alt Hacker NewsProgrammers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities. AI challenging this virtually over night is a tough pill to swallow. Naturally, many subscribe to the hope that it will fail.
How far AI will succeed in replacing programmers remains to be seen. Personally I think many jobs will disappear, especially in the largest domains (web). But I think this will only be a fraction and not a majority. For now, AI is simply most useful when paired with a programmer.
Replies
AI is useful when paired with an experienced programmer.
Experienced through old-school (pre-LLM) practice.
I don't clearly see a good endgame for this.
For a brief blip in time the last few years it was possible to jump from a code camp to a decent paying job and vaguely disappear for a while like Milton from office space. The current period from a bad economy is more of a reversion to the mean.
> Programmers have enjoyed an occupation with solid stability and growing opportunities.
This is not the case:
- Before the 90s, programming was rather a job for people who were insanely passionate about technology, and working as a programmer was not that well-regarded (so no "growing opportunities").
- After the burst of the first dotcom bubble, a lot of programmers were unemployed.
- Every older programmer can tell you how fast the skills that they have can become and became irrelevant.
Over the last decade, the stability and opportunities for programmers was more like a series of boom-bust cycles.