alt Hacker NewsIt's worth learning to harvest with a scythe because it's cheap, good exercise, and has no mechanical parts to fail.
The issue isn't whether it's worth learning something in a personal development sense, it's whether it's worth going into massive student loan debt to pursue a career path that was once seen as a ticket to a comfy office job. LLMs probably won't replace top performing software engineers. Will they replace the mediocre cog-in-the-machine coders that most people become? In 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? That's what has college students worrying about whether it's "worth it".
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brewtide • yesterday at 11:33 PM
Where do these new top notch programmers come from and what proof of top notchness will be required for job proof? (Honest questions)
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Here's an alternative farming analogy: knowing how to program(and adjacent skills) is like understanding plant biology, climate, food demand, supply chains etc.
Code generators are like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Powerful stuff. Lots of production. Solved some big problems. But we're seeing new problems like soil depletion, runoff, decreased nutrition and knock-on effects like obesity.
To solve those problems will take lots of people with the right skills, not people ignorantly using the fertilizers and pesticides according to the profit driven manufacturers instructions.