I honestly don’t know what to do, and I don’t think anybody does. Coworkers, other professionals, therapists—there is no consensus.
I fucking love development. I went to computer camp and decided I wanted this career at age 10 before I even understood it was a possibility.
I want to be paid to know things. Not to supervise a guessing machine and guide it like a sycophantic lost puppy.
I cling to the hope that AI companies will burn through their revenue and will implode under their own infestors’ demand for ROI before they truly have something that wipes away the entire profession. I am a terrible gardener.
He may be dead right, and unduly pessimistic at the same time.
The industry massively overhired relatively unskilled people who believed the job was “writing code”, for a few decades; those people got by thanks to Stack Overflow and the fact that most of the code that needed writing really didn’t need much skill anyway. There’s very little innovation or engineering in most business platforms - a couple of decent architects and an army of code monkeys can deliver most of the software that’s needed. We also developed programming languages and frameworks that made it much easier for the unskilled developers to be productive.
Sad to say, these are the people now loudly wailing about the iniquities of AI. If you thought churning out code was the profession - you absolutely should be very concerned that AI will replace you - it will. But if you realised that code was only ever a side effect of the job, which was applying computing to solve problems - you have little to worry about. AI is just a new tool to do it, and is no more a threat than optimising compilers, mamaged runtimes or IDEs were.
When I started my career, I wrote assembly code by hand for platforms that barely even had an operating system. Then C. Then Java - and as far as I’m concerned, every programming language since then has pretty much had training wheels permanently attached… For the last few years, I’ve preferred Rust, although the job has been more about developing architectures for others to implement than coding myself. But my expectation is that I’ll end my career writing instructions for AIs to implement; and that’s absolutely fine. The job didn’t change, just some of the intermediate representations I had to write to do it. The profession will probably go back to look more like the one I entered - fewer people doing it, but with more formal education in computer science, and much less “coding”.
Which is not to say I don’t think there’s anything to worry about for the profession, there absolutely is. How the hell we identify the future senior engineers with the actual skill and aptitude required, when there are no junior roles to provide the necessary apprenticeship - and when the education system is struggling to adapt to AI use in class - is a massive and fundamental problem. That’s what keeps me awake at night, not people who think writing CRUD APIs in C# is a divine gift.
Yep, and in 5 years architects and tech leads will be similarly be made obsolete. In the end, if you want to make money, all technology decisions are just implementation details in service of what actually matters - delivering business value. Therefore the only stable career in the age of AI is the project manager.
lol
We’ve had a growing invisible divide in software for two decades now:
A: People who jam in frameworks, copy examples online, and adopt “processes” and principles that bigger companies claim work for them, that only result in pulverizing responsibility, speed and understanding. They don’t expect to understand their tools. They fudge them until they stop giving off visible problems and wrap that up in “grown up words” by making ineffectual unit tests, make a PR, tagging it “bugfix: ticket #877”, sending it to review, debating some syntax, and spend the next two years debugging the system because of all the small things that go wrong because the thing they make don’t behave according to a clear mental model.
B: People who don’t think knowing a single programming language counts as competence, and prefer making things according to a model (instead of copying someone else’s framework and contorting their own work to fit inside it)
Group A are the reason shit sucks today, and they believe LLMs can code, because they themselves can barely code and just copy impressive looking convoluted shit from others anyway.
so group B doesn’t use frameworks but prefers making things according to a model? What’s a model here? I’m not following
Frameworks can be fine. Using them before understanding what you make is not. At that point you often see it is faster and better to just make the parts you needed yourself.
Model as in you have a clear opinion on what your system does, why, how, and what it doesn’t do. A model evolves during development, which is where it becomes hard: You always need to make room for things you didn’t predict, so you need to adapt and refine the system model so that the change makes sense.
Adding features until a full system explanation consists largely of “but”, “and also” or “except”, things like “and you should ask Bea about how that part works” or the worst of all “this part can be anything”, is the opposite of working from a model.
10 years is optimistic. I’m already seeing management telling experienced developers “You aren’t using Claude hard enough.”
we were mandated to double our output to justify what the company is spending on Claude and to do so we were told to use god awful skills that are constructed in a way that often ignore guide rails and bypass permission rules causing more time to be wasted in debugging and fixing shitty ai slop than would have been spent actually by humans planning and implementing sound changes.
Consistent with my experience! With the added bonus of cheap, outsourced developers who can’t find their ass with both hands.
I don’t think of myself as a developer but have been doing IT for 25 years before my current unemployment that is creeping toward two years. I have a lot of linkedin contacts in the same boat.
The feels. Week 1 here.
I have a feeling there’s a fine line between not hard enough and everyone spending $2k per month on tokens.
Yeah, I’ve had that existential crisis this Spring, and so have other devs I know. There’s still a good way to go, but unless LLMs hit a hard limit on cognition I tend to share the author’s feelings.
I’m not really sure why anyone in tech ever expected job security. The pace at which tech has been advancing and its role changing in our lifetimes is way faster than you could just make a cozy career out of.
That’s like saying you don’t understand how anyone expected to make a career in metal work? Surely we would find something better than metal within a couple of hundred years right there’s no way that industry is still exists in a thousand years.
The pace at which tech has been advancing and its role changing in our lifetimes is way faster than you could just make a cozy career out of.
Useful development, or just development for the sake of development so the shareholders are happy? Useful being defined as a product that people would still be happy to use in decade from now.
How old do you think computer Tech’s are? There’s been programmers since the 60s on punch cards. There’s totally careers worth of work there.
This is an odd take… I personally know several people that started, worked, then retired as programmers
If you’re this lacking in confidence of your skills, you may have other issues to work out…
