[swatcoder]

Over the last 10-15 years, competition among cash rich FAANG companies soaked up every person who could learn to write a for loop and read an API document and drove (American) software engineer compensation into the range of doctors and lawyers.

That’s not sustainable. There’s not enough useful engineering work to go around, and certainly not for that value. It just happened that money was cheap for a long while and those firms were using some of theirs to make sure nobody else had access to good talent.

Between money getting more expensive and LLM’s readily eating up the “for loops and API docs” class of work, the reckoning seems to be coming.

There will still be plenty of tech industry and software engineering work for talented, interested people and it will still probably pay a decent middle+ class salary. If that suits you, stick with it. That’s what a lot of us have already been a part of for decades. It’s not bad work. We’ll probably be using AI tools as part of it moving forward and working on some pretty cool projects because of that.

But if you struggle with the field and were hoping for an easy $$$$ lifestyle, you might want to look at a different career options. The landscape won’t be like you saw when you were in high school.

[tkiolp4]

While what you said rings true, one thing you are forgetting is that demand for people who work in tech is only going up. This is worldwide.

[blameitonme]

but at the same time, we can say the same about doctors (or even lawyers?) AI is just getting better at predicting things in general, be it an answer to technical question or predicting a disease, so which field is safe from AI? anything involving physical work can be optimized to outperform humans if economic incentives support it, and mentally we won't be able to combat AI say after 20 years, so what then?

Which field are safe from AI overtake? now obviously AI wont take all doctors' jobs, but it'll reduce the value that a singular doctor provides today and that's my concern, we humans are all are getting devalued, is AI field itself safe or will they replace themselves first?

[ipaddr]

Demand for medicine is increasing this will probably make the lives of gp better and free them to do more enjoyable tasks. The law and medicine are closed fields with limited spaces on purpose so I expect them to be least affected.

Whatever job sounds great in a movie avoid, find something with a moat for entry that's what successful startups do.

[abhayhegde]

I'm not convinced that scientists (researchers working on basic science domains) will not be so easy to replace. The typical work would involve an element of genius-ness that is foreign to an AI. Not saying one could never be replaced, just that it's not as straightforward.