5 ms·

I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

115 points by nomdep 6mo ago

ninju 6mo ago
> It sucks. I miss feeling like my job was secure, ... The wheel of industry rolls forward and crushes everyone underneath it
- socalgal2 6mo ago
  Progress is inevitable.
  - ofrzeta 6mo ago
    Is it? I mean in the end it is a political decision. We are used to infinite progress, infinite growth and infinite rationalization. But for what good? People have not become more free to pursuit their generic interests in Marx' sense but there's just more concentration in the hand of the capital while unemployment is growing. Weren't we better of to have less rationalization and have more meaningful work for people?
    - satvikpendem 6mo ago
      "Meaningful work" for work's sake, why? I have no desire to work in a farm or a factory when I can work from the peace of my own home without breaking my back. Not to mention the work that other people do too, like doctors and scientists, which directly positively impact my own life. If they were to say, let's not continue progressing, then that's not a world I'd want to live in.
      - ofrzeta 6mo ago
        It depends on what we define as progress. At times nuclear power was considered progress while it's no longer now (at least to that extent). Why couldn't we consider a society with less technology as progressive? Learning that less reliance on technology makes us more resilient as individuals and as a society. Obviously there are areas where we didn't want to downscale such as medical care. But there's a lot of technological progress that does not contribute much value to society in general but to concentrate wealth in the hand of a few people. EDIT: also so-called "breaking your back" has the same effect as going to the gym. Sure I am aware that there are really back-breaking jobs and they should be helped by machines. But there's no rule to say that the helping machines need to to all of the work. A moderate amount of physical work is just beneficial to everyone.
        satvikpendem 6mo ago
        This is a rose tinted glasses take. I guarantee if you took anyone from the past they'd want to live our lives today, and that's not to even say anything of being in a developing country today with lack of access to adequate supplies and medicine. > also so-called "breaking your back" has the same effect as going to the gym I can tell you've never worked a manual labor job in your life. The workload definitely does not have the same workload as just "going to the gym."
- parpfish 6mo ago
  i've been advocating for developers to unionize for years, and there'd always be a big group saying "we don't need a union". AI-based job displacement will do wonders for raising class consciousness when it's too late. the best time to unionize is when you don't need a union.
  - dmitrygr 6mo ago
    And do what, what buggy whip unions did?
    - parpfish 6mo ago
      The dynamics are different when the demand for the product dies off and there’s no money to pay salaries vs worker productivity increasing and you need fewer workers. Replacing workers will be used to increase profit margins rather than lower prices because there’s no competition to force prices down thanks to monopolistic consolidation
      - satvikpendem 6mo ago
        The demand for the product (software engineers) dies off, therefore a union has no leverage.
  - satvikpendem 6mo ago
    Unions won't do anything for AI based job displacement though, because they don't need you, whether you're in a union or not. I see this going the same way as SAG for example, if AI video or film creation ever gets good enough where a single "director" can make an entire movie themselves with no actors. Unions and indeed any bargaining organization only have leverage when their people are needed, but what happens when the people themselves are needed no longer?
    - parpfish 6mo ago
      Well, it’s all probably a moot point now because devs have lost leverage. But the union contracts can help bring some order to the layoff process - which employees get laid off and severance for the others.
Insanity 6mo ago
In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do? I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.
- znnajdla 6mo ago
  Entrepreneurship, obviously.
  - CraftingLinks 6mo ago
    I suspect the number of startups will skyrocket the nexr few years. Fired engineers will start to compete against the establishment that fired them. Competition may get a lot more fierce for a while.
- suzzer99 6mo ago
  If software engineering goes extinct, a ton of other white-collar jobs will go with it, and we could be in an intractable depression.
  - ehnto 6mo ago
    I actually think AI has an unfair advantage with software that is making it seem far more capable that it is. Software is entirely text based, and producers have been putting their outputs and problem solving online for free for decades. I think applying AI to other white collar roles that also require problem solving but do not have as much training, will prove much more difficult. Even coding on proprietary dominated domains is a much, much worse experience than people have with more accessible code. Using it for electronics has been hit or miss, embedded software is a bit shakey, game development is also challenging to use it for etc.
    - dd8601fn 6mo ago
      I get what you’re saying, but it’s not as though there are trillions of books and blog posts and stackexchange questions about excel and the handful of other things that most office workers do, too. I honestly figured that’s why everyone is coming out with MS Office plugins for all the models, and MS itself is putting it in the tools. So if most any company only needs one person to solve limited IT issues, prompt code production and deployment, generate the usual truckloads of excel spreadsheets, and do most of the finance and accounting… it starts to look pretty scary. Then, what about the people making and maintaining all the facilities for these people we don’t need anymore? The world flipped its lid about commercial real estate when wfh became a thing. That was relatively small and temporary.
chronolitus 6mo ago
10 years? These days ten years feel like an absurdly long time in the future.
- Insanity 6mo ago
  “Attention is all you need” was published 9 years ago, and gpt3.5 burst onto the scene 4 years ago. Progress is slower than people seem to think. Of course AI as a field is half a century old. But on the other hand, AI had a period of rapid acceleration 40-ish years ago and was then hit by an AI winter. We might hit that winter again in a year and all predictions made today are off the table.
minimaltom 6mo ago
I feel exactly this. One thing I will add: while AI is getting really good at _doing_ the software building bits, I haven't yet seen it well integrated into the decision-making and political structure of organizations. Right now, it seems best in the hands of a high-agency individual empowered and able to make changes or 'ship' something, with them acting as the bridge. This of course, is not a technical challenge, but I would expect the change in structure of organizations to make this more efficient to be slower than the pace of improvement we've seen over the last few years.
- rubslopes 6mo ago
  Well, I, for one, am guilty of developing AI agents for public project evaluation for current governments. It's coming.
deleted 6mo ago
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ehnto 6mo ago
I can relate, I was really looking forward to settling into mentorship roles. However I am not quite so defeated, I think that developers will continue to find employment in tech even as AI augments the roles. Experienced developers are the obvious pick for a hire to run agentic AI development tools, and even the obvious pick for managing a no-code endgame scenario as they are just smart technologists with strong problem solving skills. I think the devs who were only here for the paycheck and would not reasonably pick software if it didn't pay so much, will probably be happy to retrain into something else but be disappointed by the paycut. I am also excited by the prospect of being able to take on bigger scale side projects solo as that's really where my passion lies. I think general purpose technologists will really excel in this new ecosystem as the industry will be back to moving fast and breaking stuff for a while, for better or worse. A lot of them call themselves programmers right now but will evolve pretty quickly. Pragmatism, small teams and fast pace will best deliver software based projects, and the bottleneck in big orgs will become (or already was) the bureaucracy and communication layers. Small team, greenfield projects have a huge advantage in getting an MVP to market, which is pretty exciting for someone excited mostly by solving problems with technology. Time will tell though, this is not career advice and times are chaotic. At the end of the day, there are other careers, and you were smart enough to get into software. You will be smart enough to find a new career.
