alt Hacker NewsAs a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job.
Senior people who already know how to code are doing OKish for now, from the data I've seen, but the job is increasingly babysitting models like they were junior contributors.
Replies
Yeah. I’ve been saying that for a while (and switched fields entirely.) People were getting hung up on the idea that an LLM could not truly replace a developer, and that’s true, but it doesn’t matter. For the job market to be severely impacted, you just need to reduce the number of people required to do the parts of the job that LLMs suck at, and that only requires increased efficiency for existing developers. Even if your average developer is a measly 30% more efficient, that might create 20% less demand for developers, which would have a giant impact on demand, which would have a giant impact on wages for those still employed.
Can I ask what data you are seeing?
Which models and tools do you use to write and validate code?
> I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job.
Learning to code is not merely learning a syntax and some tooling. It’s best described in the SICP and HTDP books, as a mindset of formalizing a process enough that a dumb machine could do it. Then by building abstractions towers, we have better symbols and semantics to notate the formal aspect.
It seems that a lot of management no longer wants to provide workflows tooling to their users. Instead they want to create a wish box where those workflows would materialize somehow.
> As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job.
Not wrong. Probably.
I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good. She read and wrote Latin and Greek, could compose and play music using medieval notations, and published a book on early needlepoint.
She never obtained an academic appointment. She never found a job that needed those skills. She died alone a few years ago.
That may be the fate of many programmers.
The babysitting work would still be impossible if you didn't actually know how to code.