[striped_hash]

I don’t think kids should be insulating from AI. The examples in this article suggest for example that some people are dropping out of college and going into trade schools. I get that society needs electricians and construction workers and new software graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. But having had a moderately successful career building software, I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out. Am I biased/coping? Is this moving faster? Slower? - What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?

[time0ut]

Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.

When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.

Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.

Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?

[denkmoon]

Having an industry’s labour supplied only by those inherently passionate about it is a great way to crush wages and working conditions. Look at what companies like Blizzard get away with because their employees just want to make video games at their favourite dev studio. While they’re a pain in the ass sometimes, I welcome the devs who are only here for the cash.

[alex43578]

This is totally leaving out the supply and demand aspect. People like the idea of making games more than working on the plumbing of some accounts payable software, so Blizzard can pay less and treat worse than NicheBoringFinanceCo.

[Archonical]

The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”

[alex43578]

If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”.

That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.

[dwohnitmok]

You are only looking at supply. Neither supply nor demand by themselves adequately describe prices (even in supply-demand 101 theory; in practice of course it gets significantly more complicated than just supply and demand). There are fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely cheap and fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely expensive.

Is the number of suppliers low because demand is also low or is the number of suppliers low because demand is high but supply is constrained?

A field that previously had a supply of labor in it "for the money" who all leave is indicative of the former scenario not the latter.

That does not lead to higher wages. That leads to low wages.

(There are a variety of reasons why this story is too simple and why I remain uncertain about developer salaries in the short term)

There is a broader question of whether having people who are in it for the money leave independently "causes" wages to go down (e.g. if you were to replace all such people with people "purely in it for the passion"). My suspicion is yes. Mainly because wage markets are somewhat inefficient, there are always mild cartel-like/cooperative effects in any market, people in it for passion tend to undersell labor and the people in it for the money are much less likely to undersell their labor and this spills over beneficially to the former.

Note that this broader question is simply unanswerable assuming perfect competition, i.e. a supply-demand 101 perspective (which is why it doesn't make sense to posit "perfect competition" for this question).

It posits durable behavioral differences among suppliers that are not determined purely by supply and demand which do not update reliably in the face of pricing. This is equivalent to market friction and hence fundamentally contradicts an assumption of perfect competition.

[sumeno]

The only way the people who are only in it for the money leave the industry is if the money gets worse. If the money stays the same why would they leave

[icehawk]

Except that there are a LOT of people that want to work in video games (which is the supply) which then depresses the price (wages)

All of my developer friends in the gaming industry have had far worse working conditions then what I've had.

[terminalshort]

To use your example of someone working on the plumbing of an accounts payable system, who is passionate about that? The supply is near zero. That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Your example runs counter to the laws of supply and demand too. You understand that wages will rise when supply is restricted, but you don't want to accept that supply will respond to the price signal in the form of more people entering that job market.

[AnthonyMouse]

Let's consider how this could play out:

If you need a lot of low quality code in a hurry, AI can definitely do that for you now. The path to making money by writing mediocre code for people who don't really care that much is going to look like managing a network of bots that constantly spit out a huge volume of code that kind of mostly works and if it sometimes doesn't then whatever. The people in it for the money can probably make a decent amount in the "high volume low quality" space.

Then there's the code that needs to actually work, or have some thought put into it. Consider the process of writing IETF RFCs. Can you get an LLM to spit out English text that conforms to their formatting? Absolutely you can. Is the RFC it emits going to be something you'll want to have the whole world trying to implement as a standard? Not likely. So the people doing that are going to be doing it something closer to the old way.

[davidw]

I am kind of considering the idea of changing my LinkedIn profile to one of me with a 'wild rag', checkered shirt, and broad brimmed straw hat and calling myself a robot wrangler and see if I get any takers.

[KellyCriterion]

>plumbing of some accounts payable software,

As many of us in the early IT generation, I came because of I wanted to build games and program cool stuff.

