[habinero]

Sure; but I'm not humblebragging at how talented at coding I am. I'm good at it because I have a lot of practice and experience, but I'm hardly the best.

It's the easiest part because the hard parts of the job are everything else -- you're a knowledge worker so people look to you to make decisions and figure it out. You figure it out and make it work for whatever "it" happens to be.

[lelanthran]

> It's the easiest part because the hard parts of the job are everything else -- you're a knowledge worker so people look to you to make decisions and figure it out. You figure it out and make it work for whatever "it" happens to be.

If you thought coding was easy, wait till you see the competition for knowledge workers. You're in a spot now where the part that made you valuable (implementing business rules in software) can now be done by virtually anyone.

Doing all the non-coding parts (or, as you put it, "the hard parts") can now be done by almost any white collar worker.

[habinero]

Sure, anyone with the knowledge and experience lol

"Knowledge worker" isn't a cutesy phrase, it means I don't get paid for my time, I get paid for what I know. Contrast that to, say, working retail where you are paid to staff the store from 8-6. It's not a value judgement (retail is hard work) it's a description.

We've already had years and years of predicting the death of software engineering to offshoring and that didn't happen for the same reason. India turns out plenty of fantastic engineers who can do my job. Those people also have better options than staffing some cut rate code factory, and you can't substitute the latter if you need the former. But nice try lol

[lelanthran]

> "Knowledge worker" isn't a cutesy phrase, it means I don't get paid for my time, I get paid for what I know.

What you appear to be missing is that (if AI coding is as good as we are told) there will considerably more people with the business knowledge to drive an AI to create their solutions.

The bit that made developers valuable was the ability to actually implement those business rules in software. You will be competing with all those laid off devs as well as those non-developers who have all that business knowledge.

In simple terms, there are two groups of people:

1. Developers, who have some business knowledge, and

2. White collar workers who have no development knowledge.

Previously (or currently, say) the supply of solutions providers came only from group 1. Now they come from both group 1 and group 2.

The supply of solutions providers just exploded, you can expect the same sort of salary that the people in group 2 get, which is nowhere close to what the people in group 1 used to get.

[habinero]

Yeah, nah, that's just a complete misunderstanding of what SWEs actually do lol

I'm not a code factory who occasionally talks to the suits. That isn't the job lol

[lelanthran]

> I'm not a code factory who occasionally talks to the suits. That isn't the job lol

The problem you are facing is that "person who talks to business" is a huge pool of talent, and now you have to compete with them. Previously your only competition was "person who talks to business and can code".

[habinero]

Nope, those people are not competition lol. I get that you want that to be true for some reason, but it's not.

I do not get paid to write code. No software engineer does. The more senior the engineer, the less code they write.

I don't even really talk to the business folks, that's what a PM is for.

I already told you what I actually do, you're free to read it and learn. Or not, I ain't the boss of you