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Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

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Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#21

Post by Deinos »

nopacience wrote: post #10
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #6

No. 1997: Is my career doomed if I don't become a web developer? No. 2007: Is my career doomed if I don't become a mobile developer? No. 2017: Is my career doomed if I don't become an AI/ML developer? No. 2027: Is my career doomed if I don't become a/an [...]? No.

Are my finances doomed if i didnt buy bitcoin at USD100 some years ago ?

Probably not... but, do you kind of hate yourself for missing the wave? Probably...

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#22

Post by nolite »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #6

No. 1997: Is my career doomed if I don't become a web developer? No. 2007: Is my career doomed if I don't become a mobile developer? No. 2017: Is my career doomed if I don't become an AI/ML developer? No. 2027: Is my career doomed if I don't become a/an [...]? No.

2027... quantum developer

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#23

Post by [deleted] »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #6

No. 1997: Is my career doomed if I don't become a web developer? No. 2007: Is my career doomed if I don't become a mobile developer? No. 2017: Is my career doomed if I don't become an AI/ML developer? No. 2027: Is my career doomed if I don't become a/an [...]? No.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#24

Post by jasonthevillain »

What's cool for developers like you and me is the AI/ML technologies are being commoditized.

I have no idea how to build an image processor, or a database, or cloud infrastructure, but I can use Pillow, Postgres, and AWS to build products on top of those capabilities. AI is starting down the same route, where the number of developers who use it will vastly outstrip the number of developers who contribute directly to it.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#25

Post by tw1010 »

I would bet a small fortune that the ML hype will not live up to expectation on a 7 year horizon. It is true that there are cool things coming out of the field, and it is true that there are a lot of smart people are entering the field. But the demand for researchers, using actual mathematics day-to-day, is going to be incredibly slim compared to what you'd think it'll be if you read the news about this stuff. Data science has been hyped up for close to 10 years now. And all that time were there fears that we'd all have to become statisticians in a not too far away future. But the day has not come. In fact, you could argue that there is even less reason to get dirty with pen and paper than ever, since a huge mountain of frameworks have been developed (e.g. tensorflow) precisely with the motivation that it'll be able to bring in math-afraid coders into the ML sphere.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#26

Post by ryandrake »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #6

No. 1997: Is my career doomed if I don't become a web developer? No. 2007: Is my career doomed if I don't become a mobile developer? No. 2017: Is my career doomed if I don't become an AI/ML developer? No. 2027: Is my career doomed if I don't become a/an [...]? No.

Best answer so far. Technology fads come and go. Anyone in the business for any length of time has seen so many of them. If you just get your news from the HN bubble, you're likely to believe AI/ML is all anyone does anymore, but I'd speculate that it's needed in less than 1% of all programming projects out there now and in the near future.

If you're a programmer, focus on the fundamentals: Learn to write new code and maintain legacy code. Learn to write tests. Learn API design. Learn how to estimate projects. Learn to differentiate between a risky code change and one that isn't risky. Learn to refactor something without changing its functionality. Read/know the literature. Don't get hung up on any particular language, framework or technology.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#27

Post by albertgoeswoof »

make3 wrote: post #15
vturner wrote: post #12

There's plenty of comments on saying no your career is not doomed. I'll add that using HackerNews is not a strong way of grasping industry needs. If one took their advice solely from HackerNews, one might think the only tech that matters is JavaScript and associated framework of the season. This is simply not true...check out indeed.com, many many languages are in demand. Lastly, AI might be the thing of the future b…

the difference is that nanotechnology never worked

And machine learning doesn’t solve 90% of the problems people think it does

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#28

Post by smrtinsert »

minimaxir wrote: post #20

Although having AI/ML expertise is obviously overkill for most engineers, understanding the concepts and limitations of AI/ML is a helpful skill for any engineering field. (specifically it is not a magic spell that can solve any problem no matter what) But don’t say “I took Andrew Ng’s Coursera class and now I’m an expert on AI/ML!” like many engineers tend to do nowadays.

I'll be signing up for that.

Re: Ask HN: Is my career doomed if I don’t become an AI/ML Developer?

#30

Post by bootcat »

I have the same questions, but to my surprise, there are more software engineer/senior software engineer jobs in bay area than data scientist/machine learning engineer, according to LinkedIN. This is the scenario now ! No idea hows its going to be in 3-5 years from now !!
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