Today, while I admit Games are supercomplex stunning apps, I hate it and I love to do boring finance app development :-))

If you would have told me in my 20ies that I will end up in banking & finance IT, I would have laughed at you - today I really like it and I do not play a single game anymore.

[deterministic]

There are plenty of non-games software companies that are treating devs purely.

However almost all of the companies I have worked for in my 30+ years career treated devs well.

So if you are in a shitty situation, I highly recommend finding another job instead of just placing yourself over a barrel.

[sb057]

See also: public school teachers. You either need to be insanely passionate or incredibly stupid to take ~$55k/year for long hours as an educator that is also a babysitter. And insanely passionate teachers are in short supply.

[boringg]

I bet a lot of teachers look at what devs do and think that its also insane to sit in front of computer all day, in a no boundary job, working on something you really don't care about and is potentially really bad for civilization only to make money off and lose your sense of self.

[notesinthefield]

My spouse has expressed this nearly verbatim after transitioning out of a 16 year career in middle and grade school education to medical curriculum development. It was hell on her mental health but at least there was a clear motivation and purpose for being there.

[raw_anon_1111]

There are a lot of other benefits of being a teacher especially if it’s a secondary income in a two income family. Namely you are on the same schedule as your kids. My mom is a retired high school teacher.

[alex43578]

Long hours? Teachers work the same hours or less than other adults per “New Measures of Teachers’ Work Hours and Implications for Wage Comparisons” by West.

“Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).”

That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with matched benefits, absurd job security even in the face of terrible performance, etc.

[tdeck]

There's no way these numbers can be correct. My school was 8 am to 3 PM, that's 35 hours a week right there for full time teachers. But teachers spend many more hours outside the class preparing lessons, grading work, and following up on things. If you even spend a week teaching something you quickly realize how much extra prep work goes into it.

[alex43578]

From the study: "Teachers work more than they are required to work by contract, but less than self reported hours of work. I find that teachers are more likely to overestimate their hours of work in the CPS than workers in other occupations, and conclude that this is likely because of an uneven work year".

Even by your own example, you're only at 35 hours a week, and that's before you subtract out the weeks of summer vacation, winter vacation, spring break, etc; where the workload is certainly far less than 40 hours a week.

[mylifeandtimes]

Wait-- I think you are confusing "teachers" with "police officers".

[nullstyle]

“ benefits of incredibly strong union protections”

Lol, try saying that to an alaskan teachers face and watch yourself get slapped for the absurdity of the claim.

[alex43578]

The Alaskan teacher's union is ranked 15th overall in the US [1]. I'm betting they're just fine, and that any issues are more general "Alaska-problems" than anything specific to teaching, unions, etc.

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...

[EricDeb]

average salary of a high school teacher in seattle is 90k plus you get summers off.. doesnt seem too bad..

[ddorian43]

Where are the gamedevs in it for the money?

[cabalamat]

Working on boring accounts software.

[sunir]

I think you have the law of supply and demand backwards.

[Thanemate]

>Optimistically, I hope it filters out the people who were only interested in it for the money.

I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0".

And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more.

I don't look forward for every other software engineering branch to become like that.

[hyperadvanced]

Seems… improbable. There will certainly be less of us, but the fact remains that nobody wants to debug this shite vibecoded apps companies are pushing, and some simply are not able because of skill atrophy and perverse incentives to use AI at the cost of stability.

[Hasslequest]

Brother, we need to eat. You don't need to go to college to learn about some topic, you can pirate textbooks. You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive

[viccis]

>You need to go to college to get a piece of paper saying you did. If you were passionate about computer programming, you can do it in your free time while you flip burgers or do whatever you need to survive

This is a naive view of the average (or even above average) person's approach to learning, as well as an overly cynical read on the intellectually motivating atmosphere that comes from earnestly engaging in an academic environment.

[Hasslequest]

It's not naive. I've been to college. To call it intellectually demovating is an understatement

[viccis]

Unless you were unfortunate enough to go during peak covid years, then that was just a skill issue. If it was truly beneath you, you could have been writing and publishing papers.

[drivebyhooting]

I only went into SWE for the money.