- margalabargala 6mo ago
  My favorite hope about AI is that it will finally kill leetcode interviews.
  - blululu 6mo ago
    Would love this but I feel like it is equally likely to end up being something like: “solve 500 leet code hard problems with agentic tooling while I grill you about a time when you dealt with failure”
    - margalabargala 6mo ago
      I still prefer that to "here's a problem statement with some subtle non-obvious approach specific to this class of problem, either you've memorized it in advance or you fail."
danieldrehmer 6mo ago
*ten months
- hwhshs 6mo ago
  10th April
gherkinnn 6mo ago
Maybe the act of writing code will die. I still have hope that the act of transforming ideas and vibes in to something that works remains valuable. The means might change but the end remains.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
dzink 6mo ago
I grew up in a world that didn’t have secure corporate jobs as a thing. That’s most of the world outside the US. There, you could get secure government jobs (if you come from the right family or connections) or you had to learn how to build a business yourself. Anything else, paid barely livable wage if at all. The way to survive it was to 1) move to a village/small town where you could have a garden for fruits, vegetables, corn, chickens, maybe a pig or two for winter. 2) Young people lived with their parents while the parents saved up to build/buy their children their own flat or house. Children whose parents saved up enough would often start a family after getting their own place. Those who didn’t, co-lived with parents. The secure middle class corporate employment in the US is getting severely downgraded by AI. While there is talk of universal basic income the reality is that many many companies depend on the surplus that middle class families enjoy spending and without it, vast swaths of industries will get starved as well. The solution is to show people quickly how to hunt and gather and farm as makers instead of just employees. Figuring out what is needed, taking on a small corner of needs somewhere in meat space or online, and planting there. AI has been fantastic at helping even solo founders with that. They need to encourage a cornucopia of ideas and experimenters as early as k12. They need to set up more favorable conditions for handling the admin side as well. If the US government does not encourage cornucopia of AI-powered small business entrepreneurship and lets monopolies squash that early, they will end up with far FAR worse conditions. Any monopoly who keeps pitching “universal basic income” while actively avoids paying taxes, will end up forced into more taxes. Big tech needs to make room for people to build and grow businesses (looking at you, Apple, for copying every successful app with a native, and you Meta for eating every social competitor) or they will end up paying for everyone’s universal basic income and then some. If this country wants to survive the AI era, it needs to remove the pink glasses of “secure corporate job” and teach people how to plant, hunt, and gather as independent players in the market really fast.
tombert 6mo ago
I've been feeling this. I don't really feel like it's a "bad" thing; I've said for a long time if a job can be automated, then it should be automated. I still do believe that, even if I am probably on the losing end of that in the not-too-distant future. I think I am reasonably good at software, and I think I write code that's still a bit better than what Claude does. In fact, I suspect that will actually be true for quite awhile, but the problem is that "writing code 20% better" isn't exactly a selling point when my competition is $100/month and takes like 1/20th the time. Most software, even before AI, wasn't optimal and was kind of shitty, and good engineers were still always replaceable with shittier cheaper ones if it was economically viable. I tend to land on my feet for this stuff, so I still think I'll be ok; I know how to use the tools and there will still need to be some humans who understand how this shit works, so I'm not worried about becoming homeless or anything. What I'm mostly worried about is that I won't ever have fun at work anymore. I liked solving problems, I liked thinking of clever solutions to avoid a mutex or increase concurrency, I liked figuring out how to squeeze a few percent more performance out of my given limitations. It's something I'm good at, and it's basically the only way to get decent money while doing math. Since the ceiling for writing software has been significantly lowered, I think eventually the cushy yuppie status of software is going to shrink. Maybe I should learn to weld or something.
vishnugupta 6mo ago
Out of curiosity I checked out the author’s resume and this is their current position. Oh the irony!! I built significant pieces of the Copilot onboarding, purchasing, billing and settings flow. For eight months I headed up the Copilot anti-abuse effort. I then led the launch of GitHub Models, and am now working on other Copilot projects.
- rvz 6mo ago
  No wonder GitHub is always collapsing every week. Tay.ai, Zoe and Copilot bots being deployed wrecking the platform being unable to fix infrastructure issues whilst the humans are just tweaking all the tiniest issues. They should instead focus on GitHub actions and improving the uptime of the whole platform first before doing anything AI.
  - shermantanktop 6mo ago
    Wherever you work, are there embarrassing experiences that your organization ships? If so, why didn’t you personally fix them so that nobody could associate you as an individual with a broken CX? If not, please let me know where to apply, because that sounds like a unicorn organization. Humans in large groups do amazing and crappy things at the same time. Playing gotcha with someone’s resume is a shitty thing to do.
    - collingreen 6mo ago
      On the other hand the place I work isn't owned by a company with many many billions to throw around, including many billions paid for the platform in question. I agree attacking someone's resume is lame but attacking big corporate prioritization feels valid here to me.
      - shermantanktop 6mo ago
        Totally. None of us is as stupid as all of us. But working in a well-funded company doesn’t make this problem go away. It makes it worse in a lot of ways. For my org, I’ll be happy to be first in line to criticize some of the notably wrongheaded prioritization decisions.
FirstClassTree 6mo ago
You have many errors and I personally find the writing style pretentious. For example: Software engineer role is about automating people -> often not. That just indicates lack of rigor. Also, if so. Who will make the ai automate people? GOD? People think poorly understood theory and gradient descent will produce God.
- hwhshs 6mo ago
  Jevons "paradox" says as things get cheaper demand goes up. It is kinda how we got modern AI rather than just faster and faster paper form replacements.
bdcravens 6mo ago
I appreciate that this article is doing what few in our space do: acknowledging that software has long been the tool to put people out of work (though that process is wrapped in softer terms like "optimization" and "disruption"), and we're only the inevitable targets of the same machinery we helped build.
travisgriggs 6mo ago
“My job” is an oxymoron. It was never your job. Your employer has always made it clear that they, not you, own the job.
- 000ooo000 6mo ago
  What value do you see this distinction adding here?
hwhshs 6mo ago
> Junior and mid-level engineers will suffer before I do I wouldnt be so sure. They'll keep the people who can do what needs to be done with new tools. Current title is irrelevant. In addition loosing a 400k tc vs. 2x 200ktc makes more sense if they are all prooompters and AI handlers anyway.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
