alt Hacker News> software engineering is the only industry that is built on the notion of rapid change, constant learning, and bootstrapping ourselves to new levels of abstraction
Not sure I agree. I think most programming today looks almost exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. You could even have gotten away with never learning a new language. AI feels like the first time a large percentage of us may be forced to fundamentally change the way we work or change careers.
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It's true, unless you have always been working on FOTM frontend frameworks, you could easily be doing the same thing as 20/30/40 years ago. I'm still using vim and coding in C++ like someone could have 30+ years ago (I was too young then). Or at least, I was until Claude code got good enough to replace 90% of my code output :)
One may still write C code as they did 40 years ago, but they still use the power of numerous libraries, better compilers, Git, IDEs with syntax highlighting and so on. The only true difference — to me — is the speed of change that makes it so pronounced and unsettling.