I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

ninju

> It sucks. I miss feeling like my job was secure, ... The wheel of industry rolls forward and crushes everyone underneath it

Insanity

In “Ask HN style”, let’s say that software engineering does go extinct in the next X years, what would you do? I’ve thought about psychology. I know LLMs can work as pseudo-therapists but I feel like that’s a field where the human connection / human element will remain important.

chronolitus

10 years ? These days ten years feel like an absurdly long time in the future.

minimaltom

I feel exactly this. One thing I will add: while AI is getting really good at _doing_ the software building bits, I haven't yet seen it well integrated into the decision-making and political structure of organizations. Right now, it seems best in the hands of a high-agency individual empowered and able to make changes or 'ship' something, with them acting as the bridge. This of course, is not a technical challenge, but I would expect the change in structure of organizations to make this more efficient to be slower than the pace of improvement we've seen over the last few years.

ehnto

I can relate, I was really looking forward to settling into mentorship roles. However I am not quite so defeated, I think that developers will continue to find employment in tech even as AI augments the roles. Experienced developers are the obvious pick for a hire to run agentic AI development tools, and even the obvious pick for managing a no-code endgame scenario as they are just smart technologists with strong problem solving skills. I think the devs who were only here for the paycheck and would not reasonably pick software if it didn't pay so much, will probably be happy to retrain into something else but be disappointed by the paycut. I am also excited by the prospect of being able to take on bigger scale side projects solo as that's really where my passion lies. I think general purpose technologists will really excel in this new ecosystem as the industry will be back to moving fast and breaking stuff for a while, for better or worse. A lot of them call themselves programmers right now but will evolve pretty quickly. Pragmatism, small teams and fast pace will best deliver software based projects, and the bottleneck in big orgs will become (or already was) the bureaucracy and communication layers. Small team, greenfield projects have a huge advantage in getting an MVP to market, which is pretty exciting for someone excited mostly by solving problems with technology. Time will tell though, this is not career advice and times are chaotic. At the end of the day, there are other careers, and you were smart enough to get into software. You will be smart enough to find a new career.

danieldrehmer

*ten months

gherkinnn

Maybe the act of writing code will die. I still have hope that the act of transforming ideas and vibes in to something that works remains valuable. The means might change but the end remains.

dzink

I grew up in a world that didn’t have secure corporate jobs as a thing. That’s most of the world outside the US. There, you could get secure government jobs (if you come from the right family or connections) or you had to learn how to build a business yourself. Anything else, paid barely livable wage if at all. The way to survive it was to 1) move to a village/small town where you could have a garden for fruits, vegetables, corn, chickens, maybe a pig or two for winter. 2) Young people lived with their parents while the parents saved up to build/buy their children their own flat or house. Children whose parents saved up enough would often start a family after getting their own place. Those who didn’t, co-lived with parents. The secure middle class corporate employment in the US is getting severely downgraded by AI. While there is talk of universal basic income the reality is that many many companies depend on the surplus that middle class families enjoy spending and without it, vast swaths of industries will get starved as well. The solution is to show people quickly how to hunt and gather and farm as makers instead of just employees. Figuring out what is needed, taking on a small corner of needs somewhere in meat space or online, and planting there. AI has been fantastic at helping even solo founders with that. They need to encourage a cornucopia of ideas and experimenters as early as k12. They need to set up more favorable conditions for handling the admin side as well. If the US government does not encourage cornucopia of AI-powered small business entrepreneurship and lets monopolies squash that early, they will end up with far FAR worse conditions. Any monopoly who keeps pitching “universal basic income” while actively avoids paying taxes, will end up forced into more taxes. Big tech needs to make room for people to build and grow businesses (looking at you, Apple, for copying every successful app with a native, and you Meta for eating every social competitor) or they will end up paying for everyone’s universal basic income and then some. If this country wants to survive the AI era, it needs to remove the pink glasses of “secure corporate job” and teach people how to plant, hunt, and gather as independent players in the market really fast.

tombert

I've been feeling this. I don't really feel like it's a "bad" thing; I've said for a long time if a job can be automated, then it should be automated. I still do believe that, even if I am probably on the losing end of that in the not-too-distant future. I think I am reasonably good at software, and I think I write code that's still a bit better than what Claude does. In fact, I suspect that will actually be true for quite awhile, but the problem is that "writing code 20% better" isn't exactly a selling point when my competition is $100/month and takes like 1/20th the time. Most software, even before AI, wasn't optimal and was kind of shitty, and good engineers were still always replaceable with shittier cheaper ones if it was economically viable. I tend to land on my feet for this stuff, so I still think I'll be ok; I know how to use the tools and there will still need to be some humans who understand how this shit works, so I'm not worried about becoming homeless or anything. What I'm mostly worried about is that I won't ever have fun at work anymore. I liked solving problems, I liked thinking of clever solutions to avoid a mutex or increase concurrency, I liked figuring out how to squeeze a few percent more performance out of my given limitations. It's something I'm good at, and it's basically the only way to get decent money while doing math. Since the ceiling for writing software has been significantly lowered, I think eventually the cushy yuppie status of software is going to shrink. Maybe I should learn to weld or something.

vishnugupta

Out of curiosity I checked out the author’s resume and this is their current position. Oh the irony!! I built significant pieces of the Copilot onboarding, purchasing, billing and settings flow. For eight months I headed up the Copilot anti-abuse effort. I then led the launch of GitHub Models, and am now working on other Copilot projects.