tehlike 6mo ago
Building is half the battle. Knowing what to build is the other half. Most IC6/7+ would not code anyways - in fact a friend of mine said "we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5" - which was ironic but funny. I am curious if we would ever get a new programming language like rust or go, without this creativity. In a way, we have different products that does more or less same things (postgres vs mysql for example). The reason is there's difference of thought in the process. I doubt this will go away.
- vishnugupta 6mo ago
  > we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5 This is what bugs me the most. Those who are now at IC6/7 rose through the daily grind of coding and debugging from L1. But now that those jobs are getting automated how will someone rise to IC6!!? It’s as if first 10 rungs of a ladder are missing and only someone with an exceptionally good athleticism can jump up and start from 11th rung. I think in the coming decades we will see IKEA effect in woodworking. Like it’s extremely easy to build cheap furniture whose individual parts are really compressed papers. There’s hardly any good carpenters left to do the real wood carpentry. Those who are left will cost a bomb (rightly so) and can only be afforded by rich people.
bradley13 6mo ago
Walk around an office and look at what people are doing. Accounting? Marketing? Administration? How many of these jobs could be done by AI? Maybe companies haven't seen it yet, but most office jobs can and will be eliminated in the next decade or two.
burroisolator 6mo ago
My guess is if they haven't cured cancer, achieved world peace, colonized Mars, you'll still have a job.
xyzal 6mo ago
Honestly, I enjoyed coding a bit more when I was doing it just as a hobby. Maybe it is time to enjoy it again! Don't ruminate on the future too much folks, you won't die by hunger.
winrid 6mo ago
What will go away is the "senior engineer" position filled by people making six figures that don't know how to debug a memory leak or create a database index.
hbogert 6mo ago
I just saw a merge request created with Claude from a colleague without software engineering background. Let's just say I will have more work to do than less. Software validation was always the interesting part vs software verification. Validation asks the question, did you build what was actually necessary?
beej71 6mo ago
I don't see demand dropping in the medium to long term. Businesses like to grow, and two devs with AI are better than one. And one dev with AI is better than one non-dev with AI. The job is changing, and I don't like it in many ways, but there we go. It's not the first time new tech has nuked my dev job and I had to change. I have personal projects that I hand-code, and personal projects I hand to Claude. Depends on how boring the project is. If it's stuff I've already solved a bunch of times, I hand it off. If I have room for good learning, I code it myself.
Tade0 6mo ago
> In 2026, I’m not sure the software engineering industry will survive another decade. Due to a text predictor? I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it's amazing at presenting other people's knowledge and reducing cognitive load by filling in the gaps, it's still just a machine that predicts text and that is a limitation which won't be overcome in this generation of such tools which, including research demonstrations, are close to a decade old already. To me the main issue is that investors are not aware of these limitations and will keep pouring money into this way beyond everyone's breaking point. But really that's a failing of the world's economic system, which relies too much on their whims.
- aryehof 6mo ago
  Well it’s not just a “text predictor” is it? You can pretend that today we still only have ChatGPT 2 and that there is only pre-training on a large corpus of information, but that simply isn’t true?
  - Tade0 6mo ago
    > Well it’s not just a “text predictor” is it? It is, by definition, design and architecture a system that produces believable text. Here's a task to give it which pulls the veil right off: Ask it to add tests to a piece of code where code coverage is 100%, but it doesn't actually test functionality 100%. You'll start seeing nonsense sooner or later.
    - drooby 6mo ago
      A leading theory in neuroscience is that human brains are fundamentally prediction machines too, constantly predicting sensory input, other people’s behavior, the next word in a sentence. “it’s just prediction” isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Prediction and attention turn out to be a surprisingly powerful foundation for intelligence. The “just a text predictor” framing was fair a couple years ago but hasn’t kept up. Current models can genuinely identify untested edge cases even when coverage is 100%. You're definitely using the latest and greatest models? The architecture started as next-token prediction, sure, and yes, human judgment is still required, but that judgment is being captured and integrated too. Every time millions of people use these models, their feedback feeds the next round of improvements. Also, these models don’t need to replace your best engineers to be disruptive. They just need to outcompete the bottom of the bell curve. For a lot of junior-level work, we’re already getting close.
imiric 6mo ago
> I don’t think there are any genuinely new capabilities that AI agents would need in order to take my job. They’d just have to get better and more reliable at doing the things they can already do. The "just" here is minimizing what has been the crux of the problem for the past ~5 years. This technology has been capable of producing code all this time. The end result has been improving due to massive scaling efforts, and some relatively trivial engineering ("reasoning", "agents", etc.). And yet reliability is still a massive problem. The tools still hallucinate, still lead the user in dead-end directions, and still do so confidently and randomly, without any discernible reason. Expert users are able to guide them to a certain extent, but whether the prompting incantation is done manually or via the trendy Markdown file of the week, it's all guesswork based on feelings and anecdata. I'm personally not too worried about being replaced by these tools, even though my skillset is nothing remarkable. My opportunities might shrink, but this is a two-way street. Companies that use "AI" indiscriminately don't interest me either. The demand for quality human work and ingenuity will always exist, even within a sea of mediocrity. I'm much more concerned with the societal impact of the mountains of shoddy software being produced, deployed into increasingly more critical infrastructure, and put into hands of incompetent and malicious people. There is very little thought and discussion on this topic, let alone any guardrails. "AI" companies are now attracting governments and advertisers, both full of malicious and incompetent people. The next decade is going to be interesting, that's for sure.
- wvxf 6mo ago
  Great post.
6510 6mo ago
Let me be the optimist here: Programmers are both extremely unproductive and know very little about everything else. What percentage of capable programmers can actually sit down and write code for 8 hours and then do it 5 days in a row? The time not coding is filled with many different words for recovery. Some of this recovery involves trying to better understand the domain. (more on this later) Most of the startups that get the attention are attempting to be the next big thing but a startup can just be a startup. It doesn't have to be big or glorious. Someone who sells hot dogs (on a small scale) cant really hire a programmer but if he could (or could write it themselves) there would be plenty of software to write. You can make a nice interface with all of the sales statistics, inventory management, maps with competition and demographic data, work schedules, etc etc There is infinite complexity to even the simplest job. You could hire help and have an app talk them though every step in great detail with pictures, videos and animations. You can encode all of the little tricks that could normally take decades to learn. Say, on a busy spot you might not have time to spend 8 minutes properly cleaning the grills every 47 minutes but you could wipe down the glass every 4 minutes and clean part of the grills with alcohol every 11 minutes then clean it properly every 3 hours. The app might instruct to google location related news or other topics to talk about with the customer. If people are walking their dog they expect you to guess what breed it is and where it comes from then ask how old it is. You might build a tech stack to help recognize their face, remember their name, what they ordered last time and how long ago. You're not suppose to but you know you want to. You wont be coding for a glorious salary but will earn depending on the sector your chose. The software will be pure dog food of the finest quality in the world. Grilling hot dogs is also very relaxing, can let the mind float a bit and have software ideas the way you should. Lots of bad ideas will come, I can show people pictures of themselves eating my hotdogs! You can basically look at programming as the new literacy. You might want a fancy job writing letters for a nobleman but it is hardly the only application.
