scaredOfAI
Some more junior folks, including a few of my closest friends, just won't make it. It seems like their jobs have already been replaced by a number of different factors, including AI. It's a very sad investment of time and money for them and their patient spouses, and I feel very guilty for recommending that path to them, and being unable to help them after they struggle for twelve months or more post-bootcamp, still unable to land a job.
I am just a few years ahead, and may just have a shot at the next evolution if I learn AI in a hurry...Or maybe it's also hopeless for me. Here's to giving my best shot to seizing that future, ahem abyss... will try not to go Ophelia on this forum, embarrassingly, in the dead of the night again.
Taking further inspiration from posts on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39656745 "Ask HN: What took you from being a good programmer to a great one?"
Will also focus my unemployment energy on deepening my software infrastructure and MLOps knowledge, building open source side projects using generative AI tools, using LangChain / GPT / Pinecone / Ollama, focused on practical business purposes like parsing customer service data and fintech anomaly detection. Whatever I can do in a short time to provide more value than GPT4 / GPT5, I guess I'll try my best to work on it with the fear of the abyss...
A part of me still thinks it might be time to pivot to healthcare. I'm no greybeard or "10x Engineer", just a regular old React/Node (formerly Ruby On Rails) developer doing the CRUD thing, and yeah, I'm not sure I quite make the cut.
All the best of luck to you! And thanks for writing an encouraging response.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
This is a pretty drastic change from their earlier prediction (often cited all over the internet) that the number of software engineers will increase by more than 30% in the next 10 years. It's not the full replacement of software engineers I'm worried about, so much as the steep reduction in the number of jobs and the labor/wage pressure that will make this job pay a fraction of what it's paying now.
Karpathy already stated in 2017 that "Gradient Descent writes better code than you", when he wrote about "Software 2.0" as feeding data to neural networks: https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, seemed to have confirmed that point this week in persuading parents not to encourage their kids to learn to code.
Today, this YT video by a dev named Will Iverson about how software engineering jobs are not coming back made me really anxious, and start to worry about making backup career plans in case I need to transition in my late thirties / early forties. (That sounds sooo hard...I'm a recently laid off mid-level engineer of seven years, but I wonder if it would be better to transition now while I'm younger.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JX5ZO19hiE&t=3s
I don't think the industry will ever really be the same again. But I'm sure a lot of us will adapt. (Some of us won't, and will probably have to switch careers. BLS thinks that number will be more than one in ten of us.)
If you think I'm wrong, can you please help me not be anxious? Older devs, how have you managed to ride out all the changes in the industry over the last few decades? Does this wave of AI innovations feel different than earlier boom-bust cycles like the DotCom Bubble, or more of the same?
What advice would you give to junior or mid-level software engineers, or college grads trying to break into the industry right now?