I initially pursued my real passion which was math and physics and got a cold water bucket to the face only after grad school.

[KellyCriterion]

So you didnt tap your toe into a real dev environment before that second? :-)

[array_key_first]

> Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?

I think we basically lost this when software/computer/internet entered the mainstream. Now, like everything else, it has to be bland, unoffensive, and a commodity.

[raw_anon_1111]

I really wish this entire romanticism of the good old days when people only got into computer science because they breathed ate and dreamed about computers would die.

It was never reality - I graduated in 1996 and have worked at 10 jobs everything from lifestyle companies, to startups, to boring old enterprise to BigTech and now consulting companies. To a tee everyone has treated it like a job and not some religious calling. There is absolutely nothing wrong with coming to work at 8 leaving at 6 and not thinking about computers until the next day.

You don’t need to be doing side projects and open source contributions to do your job as a software developer anymore than a surgeon needs to be performing operations at home.

No I wouldn’t have chosen a major because I enjoyed it if it didn’t make any money. I didn’t then and I still haven’t found a method to get over my addiction to food and shelter.

[jazzpush2]

That's just your experience, though. It reflects mine, before I went to elite companies, where it is quite normal for people to live-and-breath software, at almost all hours.

[raw_anon_1111]

And by definition most developers don’t work at “elite” companies. I hope you don’t call your average FAANG and adjacent “elite”.

And if you think that is normal, it’s honestly kind of sad.

[jazzpush2]

I've worked at FAANG, yes, as well as one of the top two frontier AI labs, quant, and now, in a similar role doing very technical research.

Do you not think it's considered "elite" to e.g. work at such companies in highly technical roles in the same way that a PhD at Stanford is considered "elite"? As a holder of the latter, I do. If not, what would you consider an "elite" team?

Maybe you think the statement was pretentious, but your response: "I hope you don’t call your average FAANG and adjacent “elite” - that's sad" is, truly, the most pretentious thing I've ever read on this site. So I'll ask: what do you consider elite?

[raw_anon_1111]

Yes I’ve worked at FAANG and the average mid level or even senior developer is not that impressive. Anyone with time on their hands and a decent proficiency can grind enough leetCode to get in.

Not that I did personally, I came in in the internal cloud consulting division (yes a full time blue badge, RSU earning employee).

You know then while all developers have to work at scale. Most of the work is built on pre-existing scalable components.

There are 1 million developers+ possibly if you count all of the FAANG + adjacent developers. I’ve nope a few of them during interviews after I left because I knew they couldn’t handle not being coddled by BigTech and wouldn’t know what to do with ambiguous requirements , an empty AWS account (even if they worked at AWS) and empty git repo.

But back to the point, they very much treated their job as a just a way to earn money and RSUs. They would have been a fool to treat a company as toxic as Amazon as anything else.

Yes I knew what I was getting into going in. I was a 46 and it was my 8th job out of college. I made my money, made connections, put it on my resume and moved on

[bumblehean]

>before I went to elite companies, where it is quite normal for people to live-and-breath software, at almost all hours.

Honest question: Do they actually _want_ to live-and-breathe software, or do they work in a highly competitive and highly compensated environment where doing that is implicitly required?

[jazzpush2]

Defintely a mix, though I agree with you that the majority fall under, "they work in a highly competitive and highly compensated environment where doing that is implicitly required."

[ryandrake]

This is never normal, and should not be normalized.

[underlipton]

I'm not saying that this is an incorrect read, but I think it's important to consider that young people might be responding to the general desperation of a tight labor market across the last generation. It used to be that you could get a degree - any degree - and that would be enough to get you in the conversation for a position somewhere. Today, a degree isn't any sort of guarantee of any sort of job - in your field, entry level, dead-end retail, anything. Tuition skyrocketed and only a few fields kept pace. So, you get the degree in the field that's a "winner." Of course, this just increases competition, robs other fields of needed competency, etc. Prisoner's dilemma?

[weatherlite]

> Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?