amusings 6mo ago
I'm not yet convinced that the positions are going away. Unfortunately, I find it more likely that it's going to be a bad few years and then surge in demand to fix things that have been done in those years. Maybe I've just had bad luck but over last 2 decades I've only worked in places where 80% (at least - probably closer to 95%) coworkers (in development related areas) had negative productivity - making software more complex, brittle and abstract than necessary. With AI assistants the same people can be more "productive" and gatekeeping is mostly a lost cause. I hope to find a decent alternative in those few years and never go back to software :)
adt 6mo ago
Actually, Anthropic reckons you've got three. In 2024 (so now, one). https://lifearchitect.ai/my-last-three-years-of-work/ https://lifearchitect.ai/my-last-three-years-of-work/
waynesonfire 6mo ago
If you use an LLM at work to produce code, does the company own the copyright to that code? ... hmmm.
Juliate 6mo ago
Guys guys. I do share the sentiment. On the other hand. Unless we have a breakthrough hardware/physical innovation, GenAI in its current forecast is not energy-efficient, cost-efficient, compared to human/deterministic methods. It has shown no capacity so far to « create » in the sense we animals do. And all that, still being: highly subsidized (your subscription does NOT cover the costs of the service as of now, we are still in the market creation/capture phase), and without mesurable economical benefit. Things are still far from being over.
- orangecoffee 6mo ago
  To give you the benefit of doubt - you're not paying attention. The 100$ claude account is profitable inference wise, and performs better than 80% of engineers with upto 5YOE. Architects I speak with want to delegate to this 100$ agent rather than 10000$ engineer. It is absolutely more cost efficient. Junior engineers are done for.
  - Juliate 6mo ago
    I have first hand and second hand seen more failure from this line of reasoning _as of today_, in the French/European tech sector, than successes. Not even talking about those executives that expect to use Gen AI to "help" in their process and financial reporting - at least the flag is bright red. I've also met enough architects (or so called) in consulting, service companies as well as startups, from both a founder and a tech lead point of view, in the past 25 years not to entrust them too much with their hunches, long-term wise. Especially because, from a sustainability point of view, saying "junior engineers are done for" is like saying "kids are done for": not that wise. Unless what you account/bet for is the drastic reduction/disappearance of humains (and then, a lot starts to make more sense).
sltr 6mo ago
The article expresses what a lot of us are feeling. I appreciated the read. It conflates purpose with outcome. I don't accept the premise that software's purpose is to "automate away other jobs". That may be an outcome, but software's purpose is to enable completely new possibilities. Think bicycles of the mind. The Apollo guidance computer didn't replace astronauts. It made the missions possible in the first place because no human can continually correct the spaceship trajectory every 250ms for 10 days on end. We're not receiving some cosmic karma. We're more like cotton pickers after the cotton gin. Someone still has to plow and plant.
- rakejake 6mo ago
  I agree on principle. But there is going to be a painful transition where people are still reckoning with the new capabilities so I understand where all the fear/sadness is coming from. Tbf I think the golden days of being a software dev are over even if the AI were to stagnate and never improve. The spectre of AGI is enough for higher ups to demand more output which will in turn require more hours to be put in by devs. A project that required 2 months will now be allotted 3 weeks because "Agentic coding increases productivity".
amai 6mo ago
Your job will still exist, but your productivity will be 10-fold. Do you remember the times before we had automated tests, object oriented programming or even before compilers?
QuiEgo 6mo ago
I'm curious what our industry looks like in 10 years as well. I like the architecture analogy. An architect is not really focused on doing the actual building of a design, but understanding what's possible, what tools and techniques and materials are available, and figuring out how to put the pieces together to make a thing. Right now, you're the architect who designs a house, but you're also the cement mixer, framer, drywall installer, plumber, electrician, and so on, all at once. In this analogy, it's hard to design anything big like a skyscraper if you're bogged down by all of the minutia like picking out what type of nails to use for the framing and then installing them. I think going forward, AI is going to do a lot of the non-architecture part of software engineering. We will all become architects. The difference between us will be the scope of what we're qualified to design as we go through our careers - new grads will cut their teeth on the likes of designing shacks, principals design skyscrapers. I think this also unfortunately means there's gonna be a lot less people in software. The industry will still exist though, but it's going to look way different. I look forward to this being settled out, the uncertainty sucks.
- QuiEgo 6mo ago
  I also think in this analog, developers who are already architects are in the best place to ride out the wave of change, but long term the industry will have to figure out a way to fill the pipeline so some journeyman system will emerge. If I was going to college tomorrow, I wouldn't touch a CS program with a 10 foot poll until all of this settles out though.
  - iwsk 6mo ago
    What would you choose if you went to college tomorrow?
    - QuiEgo 6mo ago
      Medical industry seems like the safest for keeping high-paying white collar jobs. Engineering and legal are likely to get disrupted. Knowing my interests now, I’d probably go into flight school and try to become a commercial pilot.
irenetusuq 6mo ago
[dead]
Markoff 6mo ago
The real question is why do you care? Why you worry today about something which may not happen in the future? My job most likely won't exist in ten years, do you think I'm worried? You might die in car accident, from heart attack or cancer in those ten years, some lost job is absolutely irrelevant compared to your health, there are and always will be jobs available, just adapt. We have saying in my country "There were, are and (always) will be the money", which basically means you should not worry too much about money, just find a way to get them when you need them. I strongly recommend LISTENING to this song - Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI I quote one of the most important part regarding the article (especially 2nd sentence): "Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4:00 pm on some idle Tuesday."
MRonErlang 6mo ago
We forgot two things: First, this kind of phrasing is repeated again and again since Cobol was launched. A machine code writer said to Grace Hopper: "everyone can write programs!" Second, as Dijkstra said once "computers are for programmers like telescopes for astronomers", programming isn't about writing lines of code, programming is about knowing how to deal with requirements and putting them to work as a computer program.

