| Hi Lucas! electronic engineering and plumbing and other skills traditionally seen as 'blue collar' may not be as affected by AI right now, but if the Optimus robots and Hyundai androids Japan is working on so as to supplement their aging population come into fruition, then those areas won't be as AI free as one would expect. None of us know the future. Having said that, while your programming career will be different from mine (I started in the twilight of the pre-pandemic era) because of AI tool abilities, the AI tools, while improving a lot, require good judgement to be put to useful work. In a world where the AI is so smart that it does not need your judgement, then the business is so smart that it does not need any employees at all. "Coding" as in "I can hand type syntax" will likely be more commoditized. But being able to design and implement systems that automate and accomplish work useful to business workflows that are ill-defined, have lots of stakeholders who don't necessarily know the entire domain of the work, and need integration of a chain of people's workflows in order to make all the gears of industry go? That makes you a good programmer. Add on the ability to socialize / network with people, identify an underserved market and bring a profitable product to it? That makes you a full on businessman. Specific technical skills like digital logic understanding, algorithms and data structures familiarity, set theory, data-intensive application design, SQL (everything eventually becomes SQL with databases), C (still a lingua franca that in some form or fashion will be directly present or a heavy influence in whatever programs one works in), and yes, confidence bred from experience working in the industry, will make you valuable enough to be on whatever short list of humans hired, even if an AI agent is smart enough to handle or give educated guesses about whatever class of problems were commonly known and solved pre 2022. Your value is no longer only or mainly in "I can follow the process of writing source code that compiles to a program somewhere" - your value is in your developing judgement and experience that lets you take the imperfect world of now, see a goal that the business needs to get to, and use various technical skills to bring that future world into the present state. AI agents will eagerly and over-politely try to help, but beyond their limitations, your work will be needed then. You can still do a full career in programming / technical fields, no it is not a wild hiring frenzy like it was 5 years ago, but you can still pursue this field - it's not as obsolete as lots of us like to complain about over here. |