| Another doom and gloom post about SkyNet killing all the children in AskHN. Yes, there will still be very many programming jobs for humans. Yes, AI will eventually kill all the programming jobs staffed by people who cannot program, the pretenders. Is programming really all about writing code? Yes, mostly. Yes, soft skills and communication skills are more important but writing code is your bread and butter. If you do not understand your craft then those more important qualities don't matter. You have no baseline upon which to exercise those more important skills. If you are the kind of person who cannot tell the difference between writing original code versus pretender then yes, I would absolutely look for a career change. If you write software as a hobby yet struggle to land a job in sea of pretenders then there is a dim light in your future that will only get brighter with time. How to identify the pretenders: * Ask the person to measure something. Provide the means to gather data but not the data itself. * If they need a magic framework because data structures are scary, such as React because the DOM is a mad bedtime killer in the dark. * If every decision point is a game of bike shedding or Halloween costume. * When the goal is to look busy or appear as a hero savior, as opposed to just completing an assignment quickly. * If tasked to write original work is scarier than death in a Saw movie. |