115 points by nomdep 6mo ago

ninju 6mo ago

> It sucks. I miss feeling like my job was secure, ... The wheel of industry rolls forward and crushes everyone underneath it

socalgal2 6mo ago
Progress is inevitable.
- ofrzeta 6mo ago
  Is it? I mean in the end it is a political decision. We are used to infinite progress, infinite growth and infinite rationalization. But for what good? People have not become more free to pursuit their generic interests in Marx' sense but there's just more concentration in the hand of the capital while unemployment is growing. Weren't we better of to have less rationalization and have more meaningful work for people?
  - satvikpendem 6mo ago
    "Meaningful work" for work's sake, why? I have no desire to work in a farm or a factory when I can work from the peace of my own home without breaking my back. Not to mention the work that other people do too, like doctors and scientists, which directly positively impact my own life. If they were to say, let's not continue progressing, then that's not a world I'd want to live in.
    - ofrzeta 6mo ago
      It depends on what we define as progress. At times nuclear power was considered progress while it's no longer now (at least to that extent). Why couldn't we consider a society with less technology as progressive? Learning that less reliance on technology makes us more resilient as individuals and as a society. Obviously there are areas where we didn't want to downscale such as medical care. But there's a lot of technological progress that does not contribute much value to society in general but to concentrate wealth in the hand of a few people. EDIT: also so-called "breaking your back" has the same effect as going to the gym. Sure I am aware that there are really back-breaking jobs and they should be helped by machines. But there's no rule to say that the helping machines need to to all of the work. A moderate amount of physical work is just beneficial to everyone.
      - satvikpendem 6mo ago
        This is a rose tinted glasses take. I guarantee if you took anyone from the past they'd want to live our lives today, and that's not to even say anything of being in a developing country today with lack of access to adequate supplies and medicine. > also so-called "breaking your back" has the same effect as going to the gym I can tell you've never worked a manual labor job in your life. The workload definitely does not have the same workload as just "going to the gym."
parpfish 6mo ago
i've been advocating for developers to unionize for years, and there'd always be a big group saying "we don't need a union". AI-based job displacement will do wonders for raising class consciousness when it's too late. the best time to unionize is when you don't need a union.
- dmitrygr 6mo ago
  And do what, what buggy whip unions did?
  - parpfish 6mo ago
    The dynamics are different when the demand for the product dies off and there’s no money to pay salaries vs worker productivity increasing and you need fewer workers. Replacing workers will be used to increase profit margins rather than lower prices because there’s no competition to force prices down thanks to monopolistic consolidation
    - satvikpendem 6mo ago
      The demand for the product (software engineers) dies off, therefore a union has no leverage.
- satvikpendem 6mo ago
  Unions won't do anything for AI based job displacement though, because they don't need you, whether you're in a union or not. I see this going the same way as SAG for example, if AI video or film creation ever gets good enough where a single "director" can make an entire movie themselves with no actors. Unions and indeed any bargaining organization only have leverage when their people are needed, but what happens when the people themselves are needed no longer?
  - parpfish 6mo ago
    Well, it’s all probably a moot point now because devs have lost leverage. But the union contracts can help bring some order to the layoff process - which employees get laid off and severance for the others.

Insanity 6mo ago

In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do? I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.

znnajdla 6mo ago
Entrepreneurship, obviously.
- CraftingLinks 6mo ago
  I suspect the number of startups will skyrocket the nexr few years. Fired engineers will start to compete against the establishment that fired them. Competition may get a lot more fierce for a while.
suzzer99 6mo ago
If software engineering goes extinct, a ton of other white-collar jobs will go with it, and we could be in an intractable depression.
- ehnto 6mo ago
  I actually think AI has an unfair advantage with software that is making it seem far more capable that it is. Software is entirely text based, and producers have been putting their outputs and problem solving online for free for decades. I think applying AI to other white collar roles that also require problem solving but do not have as much training, will prove much more difficult. Even coding on proprietary dominated domains is a much, much worse experience than people have with more accessible code. Using it for electronics has been hit or miss, embedded software is a bit shakey, game development is also challenging to use it for etc.
  - dd8601fn 6mo ago
    I get what you’re saying, but it’s not as though there are trillions of books and blog posts and stackexchange questions about excel and the handful of other things that most office workers do, too. I honestly figured that’s why everyone is coming out with MS Office plugins for all the models, and MS itself is putting it in the tools. So if most any company only needs one person to solve limited IT issues, prompt code production and deployment, generate the usual truckloads of excel spreadsheets, and do most of the finance and accounting… it starts to look pretty scary. Then, what about the people making and maintaining all the facilities for these people we don’t need anymore? The world flipped its lid about commercial real estate when wfh became a thing. That was relatively small and temporary.

chronolitus 6mo ago

10 years? These days ten years feel like an absurdly long time in the future.

Insanity 6mo ago
“Attention is all you need” was published 9 years ago, and gpt3.5 burst onto the scene 4 years ago. Progress is slower than people seem to think. Of course AI as a field is half a century old. But on the other hand, AI had a period of rapid acceleration 40-ish years ago and was then hit by an AI winter. We might hit that winter again in a year and all predictions made today are off the table.

minimaltom 6mo ago

I feel exactly this. One thing I will add: while AI is getting really good at _doing_ the software building bits, I haven't yet seen it well integrated into the decision-making and political structure of organizations. Right now, it seems best in the hands of a high-agency individual empowered and able to make changes or 'ship' something, with them acting as the bridge. This of course, is not a technical challenge, but I would expect the change in structure of organizations to make this more efficient to be slower than the pace of improvement we've seen over the last few years.

rubslopes 6mo ago
Well, I, for one, am guilty of developing AI agents for public project evaluation for current governments. It's coming.

deleted 6mo ago

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ehnto 6mo ago

I can relate, I was really looking forward to settling into mentorship roles. However I am not quite so defeated, I think that developers will continue to find employment in tech even as AI augments the roles. Experienced developers are the obvious pick for a hire to run agentic AI development tools, and even the obvious pick for managing a no-code endgame scenario as they are just smart technologists with strong problem solving skills. I think the devs who were only here for the paycheck and would not reasonably pick software if it didn't pay so much, will probably be happy to retrain into something else but be disappointed by the paycut. I am also excited by the prospect of being able to take on bigger scale side projects solo as that's really where my passion lies. I think general purpose technologists will really excel in this new ecosystem as the industry will be back to moving fast and breaking stuff for a while, for better or worse. A lot of them call themselves programmers right now but will evolve pretty quickly. Pragmatism, small teams and fast pace will best deliver software based projects, and the bottleneck in big orgs will become (or already was) the bureaucracy and communication layers. Small team, greenfield projects have a huge advantage in getting an MVP to market, which is pretty exciting for someone excited mostly by solving problems with technology. Time will tell though, this is not career advice and times are chaotic. At the end of the day, there are other careers, and you were smart enough to get into software. You will be smart enough to find a new career.

