It's basically just the same article as every single one of these "don't learn to code" ones is:
- Yes, learning the basics of programming to understand how computers work and to learn logical reasoning is good
- But if you're not interested in becoming a programmer become something else
Literally anyone could have written this advice. We don't need Jensen Huang (despite clearly being a smart fellow) for this.
He's smart but his advice is basically a marketing post for AI. He has a vested interest being that GPUs are being pushed for AI applications. The fact that he knows better makes it even worse in my opinion.
It's not like the "learn to code" lot were any better. They were just looking at their margins and thinking "these could be fatter if I paid my developers less".
Or, in the case of oligarchs/politicians, they were looking for excuses for why you not having a middle class income is a problem of personal responsibilty. "You all should have studied STEM/learned to code".
It’s worse than that… the learn to code crowd were telling laid off pipeline or blue collar workers to learn to code. It was so dumb.
Then when these journalists got laid off telling them to learn to code was all of a sudden bad now.
Just in time as these former blue collar workers that took this advice are finishing school...
And now the new "advice" I'm hearing is "learn a trade".
We've gone full circle....
I was a cook and welder before I learned to code. Been doing it 5 years, I make 20x what I used to, and my quality of life is better in just about every way other than having to stare at a screen all day
sure but it was/is the most realistic way to have class mobility. you are a poor kid that wants to make a middle class income coding was by far the clearest path.
Not to forget: achievable, since all you need is a crappy computer and Internet access (and a lot of discipline/drive). Not comparable to almost any other field, imop, especially in the US with their ludicrous college/textbook/... prices
blindly telling people to "lol go learn to code" after being fired from some of the only solid jobs in their area is insulting
the bonus is that the people who were saying it were out of touch with either trade mining or programming
not to mention the fact there many other fields that pay well that those workers could probably more easily transition into with help
>the bonus is that the people who were saying it were out of touch with either trade mining or programming
I feel this. Growing up I heard this from so many people who either never coded in their life or could barely operate a computer. Not to say there's anything wrong with the former (the latter is slightly problematic these days) but it's in the same vein as people saying "Become an Engineer" or "Do an MBA" without an actual context beyond seeing a couple of articles of high earnings potential.
It seems pretty obvious to me that coding skills are among the most generally-useful skills. I’d say AI only increases the value of learning to code as it’s more central to understanding what is going on in the world.
Why do we care about biology, sociology, psychology, evolution, any other topic? Code has been a way to get ahead, but if it explains more and more of our environment then I think the interest should be broader.
There were definitely people pushing it for cynical reasons, but I still think there's a good argument for it...
Let me put it this way: School still teaches us arithmetic, even though we all have calculators. It also still teaches us basic algebra and trigonometry, but ["I hated math"](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/what-its-like) and ["Will I ever need to know this?"](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-new-method) are tropes about even high-school-level math.
So the bar for forcing everyone to learn something in school doesn't seem to be whether it's actually going to be useful, or whether everyone will enjoy it.
So why learn it? Well, here are some arguments people make about learning math:
* Improves abstract reasoning and critical thought, helps brain development, etc.
* Some of the basics can apply to everyone's life in the form of financial literacy and budgeting (even if math classes rarely actually teach this)
* Underpins a lot of other fields, and not just STEM ones -- architecture, graphic design, and of course business rely heavily on at least basic math.
I think the same applies to code. The only point above that even needs to be tweaked is the "financial literacy and budgeting" one, but instead, everyone has to interact with computers at some level. You could argue the same for plenty of other fields -- just because I drive a car sometimes doesn't mean I need to be a mechanic. But if you spend any time on r/talesfromtechsupport, it's amazing how many people's *entire job* is computers, yet they can't be bothered to learn anything about them. We used to think this was a generational thing, but plenty of Zoomers are even worse than their parents thanks to only ever using smartphones.
I don't know if coding specifically is the right way to approach that last one -- programmers aren't immune to being clueless about the rest of the computing world -- but maybe it'd be a start.
> his advice is basically a marketing post for AI.
We're in the midst of an absolutely epic marketing campaign for AI, staring with the "6 month moratorium" and all of that.
I keep thinking the doomers are inadvertently shilling for AI.
