather than pipelines

[Kev94]

I got laid off from Oracle in March in the round that cut 10k positions, currently on the job hunt, not a fun time

[VoidSentinel74]

Sorry to hear that, the Oracle cuts were brutal and quiet, barely any coverage

[Holly]

Student finishing an MSc in quantum computing, no real world data yet but the pace of research I can do with AI tools is genuinely different to what my supervisors dealt with

[Golden Tara]

Security consultant and the work has exploded, every company suddenly needs AI governance and threat modelling for agentic systems

[CosmicRay40]

Marketing at a software company which feels weird to admit on a forum like this, but I am genuinely learning a lot from lurking here

[Amy96]

Nothing wrong with that, understanding the technology your company builds products around is part of the job

[DQ Eric]

Retired aerospace engineer, I am here because quantum sensing is going to transform navigation and nobody in mainstream media is writing about it properly

[WWEPete45]

This is actually a great thread, the forum feels different when you know who you are actually talking to

[GhostRider41]

Freelance technical writer and the irony of my job being AI adjacent is not lost on me at all