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> The career of a pro athlete has a maximum lifespan of around fifteen years. You have the opportunity to make a lot of money until around your mid-thirties, at which point your body just can’t keep up with it. If you believe this about your software career, how do you think your going to switch into another career as a junior and keep up?
Are people seriously thinking that you can make yourself dumber by using a chat UI? If talking to an AI makes me dumber and a limited career, then all the customer support people that ever existed were in the same or worse position talking to dumb humans on chat all day answering tickets always about the same topics and linking the same docs over and over. This makes no sense.
Are people seriously thinking that you can make yourself dumber by using a chat UI? If talking to an AI makes me dumber and a limited career, then all the customer support people that ever existed were in the same or worse position talking to dumb humans on chat all day answering tickets always about the same topics and linking the same docs over and over. This makes no sense.
You're misrepresenting the potential problem. It's more along the lines of using AI stops you exercising the cognitive processes you would doing things yourself and those encompass skills, knowledge and brain function that can atrophy. For an extreme example you can look at cognitive decline in the elderly which can be mitigated by taking part in activities that are cognitively stimulating.
It will be for those fixing AI slop software. (In fact, they might need several lifetimes.)
We've entered a period of single-use-plastic software, piling up and polluting everything, because it's cheaper than the alternative
If we truly need to sacrifice our skill to be productive by using LLMs that atrophy us, then the only devs that have a limited lifespan are us. The next ones won't have a skillset to atrophy since they won't have built it through manual work.
Also, I hereby propose to publicly ban the "LLMs generating code are like compilers generating machine code" analogy, it's getting old to reargue the same idea time after time.
Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career. It's a tool for knowledge work. No carpenter is a specialist in drills. It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.
Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career. It's a tool for knowledge work. No carpenter is a specialist in drills. It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.
There's no category difference between being an expert in carpentry vs masonry and being an expert in drills vs hammers. They are both just areas of expertise.
Going down the path of trying to define what is expert functions and what is "merely" a tool using anything but descriptive technique is nonsense.
Expert functions are just those areas where using a tool is sufficiently difficult to require expertise.
If you mean creating software, well we are creating more software than ever before and the definition of what software is has never been so diverse. I can see many different careers branching off from here.
Was it ever? It's always seemed weird to me that people even think 'software engineering' is a career. It's a tool for knowledge work. No carpenter is a specialist in drills. It seems to me that the best way to navigate a long term career is to have another specialty and use software engineering as a tool within that specialty.
That's great, but its nowhere near the norm, and people have been doing generalist software engineering for decades. There has been a sufficient amount of work for a long time to be performed by generalists that it has been a very reasonable career.
IMO AI is the first thing that has ever actually challenged that.
I certainly don't have the money or time to go back to college and start a new career at the bottom.