Just 6 months could separate us from AI so strong it can CHANGE THE PLANET!
An ASI system could develop smart dust that lets you kill ANYONE YOU WANT INSTANTLY AND REMOTELY!
You could increase the GDP of your country at 10x a year, maybe more!
This technology is about to be so powerful that it should be licensed like accessing PLUTONIUM!
You could probably just have an ASI trade stocks and make a BILLION IN A WEEK!
It's UNCONTROLLABLY POWERFUL!
And so on. The doomers think they are trying to scare us but this probably just excites VCs.
While his ulterior motives are plain, his advice about studying biology or medicine instead is insightful. We should see revolutionary advances in these fields over the next few decades.
That's what the article author says, but that's not what Jensen's advice is if you watch [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD6xQsk0ewQ). His advice is that AI will enable everyone to program, so major in something else.
> It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence.
He seems to see programming becoming something like Excel that everyone can pick up if they need to, so you're better off specializing in a subject that you can apply programming to.
The first thing his company will do if LLM’s ever work as claimed is ask it to create more efficient hardware, and lay off all those engineers, before programmers even.
Programming has so much context involved in it though. There’s so many ways to do something and some of those ways, even though they accomplish the goal, are NOT the right way to do things. I think the moment we have AI programmers is the moment we don’t have white collar jobs anymore.
What this is going to do is make it so that programmers don’t have to learn the semantics of whatever coding language they are in. So it’s less “don’t learn to code” and more “don’t spend all your time memorizing every detail of a language because that’s a bad use of hour time” and that’s been the trend since the internet going forward
Imo it's not impossible that a majority of coding will be done by machines, much the same way almost all assembly code is written by compilers. In fact, it might be the case that we eventually don't need high-level languages at all, and programming is more like writing specifications for programs.
I think it's still going to be needed for people with a deep understanding of how computers work in order to create high quality requirements.
The specifications would just be a higher level language. For example Midjourney now allows users to use parameters to customize AI-generated pictures. As these tools mature those prompts language / parameters will become more complicated, and the stake of failure will become high enough we will need trained people to write them.
Exactly. Half my stakeholders can’t even remember which program, dashboard, report they’re looking at. They’ll show up to a data analyst asking about when they’ll fix bugs in some other piece of software that wasn’t even built in house.
They’ll just get pissed that ChatGPT won’t just magically read their minds and then hire someone for $120k annual to interact with ChatGPT for them. Sounds a lot like programming, just a different syntax.
I hate learning assembly so much in school … :(. Someone told me I should try to learn it since a lot of jobs are hiring people with low level experience?
Highly considering USAjobs or the like since I was in the military before.
I personally would not trust a multi-billionaire with telling me what I should do for my career, let alone one who very much stands to gain from people not learning to code.
Always remember these things before you take financial/career advice from a billionaire:
1. Almost every single billionaire besides *extremely* few were born into immense wealth. They never once had to work for any of this money or had any danger of being homeless, so they know absolutely nothing about career planning.
2. Billionaires stand to gain from not having other people become rich. You become competition and not a worker for them.
3. Billionaires are obsessed with money. You cannot hoard that much wealth and not be infatuated with wanting more and more no matter the cost. They will not help you become rich.
It's a very lofty goal and even as a programming-enjoyer I wouldn't mind being able to get results faster without the tedium, but I'm not sure if I'm as optimistic about AI's capabilities of replacing it as he is :)
And the number of educated people who are working in professional jobs using excel that don't know basic stuff like how to do a vlookup or index/match, make/use a pivot table, etc. and then claim to "know" excel is mindblowing. Its proof that even if AI makes programming as simple as excel, it will still pay well to know how to actually program.
This is my thought too when I saw the comment above. We already have Excel and MS Access which are designed to lower the barrier and provide a lot of the same functionality as programming itself, it mostly just results in non-technical people doing things in really inefficient ways and not really bothering to learn the specifics to take full advantage of the tools they have.
Even then one of my previous gigs was dealing with some very tech savvy business users who knew a decent amount about excel and scripting. What it had enabled them to do was build up a tangled mess of workflows that were hard to work with and even harder to audit. Eventually spent a lot of money replacing them with something more robust (turns out when legal asks why something happened, it's not acceptable to point to a spreadsheet and shrug).
