[refulgentis]

I went from economics dropout waiter who built a app startup with $0 funding and $1M a year in revenue by midway through year 1, sold it a few years later, then went to Google for 7 years, and last year I left. I'm mentioning that because the following sounds darn opinionated and brusque without the context I've capital-S seen a variety of people and situations.

Sit down and be really honest with yourself. If your goal is to have a nice $250K+ year job, in a perfect conflict-free zone, and don't mind Dilbert-esque situations...that will evaporate. Google is full of Ivy Leaguers like that, who would have just gone to Wall Street 8 years ago, and they're perennially unhappy people, even with the comparative salary advantage. I don't think most of them even realize because they've always just viewed a career as something you do to enable a fuller life doing snowboarding and having kids and vacations in the Maldives, stuff I never dreamed of and still don't have an interest in.

If you're a bit more feral, and you have an inherent interest and would be doing it on the side no matter what job you have like me, this stuff is a godsend. I don't need to sit around trying to figure out Typescript edge functions in Deno, from scratch via Google, StackOverflow, and a couple books from Amazon, taking a couple weeks to get that first feature built. Much less debug and maintain it. That feedback loop is now like 10-20 minutes.

[ylee]

>Google is full of Ivy Leaguers like that, who would have just gone to Wall Street 8 years ago

I am one of those Ivy Leaguers, except a) I did go to Wall Street, and b) I liked my job.

More to the point, computers have been a hobby all my life. I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

Yet I have never desired to work as a professional software developer. My verbal and math scores on the SAT are almost identical. I majored in history and Spanish in college while working for the university's Unix systems group. Before graduation I interviewed and got offers (including one explicitly as a developer) at various tech startups. Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies; my manager was looking for a CS major but I was able to convince her that I had the equivalent thereof. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772>

Meanwhile, I continue to putter around with Elisp (and marveling at Lisp's elegance) and bash (and wincing at its idiosyncracies) at home, and also experiment with running local LLMs on my MacBook. My current project is fixing bugs and adding features to VM, the written-in-Elisp email client I have used for three decades. So I say, bring on AI! Hopefully it will mean fewer people going into tech just to make lots of money and more who, like me and Wall Street, really want to do it for its own sake.

[pzo]

That's more well balanced opinion comparing to others I seen here. I also believe that the golden age with 250k+ salaries with solving easy problems will be gone in 5-10 years. Most people look at this AI improvements at current state and forget that you are supposed to have a profession for 40 years until retirement. 250k+ jobs will still exist 10 years from now but expectations will be much higher and competition much bigger.

On the other hand now is the best time to build your own product as long you are not interested only in software as craftmanship but in product development in general. Probably in the future expectation will be your are not only monkey coder or craftman but also project lead/manager (for AI teams), product developer/designer and maybe even UX/designer if you will be working for some software house, consulting or freelancing.

[mmckelvy]

What did your startup do?

[refulgentis]

Point of sale, on iPad, in ~2011. Massively differentiated from Square / VC competitor land via doing a bunch of restaurant specific stuff early.

Trick with the $1M number is a site license was $999 and receipt printers were sold ~at cost, for $300. 1_000_000 / ((2 x 300) + 1000) ~= 500 customers.

Now I'm doing an "AI client", well-designed app, choose your provider, make and share workflows with LLMs/search/etc.

[thruway516]

Lol. I like this answer. You can either think of it in terms of "it'll eat my lunch" or "I now have 10x more capabilities and can be 100x more productive". The former category will be self-fulfilling.