11–20 of 35 posts
There will always be a demand for licensed Professional Engineers, the folks who can sign on the dotted line certifying something won't collapse and kill someone.
I would have no problem leaving if something better came around, and I have no problem adapting if I need to, I just believe that there is going to be a MASSIVE increase in demand for high performing software professionals with experience... we just aren't seeing it right now because of the business cycle.
I read it in a report, and I wrote it here in HN many times in the last few weeks: AI amplifies... It amplifies the success of the good professionals, and it amplifies the failure of the bad ones.
Good professionals are needed so that AI is used the proper way. I think that the way we do our job will change, but there will also be place for developers, PMs, POs, Team leaders, etc.
Entrepreneurship will always be timeless profession.
Nope. Software was my second career - I was a high performing sales person before software. Sales was fun, and I liked it, but it was a lot of work to stay in that Top 10%. I would have no problem leaving if something better came around, and I have no problem adapting if I need to, I just believe that there is going to be a MASSIVE increase in demand for high performing software professionals with experience... we ju…
I'm pretty concerned for early career developers. The industry is failing them by 1) Allowing the early career devs to outsource their critical thinking to AI and 2) Actively hiring fewer early career devs because they're extracting more work from their existing develops with AI. They're failing themselves by relying too much on AI, and not developing those important long-term skills and intuitions.
For that reason I feel pretty safe in my (admittedly niche) career space, and have a similar prediction that in 5-10 years we will have created a experience gap that we can't fix. Experienced engineers with good troubleshooting and debug skills will be even more valuable.
The first is certification for high-growth jobs that exist as short-term accidents of history and policy-making. Think of the droves of people doing rote medical billing and coding, mostly as an artifact of the current state of the US healthcare system. Or think of an over-saturated nursing specialization.
The second role of education has been the lowest rung on the ladder to join a prestige profession, like medicine or architecture. It takes a significant chunk of your lifetime, and there are ingrained cultural expectations around the age at which you do it and what your future prospects look like.
A lot of people who fantasize about a midlife pivot have no personal history with any other profession, and mostly seem to aim for occupations that are easy to describe and get saturated easily.
My p(doom) is now so high and I feel the singularity is so close that I've decided I'm just going to make the most of the little time I have left when my job ends.
The considerations I'm making now are more about how I can prep for whats coming more broadly. I've been prepping for the biological threats AI presents for some time now, although these timelines largely assume malicious human actors.
I've also been prepping for various AI infrastructure attacks which might leave me without energy, water or food for a prolonged period of time.
I think I may be able to survive 5% of the "doom" scenarios which I like the odds of these days...
Still amazes me people are seeing what's happening around and just looking at the immediate changes that are coming in terms of their careers to be honest. Assuming doom isn't coming what are you even planning to reskill in that a clanker wouldn't be able to do better that you within a decade or two?
And even if clankers can't take your job, if there's only a small subset of jobs that humans can still do then everyone is going to be competing for those jobs and you're going to be paid horribly any way. If you're jobless we're all jobless and the economy doesn't need 1 in every 5 people to be plumbers.
These are fundamentally unserious concerns. It's only marginally more sane that the people suggesting those losing their jobs to AI in design or consumer service roles could just become prompt engineers. Project forward a decade and start prepping for that.
The economy is so messed up right now that the only jobs I found that didn't require a degree or several years of prior experience were hard labour for minimum wage. Even McDonald's apparently requires 3 years of experience.
So, my advice would be that school is expensive, wages are low, and if you're in a spot where you can reasonably get a decent paying job, you should take advantage of that. (as much as I would love to work in an industry that isn't the total shitshow that software is right now)
At 40+ , especially if you have kids and other responsibilities, just going back t school is really, really hard. I may also say, impossible. I tried to learn German a few years ago. My brain does not work the same way, as when I was before 36. I read it in a report, and I wrote it here in HN many times in the last few weeks: AI amplifies... It amplifies the success of the good professionals, and it amplifies the fai…
I'm not sure it's that bad if you do it full-time like any other student. Getting a degree should be doable even at 40+. I used to be a university lecturer in CS, and occasionally I got older students who did very well.
That being said, I think the issue is employability. You may get a degree, but is anyone getting to hire an older person with not experience?