margalabargala 6mo ago
My favorite hope about AI is that it will finally kill leetcode interviews.
- blululu 6mo ago
  Would love this but I feel like it is equally likely to end up being something like: “solve 500 leet code hard problems with agentic tooling while I grill you about a time when you dealt with failure”
  - margalabargala 6mo ago
    I still prefer that to "here's a problem statement with some subtle non-obvious approach specific to this class of problem, either you've memorized it in advance or you fail."

danieldrehmer 6mo ago

*ten months

hwhshs 6mo ago
10th April

gherkinnn 6mo ago

Maybe the act of writing code will die. I still have hope that the act of transforming ideas and vibes in to something that works remains valuable. The means might change but the end remains.

deleted 6mo ago
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dzink 6mo ago

I grew up in a world that didn’t have secure corporate jobs as a thing. That’s most of the world outside the US. There, you could get secure government jobs (if you come from the right family or connections) or you had to learn how to build a business yourself. Anything else, paid barely livable wage if at all. The way to survive it was to 1) move to a village/small town where you could have a garden for fruits, vegetables, corn, chickens, maybe a pig or two for winter. 2) Young people lived with their parents while the parents saved up to build/buy their children their own flat or house. Children whose parents saved up enough would often start a family after getting their own place. Those who didn’t, co-lived with parents. The secure middle class corporate employment in the US is getting severely downgraded by AI. While there is talk of universal basic income the reality is that many many companies depend on the surplus that middle class families enjoy spending and without it, vast swaths of industries will get starved as well. The solution is to show people quickly how to hunt and gather and farm as makers instead of just employees. Figuring out what is needed, taking on a small corner of needs somewhere in meat space or online, and planting there. AI has been fantastic at helping even solo founders with that. They need to encourage a cornucopia of ideas and experimenters as early as k12. They need to set up more favorable conditions for handling the admin side as well. If the US government does not encourage cornucopia of AI-powered small business entrepreneurship and lets monopolies squash that early, they will end up with far FAR worse conditions. Any monopoly who keeps pitching “universal basic income” while actively avoids paying taxes, will end up forced into more taxes. Big tech needs to make room for people to build and grow businesses (looking at you, Apple, for copying every successful app with a native, and you Meta for eating every social competitor) or they will end up paying for everyone’s universal basic income and then some. If this country wants to survive the AI era, it needs to remove the pink glasses of “secure corporate job” and teach people how to plant, hunt, and gather as independent players in the market really fast.

tombert 6mo ago

I've been feeling this. I don't really feel like it's a "bad" thing; I've said for a long time if a job can be automated, then it should be automated. I still do believe that, even if I am probably on the losing end of that in the not-too-distant future. I think I am reasonably good at software, and I think I write code that's still a bit better than what Claude does. In fact, I suspect that will actually be true for quite awhile, but the problem is that "writing code 20% better" isn't exactly a selling point when my competition is $100/month and takes like 1/20th the time. Most software, even before AI, wasn't optimal and was kind of shitty, and good engineers were still always replaceable with shittier cheaper ones if it was economically viable. I tend to land on my feet for this stuff, so I still think I'll be ok; I know how to use the tools and there will still need to be some humans who understand how this shit works, so I'm not worried about becoming homeless or anything. What I'm mostly worried about is that I won't ever have fun at work anymore. I liked solving problems, I liked thinking of clever solutions to avoid a mutex or increase concurrency, I liked figuring out how to squeeze a few percent more performance out of my given limitations. It's something I'm good at, and it's basically the only way to get decent money while doing math. Since the ceiling for writing software has been significantly lowered, I think eventually the cushy yuppie status of software is going to shrink. Maybe I should learn to weld or something.

vishnugupta 6mo ago

Out of curiosity I checked out the author’s resume and this is their current position. Oh the irony!! I built significant pieces of the Copilot onboarding, purchasing, billing and settings flow. For eight months I headed up the Copilot anti-abuse effort. I then led the launch of GitHub Models, and am now working on other Copilot projects.

rvz 6mo ago
No wonder GitHub is always collapsing every week. Tay.ai, Zoe and Copilot bots being deployed wrecking the platform being unable to fix infrastructure issues whilst the humans are just tweaking all the tiniest issues. They should instead focus on GitHub actions and improving the uptime of the whole platform first before doing anything AI.
- shermantanktop 6mo ago
  Wherever you work, are there embarrassing experiences that your organization ships? If so, why didn’t you personally fix them so that nobody could associate you as an individual with a broken CX? If not, please let me know where to apply, because that sounds like a unicorn organization. Humans in large groups do amazing and crappy things at the same time. Playing gotcha with someone’s resume is a shitty thing to do.
  - collingreen 6mo ago
    On the other hand the place I work isn't owned by a company with many many billions to throw around, including many billions paid for the platform in question. I agree attacking someone's resume is lame but attacking big corporate prioritization feels valid here to me.
    - shermantanktop 6mo ago
      Totally. None of us is as stupid as all of us. But working in a well-funded company doesn’t make this problem go away. It makes it worse in a lot of ways. For my org, I’ll be happy to be first in line to criticize some of the notably wrongheaded prioritization decisions.

FirstClassTree 6mo ago

You have many errors and I personally find the writing style pretentious. For example: Software engineer role is about automating people -> often not. That just indicates lack of rigor. Also, if so. Who will make the ai automate people? GOD? People think poorly understood theory and gradient descent will produce God.

hwhshs 6mo ago
Jevons "paradox" says as things get cheaper demand goes up. It is kinda how we got modern AI rather than just faster and faster paper form replacements.

bdcravens 6mo ago

I appreciate that this article is doing what few in our space do: acknowledging that software has long been the tool to put people out of work (though that process is wrapped in softer terms like "optimization" and "disruption"), and we're only the inevitable targets of the same machinery we helped build.

travisgriggs 6mo ago

“My job” is an oxymoron. It was never your job. Your employer has always made it clear that they, not you, own the job.