This is a really narrow way to look at it and define it lucky. What you describe will absolutely be a shitstorm for everyone - passionate workers and non passionate alike. Management doesn't care about your passion, it cares about the bottom line. Lots of folks will get fired - passionate people as well, or see their salaries cut and their job security evaporate. There's no winners in the scenario you described other than the employers.

[archagon]

I think it will actually filter out people who weren't doing it for the money.

[ctoth]

> What should kids be aiming for according to you? Computer Scientist? Biologist? Finance? Construction?

Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?

The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.

Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.

[striped_hash]

> The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.

Agreed that if someone can self direct and is capable, they’ll do better. Assuming two people who are similar in that regard, what are professions that may benefit from AI rather than hurt because of it.

[syphia]

> Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?

Do I have faith that I'll be compensated according to my developed ability?

Looking broadly at the recent past, the correct answer seems "no".

[fragmede]

> full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.

What does that mean in practice? Are there specific stock market bets you've made because of that world view?

[sph]

It can be read in two different ways. Massive techno-optimism, or massive techno-pessimism but facing a reality where humans are increasingly less valuable.

In the first case, buy AI stocks. In the second case, build a bunker in the wilderness.

[georgemcbay]

I don't think they are actually talking about the stock market and are just saying they think AI will destroy everything (referencing Nick Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer theory).

[justonepost2]

> Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.

What a ludicrous world we live in where this is a socially acceptable view to hold.

[alvah]

What a ludicrous reply, to suggest it should be "socially unacceptable" to believe the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment might reveal a scenario that is bad for humans overall.

[justonepost2]

Of course it would be bad for humanity. “Short humanity and long paperclips”, in my reading, is pro-extinctionism. The specter of Daniel Faggella haunts this site and this industry.

[georgemcbay]

> pro-extinctionism

I can only speculate as I didn't write that post, but by my reading they were just stating their belief that AI is likely to lead to human extinction, not that they were happy about that outcome.

[CalRobert]

Reality doesn’t give a shit about your beliefs, as the saying goes.

[justonepost2]

If your model of reality includes imminent human extinction, you have some form of imperative to do something about that other than “ZOMG Claude Code”. YMMV

[CalRobert]

Are you saying that the comment _supported_ human extinction? I think they're just saying they think it's a likely outcome. It doesn't appear to be an endorsement.

Personally, I think there's a worryingly high chance that ourselves or our kids will live in a dead, desertified, apocalyptic hellscape of a planet after we hit 5+ degrees of warming, but saying that doesn't mean I _want_ it to happen. In fact, I would prefer it not to!

[justonepost2]

Pro-extinctionism (in favor of some “greater conciousness” that spreads across the stars) is a nontrivial minority view among AI people, including some “AI safety” leaders.

One of the reasons that I’m slightly less worried about a climate apocalypse is that there isn’t an equivalent group of people that sees the “inevitability” and concludes that it must be a moral good for the planet to warm 5 degrees. I’d argue that multiple degrees of warming is more inevitable than paperclips, but there’s a serious global effort to mitigate and avoid it anyway!

[crop_rotation]

Even if people assume the worst impacts of LLMs on white collar work, there is simply not enough demand for electricians and plumbers for that to work, right now these professions work only because the number of people going into them is limited.

[F7F7F7]

You sound like you're not a home owner. In populated areas it could take a week to get a electrician or plumber out. And contractors are hard to find.

[sweezyjeezy]

Don't get fixated on plumbing itself. The point is if a bunch of people rush into any profession it leads to wage depression. Unless the amount of plumbing needed increases, the overall amount of money flowing to the plumbing populace is likely to stay roughly the same.

[Capricorn2481]

> The point is if a bunch of people rush into any profession it leads to wage depression

Eventually. Wage depression does not happen linearly. You're asserting that demand is maxed out and there's no more money to go around, and that's just not true. A lot of people just don't bother because tradespeople are famously difficult to work with because they are so overbooked.

[asdff]

It takes a week because if you want it fast they charge you an emergency rate. This aspect of the tradesman is independent of demand and one of the perks of their lines of work much like over time in other fields.

