Re:Amazon's Silent Sacking
by sanderjd on Saturday December 30, 2023 @04:14PM
(#38819228)
Maybe ... but this is almost word for word what my college counselor told me in 2001 when encouraging me not to study computer science, and I've heard some variant of it again and again ever since. What I think is that supply and demand will continue to ebb and flow, as will compensation, but that the ability to create software is a useful skill that will continue to be compensated pretty well for the foreseeable future.
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It will need to be tied in with a real abet engineering discipline the future , at least domestically.
This is more or less why I said the useful skill is the ability to "create software", not to "write code".
One end game may well be that a lot of people who are today "product managers" will use increasingly capable AI assistants to "create software" without writing much, if any, code. But in that world, I think a lot of people who are today "programmers" will also be very well suited to creating software in that way, and will have no trouble transitioning into those roles if that's where the opportunities are.
Re:Amazon's Silent Sacking
by oceanplexian on Sunday December 31, 2023 @07:15PM
(#38828620)
Saying that kids shouldn’t need to study computer science is like saying kids shouldn’t need to read and write because the market for literate people is saturated. Code is the toolset for the modern economy.
So, this is an easier case to make today (though to be honest I remain pretty skeptical of this), but in 2001 this was very far from being clear cut. The dot-com bubble had just burst and software looked like it might be a small niche or even just a fad in permanent decline.