000ooo000 6mo ago
What value do you see this distinction adding here?

hwhshs 6mo ago

> Junior and mid-level engineers will suffer before I do I wouldnt be so sure. They'll keep the people who can do what needs to be done with new tools. Current title is irrelevant. In addition loosing a 400k tc vs. 2x 200ktc makes more sense if they are all prooompters and AI handlers anyway.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

tehlike 6mo ago

Building is half the battle. Knowing what to build is the other half. Most IC6/7+ would not code anyways - in fact a friend of mine said "we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5" - which was ironic but funny. I am curious if we would ever get a new programming language like rust or go, without this creativity. In a way, we have different products that does more or less same things (postgres vs mysql for example). The reason is there's difference of thought in the process. I doubt this will go away.

vishnugupta 6mo ago
> we had our own agents we just called them IC4/5 This is what bugs me the most. Those who are now at IC6/7 rose through the daily grind of coding and debugging from L1. But now that those jobs are getting automated how will someone rise to IC6!!? It’s as if first 10 rungs of a ladder are missing and only someone with an exceptionally good athleticism can jump up and start from 11th rung. I think in the coming decades we will see IKEA effect in woodworking. Like it’s extremely easy to build cheap furniture whose individual parts are really compressed papers. There’s hardly any good carpenters left to do the real wood carpentry. Those who are left will cost a bomb (rightly so) and can only be afforded by rich people.

bradley13 6mo ago

Walk around an office and look at what people are doing. Accounting? Marketing? Administration? How many of these jobs could be done by AI? Maybe companies haven't seen it yet, but most office jobs can and will be eliminated in the next decade or two.

burroisolator 6mo ago

My guess is if they haven't cured cancer, achieved world peace, colonized Mars, you'll still have a job.

xyzal 6mo ago

Honestly, I enjoyed coding a bit more when I was doing it just as a hobby. Maybe it is time to enjoy it again! Don't ruminate on the future too much folks, you won't die by hunger.

winrid 6mo ago

What will go away is the "senior engineer" position filled by people making six figures that don't know how to debug a memory leak or create a database index.

hbogert 6mo ago

I just saw a merge request created with Claude from a colleague without software engineering background. Let's just say I will have more work to do than less. Software validation was always the interesting part vs software verification. Validation asks the question, did you build what was actually necessary?

beej71 6mo ago

I don't see demand dropping in the medium to long term. Businesses like to grow, and two devs with AI are better than one. And one dev with AI is better than one non-dev with AI. The job is changing, and I don't like it in many ways, but there we go. It's not the first time new tech has nuked my dev job and I had to change. I have personal projects that I hand-code, and personal projects I hand to Claude. Depends on how boring the project is. If it's stuff I've already solved a bunch of times, I hand it off. If I have room for good learning, I code it myself.

Tade0 6mo ago

> In 2026, I’m not sure the software engineering industry will survive another decade. Due to a text predictor? I'm a daily user of the most recent Claude and while it's amazing at presenting other people's knowledge and reducing cognitive load by filling in the gaps, it's still just a machine that predicts text and that is a limitation which won't be overcome in this generation of such tools which, including research demonstrations, are close to a decade old already. To me the main issue is that investors are not aware of these limitations and will keep pouring money into this way beyond everyone's breaking point. But really that's a failing of the world's economic system, which relies too much on their whims.

aryehof 6mo ago
Well it’s not just a “text predictor” is it? You can pretend that today we still only have ChatGPT 2 and that there is only pre-training on a large corpus of information, but that simply isn’t true?
- Tade0 6mo ago
  > Well it’s not just a “text predictor” is it? It is, by definition, design and architecture a system that produces believable text. Here's a task to give it which pulls the veil right off: Ask it to add tests to a piece of code where code coverage is 100%, but it doesn't actually test functionality 100%. You'll start seeing nonsense sooner or later.
  - drooby 6mo ago
    A leading theory in neuroscience is that human brains are fundamentally prediction machines too, constantly predicting sensory input, other people’s behavior, the next word in a sentence. “it’s just prediction” isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Prediction and attention turn out to be a surprisingly powerful foundation for intelligence. The “just a text predictor” framing was fair a couple years ago but hasn’t kept up. Current models can genuinely identify untested edge cases even when coverage is 100%. You're definitely using the latest and greatest models? The architecture started as next-token prediction, sure, and yes, human judgment is still required, but that judgment is being captured and integrated too. Every time millions of people use these models, their feedback feeds the next round of improvements. Also, these models don’t need to replace your best engineers to be disruptive. They just need to outcompete the bottom of the bell curve. For a lot of junior-level work, we’re already getting close.

imiric 6mo ago

> I don’t think there are any genuinely new capabilities that AI agents would need in order to take my job. They’d just have to get better and more reliable at doing the things they can already do. The "just" here is minimizing what has been the crux of the problem for the past ~5 years. This technology has been capable of producing code all this time. The end result has been improving due to massive scaling efforts, and some relatively trivial engineering ("reasoning", "agents", etc.). And yet reliability is still a massive problem. The tools still hallucinate, still lead the user in dead-end directions, and still do so confidently and randomly, without any discernible reason. Expert users are able to guide them to a certain extent, but whether the prompting incantation is done manually or via the trendy Markdown file of the week, it's all guesswork based on feelings and anecdata. I'm personally not too worried about being replaced by these tools, even though my skillset is nothing remarkable. My opportunities might shrink, but this is a two-way street. Companies that use "AI" indiscriminately don't interest me either. The demand for quality human work and ingenuity will always exist, even within a sea of mediocrity. I'm much more concerned with the societal impact of the mountains of shoddy software being produced, deployed into increasingly more critical infrastructure, and put into hands of incompetent and malicious people. There is very little thought and discussion on this topic, let alone any guardrails. "AI" companies are now attracting governments and advertisers, both full of malicious and incompetent people. The next decade is going to be interesting, that's for sure.

wvxf 6mo ago
Great post.