[Capricorn2481]

They charge you an emergency rate because they are so booked out it takes a week to get them.

[tonyedgecombe]

Six weeks here (wealthy part of the UK).

[selectodude]

And their elevated pay is a function of all the other folks making a ton of money in white collar PMC work.

[dspillett]

Development is the same though.

If things play out I see there being two classes of low paid developers in a decade or so: the first being the vibe coders who earn a subsistence wage because most people can do it (not everyone, there will still be a cost of entry, paying for the tools, which will exclude some groups), the second being the more “artisnal” developers working on the things that can't (yet) be vide coded and fixing up the problems caused by insufficient care by the vibers and those employing them. These will be low paid because while the work is important demand will be low and there will still be a fair few people with the skills and desire (they'll make ends meet between good jobs by taking on gig-economy vide-coding work themselves). There will be a lucky few still making a decent living, but a much lower proportion than now.

I'm hoping to arrange retirement before things get that far… Failing that I'll do something else (I could be a sparky, though if all the youngsters are training for that perhaps that industry will gain a bad supply/demand picture from the worker's PoV too!) to pay the bills and reclaim dicking around with tech as a hobby.

[striped_hash]

Agree.

[ethin]

Why shouldn't they? They're constantly being told by CEOs and big companies that AI is going to take all the jobs and do all the things. They're told the same by AI boosters who only see utopias and not the consequences of said utopias. Of course they're going to insulate from AI as much as possible. Especially given that society still pretty much requires that you work to be successful in the world. The utopian dream of "you'll never have to work again, you can just do anything you want" is a very very long ways off, but it's being pushed hard as though it will be in the next 3 years. But society is still pushing the "you must work" message too.

Edit: of course, the "long ways off" assumes that that dream is even possible and isn't just that, a dream. I question whether even that is possible given how we are still split under hundreds of nation states and can't even unite on the most basic of things.

[chromacity]

The prevailing sentiment on HN is that AI will make coders 10x more productive, but that we'll all keep our jobs and salaries, with the possible exception of people who don't embrace AI quickly enough.

But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-made products that the average consumer can't distinguish from the "real" thing. But if they embrace it, they can't differentiate themselves from the cheaply-produced content! In fact, for artists, the best strategy may be to speak out very vocally against AI, reject it early on, and build a following of like-minded consumers.

[acdha]

It’s also not exactly a secret that the executive class resents having to pay high-income workers and is champing at the bit for layoffs. Even if you fully embrace AI, they want white collar jobs to look more like call center work with high surveillance, less autonomy, and constant reminders of replaceability. Most people saw through that “our people are our greatest asset” talk before, but they’re not even trying anymore.

[fragmede]

We just need to be bold enough to take risks and replace the executive class with an AI agent that's been trained on Machiavelli and the Wealth of Nations and all of the rest of the written word to write the layoff letter in corpo speak anyway. Waiting for the AI bot that gets paid $10mm/year to be a CEO.

[asdff]

The thing is, for most artists outside say in commercial work where AI is a great risk to jobs, they are judged by the finery of their craft, not rate of output. How many clients are there who say "we don't care how long it takes for you to come up with the solution, we just want it beautiful and representative of your style."

[CalRobert]

I think you just described a tiny minority of artists though.

[NegativeLatency]

Automation worked out great for domestic manufacturing in the US /s

[eucyclos]

>What should kids be aiming for according to you?

If it's my kid? Starting their own Enterprise. Between 'good enough' knowledge work getting cheaper and the bureaucracy that made entrepreneurship less attractive over the last decades being either trimmed or automatable, we may be looking at a golden age of new business formation. There's an old saying, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration". If ai shifts that to just 2 and 98, it'll unlock massive demand for a certain kind of mind.

How to teach that I'm still pondering. One idea that occurs to me, is that a human will always be needed to ask the right questions and have good taste, but I don't know how to teach those. They can probably only be educated, which in my mind is distinct from teaching. A different idea I have is that an entrepreneur needs three skills: they need to identify a problem, implement a solution, and get paid for it. Those skills probably can be taught, so I'd try to ensure they get early reps in all three.

