best programmers will be in still in demand in 10 years.
Best programmers (who understand requirements well and write concise code, etc..) are only less than 1/3 of total programmer population as of TODAY. What 2/3 of the total programmers doing today can be done by 20% of this current 2/3 group at similar ( or better) quality with the help of COPILOT like tools.
This tedious task of finding answers will be the job of GPT Codex/Copilot in near future
Future of Coding is AI pair programming
Between 2025 -2030 GPT-8 Codex/Copilot kind of tools enable developers write "better" code, regardless of their SKILL LEVEL ( this is with the 2/3 programmer population as of TODAY).
Even in 2030 we still need best programmers, whose programming patterns will be still be input to GPT-10 kind of tools.
Like "Peak oil" , "Peak automobiles" ( we are almost there), we will be reaching "Peak programmers" in few short years, then decline from there onwards.
What is software development: let AI generate most code then REVIEW code for accuracy, completion, security etc.. and test it
What is NOT software development : "solving age old problems" via Stackoverflow
By 2030 tools like Copilot create 'two-tier programmers'
-Tier 1 (squeeze 10x from Copilot) : writes 'prompts' and 'function signatures' for AI tools likes of CoPilot as part of technical design, from which Copilot will generate 80% of the code
-Tier 2: will check completeness & execute generated test suite
the only currency in this world is ownership and job-takers take no ownership in their work because they choose to trade their finite time and valuable IP for peanut butter
the problem is that you are forced to sign off your work to corporations else you can’t feed your family, because they’ll find somebody else who is desperate enough and will sign it
the only solution is unionizing and voting against IP transfer between individual and corporation
What's the alternative?
- unionizing
- union vote against signing IP assignment
- royalty agreement (like in music business)
- state legislation to make IP transfers between individual and corporation illegal
on individual level:
- refusing to sign IP assignment
- if possible, founding your own company with money extracted from labour and keeping the IP for yourself
In other words: You should not allow others to get rich on your labour. Instead make a company and get rich on other people's labour?
The work of some is worth, at least fiscally, more than others. I’m not justifying that or defending it. I’m just saying that my work is not as financially valuable as Tim Cook’s (for example), which is easily demonstrated.
The same would occur under this reality. Let’s say I create this awesome new Widget and I retain the rights. The Widget goes on to make my employer billions and I get millions in royalties. That’s effectively our current system.
And what about issues like confidentiality and conflict of interest? If I own my work and my agency decides to do business with, say, Vivendi, then what prevents me from screwing over my agency and giving the same or extremely similar content to, say, Disney?
I’m not asking to rhetorically write off what you say or refute it. These are the questions my mind went to as someone who owns his own small business where creating and manipulating IP for clients is a nontrivial part of our output.
I don't know if you're familiar with this American folk legend.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)
to understand what they are actually doing
but companies don’t care, all they want is that lemon juice extracted by cheap labour
That's the wrong takeaway. Plenty of people know how to build "what's needed" instead of "what's requested", CS degree or not.
I'm not super confident it correlates at all, but if I were to make a guess, I'd say that people with CS degrees are more likely to focus on the wrong things (eg: take requirements as they are without thinking about the why and optimize the requirements given to them) compared to people who got into tech other ways. But that's just based on anecdotal data, won't apply everywhere and so on.
companies love obedience!
One of the criteria I have for a professional is to understand how their work fits into the wider context, and be able to juggle multiple vantage points. Most developers now are amateurs that just stitch together code from npm, Stack Overflow and random github repos to create unmaintainable messes. Their work might be made redundant, or even sadder it might be that quality will become even more irrelevant, and all that matters is how well developers can sell themselves.
Whatever might happen, solid fundamentals and knowing how to best abstract the real world with minimal complexity will still be useful in the next 10-20 years.