Ask HN: Software people, where are you taking your careers next?
Like many on HN, I started programming at a young age. Throughout my teens I taught myself programming through projects, and at 16 got an apprenticeship. From there I worked my way up to where I am now. Programming felt like my calling.
I once arrogantly thought software engineering would be one of the last roles to be impacted by AI, but now it's looking like it's one of the first.
We can debate about to what degree AI can actually take over from software engineers today, but I think there's no denying the trajectory. Companies don't want tenured and skilled developers anymore, they want dime a dozen agent supervisors to pump out features. Quality is taking even more of a backseat than before. Even if developers can't be replaced, AI significantly lowers the leverage we have.
Needless to say I didn't sign up for this. Supervising agents takes away pretty much everything I enjoyed about my job. I am somewhat mourning this loss, but I can at least be grateful I'm still relatively early in my career and young enough to learn a new skill.
So, now I'm thinking about what's next for me so I can protect both my income and my sanity. Since I left school at 16 I have no real qualifications, just my experience, which makes it harder to pivot.
If you feel the same way as me, what's your next move?
Comments
In my opinion, we are not so cooked in software engineering. Yes, professional shaping its okay, but we should change too. I think software engineering always was about solving the problem of the business. Now we just miss, the favorite part writing the code. Sometimes I catch a thought: we are more like an artist expressing our thought to a model so he executed.
Yes, but AI enables businesses to cut out the middleman developer. Business people can just directly convey what they want to the AI. Today, yes, this often leads to a mess. But for how long?
According to Demis Hassabis, someone who I think is worth listening to, we may only be one or two breakthroughs from AGI.
Even if such breakthroughs don't happen, can you imagine what it will be like working in this career in 10 years? It will be full of people who have no idea what they're doing; who just completely delegate their thinking to the machine. Working with such people will surely drive me mad.
When deep knowledge isn't incentivised anymore, all the people with deep knowledge will disappear and we'll have an industry of people who only know how to brute force problems with agents.
Retirement. Read paleontology papers, build some kits, learn to bake bread, learn to use a slide rule efficiently. Write some programs for learning purposes.
Bring us blog posts for show and tell if and when it brings you joy.
https://bruceediger.com
I see my peers joining union trades.
I got a 4 year degree in agric, 46 years ago.
Been an entrepreneur all my life.
Discovered that for myself, business "overhead" was the key.
I ran a high overhead business for 6 years, ran it into the ground, in fact. International Dating Club. Being the alpha male everywhere I traveled in the former USSR didn't turn out to be the financially secure male back in the states.
Then divorce-bankruptcy, ouch.
Finally discovered my calling in a blue collar gig, installing and servicing underwater submersible lake pumps for the uber wealthy living on waterfront property, only 3 major competitors. Lot's of scuba diving. I found I could do almost everything within the business myself, except I did have a day labor guy who would help me out on the major portion of the install for about 6 hrs on one day each job, carrying tanks, pumps, equipment, tools up and down the hillsides. I created and managed the websites, did all the quotes, sales, etc.
In 15 years of hard work, finally made my retirement savings, paid off my house, totally free of debt. Trying to sell the business now.
Now I enjoy training at The Masters swim group for competitions, getting ready to fly to the BVI to dive and sail on the world's largest trimaran.
My motto: Never give up. NEVER.
Thank you for sharing your story!