Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.
If I could make money doing something I found a lot of meaning in I'd be doing that instead. Thing is, we usually don't have that option.
How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A good deal of them, I would say. Why should people measure their happiness and self worth from these?
I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring, shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this is far out of reach for most people.
Capitalism maximizes profits, not happiness. The market for software development jobs is much bigger for people who know popular frameworks and are content with validating forms, querying databases, aligning buttons, sending reports, etc. It's a lot easier (and rewarding) to find fulfillment elsewhere.
For all but a select few this is an unrealistic fairy tail. Most of us just want to make money to better enjoy our lives. We were given or acquired certain skills to make money, out of juvenile interests or opportunities we used. That doesn't mean we enjoy using those skills. It would be very hard to find any other job without taking a massive pay cut, investing huge amounts of money, time and effort only to have a high chance you won't like your new job as well.
I see no job or career I am interested in: I hate everything the moment it becomes work. And I am no unique snow flake. I am part of the majority with that.
https://www.wellable.co/blog/employee-engagement-statistics-....
Things I enjoy don't pay enough to live a comfortable life. Tech does. So I do well enough at my job to pay for the things I enjoy, and hope I find enough edge cases at work to avoid burnout.
In a true post-scarcity society, where everyone has the freedom to choose a career based purely on fulfillment, your argument is excellent. Until then, however, it's not.
At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be relevant in 2024?
I think the best thing one can do is learn how LLMs work, acquaint themselves with real implementations of it (ChatGPT, copilot), and then find ways to integrate these techniques into their companies.
Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills. There's your set of skills the market currently is in demand of.
Don't pivot your career. Don't burn the boat and jump into AI. Just be aware of these tools and get good at what they're poor at.
While I agree with the sentiment, there is way too much noise in that channel. Job listings written by non-technical people just throwing key words together, recruiters detached from specific roles and companies trying signalling growth to mention just a few sources of confusion...
I scratched and clawed, read tons of books, blogs, spent extra time polishing features beyond what was needed so I could learn new skills... but now I am a father of two young kids, with a wife. How long am I supposed to put in all this extra work? I'm likely slightly above average intelligence, but I'm far from being at the level where I could be an AI researcher... if I am even capable of doing the kind of math required there, it would require many years of learning.
GPT4 isn't going to replace me, but watching this space unfold really has me worrying about the versions that come out over the next 2-5 years.
A human is only so moldable, and while I am more than happy to learn new skills, I have no idea where to even start. What profession is safe? Where will the growth be in a field that will have equivalent or even near equivalent earning potential?
If GPT ends up getting to the point where it can replace me at my job, I really have a hard time thinking of a career path I could get into at this stage in life. It would need to be able to architect systems at a high level, write code to implement various features, communicate with stakeholders, document design decisions... if it can do that, it can do a whole hell of a lot of other jobs too.
Once it gets to that point, I don't think physical jobs will be that far behind on being automated either. We already have robots of all shapes and sizes (including bipedal), the main thing slowing down their deployment is that they aren't adaptable enough. With AGI, that changes. It will take a bit longer due to the capital requirements and factory build outs that would be needed.
GPT-4 is a very capable systems architect and can also implement the code. There are a few tools available to put it in a debug loop. Writing documents is a walk in the park for GPT-4. Emails or Discord chats or even perfectly realistic voice conversations are completely doable (I have that on my website).
At this point it's about connecting things together and looping them properly to automate a very high portion of jobs.
I think the answer is not employment but rather production. Think of something you can leverage these AIs that would be interesting or useful to someone else or some business.
Beyond that things like UBI and generally better integration of technology into government is going to be critical for our survival. Especially decentralized technologies and real-world resource data.
I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.
Maybe we shouldn't be, but it's still a problem that regularly needs to be solved.
In any case, I need to refute your argument, in my work as software engineer spanning more than a decade, I have noticed zero deprecation of my skills (Java, SQL, HTML/JS/CSS) (while keeping them up to date!) until now and only had to learn a few new complementing skills (cloud, docker, SPA, Kubernetes). The only skill that got replaced might have been "Java application server management" since that got replaced by whatever docker runtime is en vogue at the moment. I have worked for the government and met PL1/Cobol mainframe programmers that refused to learn Java and still got paid generously for their long term expertise.
I can see how you might think that... until you start actually talking in depth with enough actual users and executives and trying to get them to agree on how all that stuff should work and what it should be capable of.
Most of the development process is about trying to wrangle abstract ideas about how business logic should be implemented/improved from flawed humans who aren't great at communicating those ideas. Your 'simple' CRUD app still often has to be highly customized by someone willing to do the difficult work of dealing with people. And that's before you even start getting into working with more regulated businesses.
Code monkeys/plumbers using 'outdated' tech who can deliver something that makes a workplace more efficient in the long run will continue to be in demand. There was enough functionality in software by the 1970s to handle the vast majority of business needs. Someone still has to understand those businesses needs (which ultimately have little to nothing to do with software) well enough to translate them into something that works. Whether it works for those who are using it is all that really matters.
The only problem is that we live in a system that directs the gains upward and any costs downwards, and in so doing creates perverse incentives against people welcoming their redundancy.
Like sibling commenters, I love the idea of building something new with greater leverage. On an individual level, I'm looking forward to leveling up and finding new ways to be effective in my work.
Unlike sibling commenters, I don't think that should be our only option in life. It saddens me greatly that, given a new option to increase the effective output of a unit of time, we repeatedly choose as a society to profit monetarily (and with vast disparity in who benefits) rather than to give people more options in life than drilling on their jobs.
The industrial revolution promised people lives of relative leisure by replacing the need for much physical labor, but instead we concentrated the benefit to the few—and we keep making that same choice over and over.
You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. And we certainly do not want to be "solo founders", build products of our dreams or increase our productivity.
This way of living feels threatened now.