What a poetic perspective! A few days ago, I was very much "to code or not to code", or rather, "get thee to a nunnery...", considering a switch to nursing to better support my family long-term. But I'll try to push forward for a while longer and adapt as best as I can. I'm not as optimistic as most folks on this page, but also trying not to waste my energy on a panic attack.
Some more junior folks, including a few of my closest friends, just won't make it. It seems like their jobs have already been replaced by a number of different factors, including AI. It's a very sad investment of time and money for them and their patient spouses, and I feel very guilty for recommending that path to them, and being unable to help them after they struggle for twelve months or more post-bootcamp, still unable to land a job.
I am just a few years ahead, and may just have a shot at the next evolution if I learn AI in a hurry...Or maybe it's also hopeless for me.
Here's to everyone giving their best shot to seizing that future, ahem (not) abyss...
Taking a lot of further inspiration from posts on this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39656745
"Ask HN: What took you from being a good programmer to a great one?" Build everything from scratch, using zero dependencies, get below the abstractions... Ok, ok, ok. :(
Thanks -- Really appreciate your thoughtful and kind response! Yes, I see there are a lot of other factors to consider. Will keep networking and interviewing until something lands.
Will also focus my unemployment energy on deepening my software infrastructure and MLOps knowledge, building open source side projects using generative AI tools, using LangChain / GPT / Pinecone / Ollama, focused on practical business purposes like parsing customer service data and fintech anomaly detection. Whatever I can do in a short time to provide more value than GPT4 / GPT5, I guess I'll try my best to work on it with the fear of the abyss...
A part of me still thinks it might be time to pivot to healthcare. I'm no greybeard or "10x Engineer", just a regular old React/Node (formerly Ruby On Rails, PHP) developer doing the CRUD thing, and yeah, I'm not sure I quite make the cut.
All the best of luck to you! And thanks for writing an encouraging response.
This is a pretty drastic change from their earlier prediction (often cited all over the internet) that the number of software engineers will increase by more than 30% in the next 10 years. It's not the full replacement of software engineers I'm worried about, so much as the steep reduction in the number of jobs and the labor/wage pressure that will make this job pay a fraction of what it's paying now, and make everyone's livelihoods more precarious in the next 10 to 15 years.
Karpathy already stated in 2017 that "Gradient Descent writes better code than you", when he wrote about "Software 2.0" as feeding data to neural networks:
https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, seemed to have confirmed that point this week in persuading parents not to encourage their kids to learn to code.
Today, this YT video by a dev named Will Iverson about how software engineering jobs are not coming back made me really anxious, and start to worry about making backup career plans in case I need to transition in my late thirties / early forties. (That sounds sooo hard...I'm a recently laid off mid-level full stack engineer of seven years, but I wonder if it would be better to transition now while I'm younger. Why wait 10 to 15 years to become increasingly obsolete or more stressed of becoming laid off? How can I support a family like that? Or make any plans into the future that might impact other people I'm responsible for?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JX5ZO19hiE&t=3s
I don't think the industry will ever really be the same again. But I'm sure a lot of us will adapt. Some of us won't, and will probably have to switch careers. I always thought I could at least make it to retirement in this profession, by continually learning a few new skills each year as new tech frameworks emerge but the fundamentals stay the same -- now I'm not so sure.
If you think I'm wrong, can you please help me not be anxious? Older devs, how have you managed to ride out all the changes in the industry over the last few decades? Does this wave of AI innovations feel different than earlier boom-bust cycles like the DotCom Bubble, or more of the same?
What advice would you give to junior or mid-level software engineers, or college grads trying to break into the industry right now, who have been failing completely at getting a foot in the door in the last 12 months, when they would have been considered good hires just two or three years before?