6510 6mo ago

Let me be the optimist here: Programmers are both extremely unproductive and know very little about everything else. What percentage of capable programmers can actually sit down and write code for 8 hours and then do it 5 days in a row? The time not coding is filled with many different words for recovery. Some of this recovery involves trying to better understand the domain. (more on this later) Most of the startups that get the attention are attempting to be the next big thing but a startup can just be a startup. It doesn't have to be big or glorious. Someone who sells hot dogs (on a small scale) cant really hire a programmer but if he could (or could write it themselves) there would be plenty of software to write. You can make a nice interface with all of the sales statistics, inventory management, maps with competition and demographic data, work schedules, etc etc There is infinite complexity to even the simplest job. You could hire help and have an app talk them though every step in great detail with pictures, videos and animations. You can encode all of the little tricks that could normally take decades to learn. Say, on a busy spot you might not have time to spend 8 minutes properly cleaning the grills every 47 minutes but you could wipe down the glass every 4 minutes and clean part of the grills with alcohol every 11 minutes then clean it properly every 3 hours. The app might instruct to google location related news or other topics to talk about with the customer. If people are walking their dog they expect you to guess what breed it is and where it comes from then ask how old it is. You might build a tech stack to help recognize their face, remember their name, what they ordered last time and how long ago. You're not suppose to but you know you want to. You wont be coding for a glorious salary but will earn depending on the sector your chose. The software will be pure dog food of the finest quality in the world. Grilling hot dogs is also very relaxing, can let the mind float a bit and have software ideas the way you should. Lots of bad ideas will come, I can show people pictures of themselves eating my hotdogs! You can basically look at programming as the new literacy. You might want a fancy job writing letters for a nobleman but it is hardly the only application.

amusings 6mo ago

I'm not yet convinced that the positions are going away. Unfortunately, I find it more likely that it's going to be a bad few years and then surge in demand to fix things that have been done in those years. Maybe I've just had bad luck but over last 2 decades I've only worked in places where 80% (at least - probably closer to 95%) coworkers (in development related areas) had negative productivity - making software more complex, brittle and abstract than necessary. With AI assistants the same people can be more "productive" and gatekeeping is mostly a lost cause. I hope to find a decent alternative in those few years and never go back to software :)

adt 6mo ago

Actually, Anthropic reckons you've got three. In 2024 (so now, one). https://lifearchitect.ai/my-last-three-years-of-work/ https://lifearchitect.ai/my-last-three-years-of-work/

waynesonfire 6mo ago

If you use an LLM at work to produce code, does the company own the copyright to that code? ... hmmm.

Juliate 6mo ago

Guys guys. I do share the sentiment. On the other hand. Unless we have a breakthrough hardware/physical innovation, GenAI in its current forecast is not energy-efficient, cost-efficient, compared to human/deterministic methods. It has shown no capacity so far to « create » in the sense we animals do. And all that, still being: highly subsidized (your subscription does NOT cover the costs of the service as of now, we are still in the market creation/capture phase), and without mesurable economical benefit. Things are still far from being over.

orangecoffee 6mo ago
To give you the benefit of doubt - you're not paying attention. The 100$ claude account is profitable inference wise, and performs better than 80% of engineers with upto 5YOE. Architects I speak with want to delegate to this 100$ agent rather than 10000$ engineer. It is absolutely more cost efficient. Junior engineers are done for.
- Juliate 6mo ago
  I have first hand and second hand seen more failure from this line of reasoning _as of today_, in the French/European tech sector, than successes. Not even talking about those executives that expect to use Gen AI to "help" in their process and financial reporting - at least the flag is bright red. I've also met enough architects (or so called) in consulting, service companies as well as startups, from both a founder and a tech lead point of view, in the past 25 years not to entrust them too much with their hunches, long-term wise. Especially because, from a sustainability point of view, saying "junior engineers are done for" is like saying "kids are done for": not that wise. Unless what you account/bet for is the drastic reduction/disappearance of humains (and then, a lot starts to make more sense).

sltr 6mo ago

The article expresses what a lot of us are feeling. I appreciated the read. It conflates purpose with outcome. I don't accept the premise that software's purpose is to "automate away other jobs". That may be an outcome, but software's purpose is to enable completely new possibilities. Think bicycles of the mind. The Apollo guidance computer didn't replace astronauts. It made the missions possible in the first place because no human can continually correct the spaceship trajectory every 250ms for 10 days on end. We're not receiving some cosmic karma. We're more like cotton pickers after the cotton gin. Someone still has to plow and plant.

rakejake 6mo ago
I agree on principle. But there is going to be a painful transition where people are still reckoning with the new capabilities so I understand where all the fear/sadness is coming from. Tbf I think the golden days of being a software dev are over even if the AI were to stagnate and never improve. The spectre of AGI is enough for higher ups to demand more output which will in turn require more hours to be put in by devs. A project that required 2 months will now be allotted 3 weeks because "Agentic coding increases productivity".

amai 6mo ago

Your job will still exist, but your productivity will be 10-fold. Do you remember the times before we had automated tests, object oriented programming or even before compilers?

QuiEgo 6mo ago

I'm curious what our industry looks like in 10 years as well. I like the architecture analogy. An architect is not really focused on doing the actual building of a design, but understanding what's possible, what tools and techniques and materials are available, and figuring out how to put the pieces together to make a thing. Right now, you're the architect who designs a house, but you're also the cement mixer, framer, drywall installer, plumber, electrician, and so on, all at once. In this analogy, it's hard to design anything big like a skyscraper if you're bogged down by all of the minutia like picking out what type of nails to use for the framing and then installing them. I think going forward, AI is going to do a lot of the non-architecture part of software engineering. We will all become architects. The difference between us will be the scope of what we're qualified to design as we go through our careers - new grads will cut their teeth on the likes of designing shacks, principals design skyscrapers. I think this also unfortunately means there's gonna be a lot less people in software. The industry will still exist though, but it's going to look way different. I look forward to this being settled out, the uncertainty sucks.

QuiEgo 6mo ago
I also think in this analog, developers who are already architects are in the best place to ride out the wave of change, but long term the industry will have to figure out a way to fill the pipeline so some journeyman system will emerge. If I was going to college tomorrow, I wouldn't touch a CS program with a 10 foot poll until all of this settles out though.
- iwsk 6mo ago
  What would you choose if you went to college tomorrow?
  - QuiEgo 6mo ago
    Medical industry seems like the safest for keeping high-paying white collar jobs. Engineering and legal are likely to get disrupted. Knowing my interests now, I’d probably go into flight school and try to become a commercial pilot.

irenetusuq 6mo ago

[dead]

Markoff 6mo ago

The real question is why do you care? Why you worry today about something which may not happen in the future? My job most likely won't exist in ten years, do you think I'm worried? You might die in car accident, from heart attack or cancer in those ten years, some lost job is absolutely irrelevant compared to your health, there are and always will be jobs available, just adapt. We have saying in my country "There were, are and (always) will be the money", which basically means you should not worry too much about money, just find a way to get them when you need them. I strongly recommend LISTENING to this song - Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI I quote one of the most important part regarding the article (especially 2nd sentence): "Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4:00 pm on some idle Tuesday."

MRonErlang 6mo ago

We forgot two things: First, this kind of phrasing is repeated again and again since Cobol was launched. A machine code writer said to Grace Hopper: "everyone can write programs!" Second, as Dijkstra said once "computers are for programmers like telescopes for astronomers", programming isn't about writing lines of code, programming is about knowing how to deal with requirements and putting them to work as a computer program.