If I knew how to connect those two ideas I think I'd have a decent curriculum. Anyone have suggestions for that?

[logicchains]

Entrepreneurship is like sales; it can't really be taught, only learned through practice, through trial and error. The best way for kids to learn business is through doing it.

[eucyclos]

Definitely. Unlike asking the right questions or having good taste though, it's possible to know how successful you are at business so the dynamics are definitely different.

[wongarsu]

> I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out

So far, the demand curve of software has been very favorable, and I don't think that will change soon. If software was 10x cheaper to develop that makes a lot of features and projects attractive that would have been too expensive before. So far every single efficiency improvement in programming has lead to more demand for programmers because of this. At some point there is a limit of useful things to do, but I don't think we are close to it yet

But as someone choosing which college to go to you don't just have to think about the next decade, you have to think about the next half century. I am confident software engineering will be in a good place in 10 years, but I have no clue where we will stand in 20.

[andrekandre]

  > I tend to think there is a lot of scope for the $40 trillion white collar economy to be disrupted (re-imagined/made more efficient), so still see potential for software engineering demand to stay high over the next decade as the true ramifications of AI plays out.

i would hope so, but wherever i have worked its the bureaucracy/endless "agile" ceremonies and meetings that make things less efficient, and so far (where i'm at anyways) ai has done nothing to help that...

[saltyoldman]

You're coping. Everyone wants a remote software job. These are dead. If you want something in software, it will need to be robotics or space related and you'll drive to a location to do it.

If you want to be in a remote, small town, get into construction and become a builder with their own GC license in a few years. Then charge people 400k to build that little dream cottage with 2 guys (you and a team mate) twice a year. 150k each 100k mats for each house. Just a small warning: It's hard but real work and very rewarding.

[adamtaylor_13]

Wha do you mean these are dead? I work a remote software job and it ain't going anywhere from what I can see.

[saltyoldman]

I could have elaborated, but long term this line of work is dead. Will there be software engineers in 20 years? Can't tell you, but it won't be in the millions like it is now. Will those people KNOW a programming language? probably not. At some point the sheer amount of capabilities of agents will just keep going up and us humans are still writing buggy code. Waymo just declared that it's drivers are something like 13x better than human drivers... Agentic has only been around for what, 1 years maybe 2 if you count closed betas.

[r_lee]

"Will those people KNOW a programming language? probably not. "

if I'm able to learn all kinds of stuff in just a few hours, why would programmers 20 years from now not know programming languages?

just doesn't make sense.

[saltyoldman]

Yes, you could. Have you bothered learning how to wash your clothes with a washboard sitting next to a river? No, instead you using a washing machine (I presume).

There won't be much of a reason to learn a programming language at some point in the future.

[raw_anon_1111]

Interesting, I’ve been working remotely at “remote first departments/companies for 6 years across 3 jobs.

Admittedly the first was at BigTech in a “field by design” role that went RTO last year a year after I left.

[marcus_holmes]

The thing I'm seeing in people's use of LLMs is that there's still a strong contrast in technical usage of them.

I went to the local Claude Code meetup last week, and the contrast between the first two speakers really stuck with me.

The first was an old-skool tech guy who was using teams of agents to basically duplicate what an entire old-fashioned dev team would do.

The second was a "non-technical" (she must have said this at least 20 times in her talk) product manager using the LLM to prototype code and iterate on design choices.

Both are replacing dev humans with LLMs, but there's a massive difference in the technical complexity of their use. And I've heard this before talking to other people; non-technical folks are using it to write code and are amazed with how it's going, while technical folks are next-level using skills, agents, etc to replace whole teams.

I can see how this becomes a career in its own right; not writing code any more, but wrangling agents (or whatever comes after them). The same kind of mental aptitude that gets us good code can also be used to solve these problems, too.

[toofy]

and the things the first person is doing can very very easily be trained into a bot as well.

this doesn’t seem like a safe direction either.