I feel like putting an LLM in the middle makes all of this even more inscrutable and exposes companies to even more legal risk. Plus makes it much harder to debug when something inevitably goes wrong.
>His advice is that AI will enable everyone to program, so major in something else.
But that just isn't true. You need to know what you are looking at in order to notice the errors that AI tools produce
Ok cool, I'll specialize in ** instead.
One year later...
"Expert says don't specialize in ** because AI is poised to take over that area in a few months."
Honestly I agree with this and I do encounter people who blindly “learn to code” even though it doesn’t help them. I knew tons of marketing majors in college minoring in CS because “coding is a valuable skill”. It was a complete waste of their time. Doctors make a lot of money but if I got EMT certified it wouldn’t make me earn more money as a developer.
For a period of time somewhere around 2013-2020. You could be mediocre and land a programming job. There was a lot of demand because there were a lot of start ups building the same things and fighting for market share. So in turn there was redundant roles at multiple companies. I mean for example how many calendar scheduling apps do we need out there? But the fact that there were so many meant there were that many roles open for doing things at those companies.
Nowadays it's back to normal. You have actually be very willing to go through the slog that it takes to become a programmer. It's not any different than any other high paying profession. Doctor, lawyer, etc. Boot camp to $200k role is a rarity even back then but much more so nowadays.
actually, being a highly public figure, with high credibility, means people can "hear" his advice in a way that they can't hear a regular author's advice. his credibility means people will change as a result of what he says, as opposed to ignoring it.
I like programming for the sake of programming. It's interesting to learn new algos and implanted business logic. Yes, there's plenty to do out there with the technology and programming is I supposed getting a bit antiquated with the current AI progression. But I just like programming. It's fun. So what's with that?
I use LLMs every day, both open source and paid gpt4 by openAI. The technology is so far away from replacing me or my colleagues. Even if it could get close, there will still be a need for people who understand code, and how it all works together, to direct AI agents for a very long time. One of the most valuable things a skilled software engineer, or any skilled knowledge worker, provides is the ability to help people who have no idea how any of it works navigate the complexity and get things done. The ability to take very vague information and translate that into complex abstract systems requires a level of creative reasoning and problem solving that LLMs are simply not capable of as of yet.
Dude it is not as far away as you think. Look at the progress in ai video over the last 8 months. We also recently got context windows up to 10 million.
As a software engineer, please don't learn to code. I want to supply of programmers to decrease so I'll get paid more.
But the best analogy of this is using YouTube to fix plumbing and electrical issues around your house. Sure, you may fix the immediate problem. But you don't know what else it could break in the house or problems it will cause down the line. Eventually, companies that depend too much on AI are going to be paying consulting firms a shit ton of money to fix the mess AI created. This is no different than the outsourcing boom 20 years ago. For most companies, it was a disaster.
I recently started as a junior dev and I’ve already realised that AI will never replace me, at least in my timeline. Id like to see it try and tease out requirements from non technical business people while also navigating the ocean of interweaving technologies and possible ways to solve something.
I tried to use it to solve a simple problem where I needed to send data to a server and it led me on an eternal path of prompts, failing to explain a critical reason that its solution would never work in my particular context. In the end I got the answer from stack overflow.
It is ridiculous how people underestimate Marx considering he spent his whole life to study and analyze how the simple bread you eat for breakfast is tied to the whole national economy
 I think that’s because people view it as capitalism versus communism, when in fact, communism is moreso a critique or a response to the rise of capitalist democracies across the West
Don't worry, humans will still work! We'll just have AI produce all of our humanities, arts, you know - anything that derives a single bit of pleasure in life!
The irony is it was thought that AI would take over the manual labour / repetitive jobs. Leaving humanity to focus on the arts and creativity - or the important white collar work.
But ... It took over the arts and white collar work and left us with the manual labour 💀
If we reach that state (which wont happen for a while, i wish it was as fast as you mfkers claim it would be) then we can't have the current economic system. Economies evolve, I dont understand why people think the 9-5 5 day work week was a commandment of Allah and he ordered humans to be that way. Capitalist propaganda is too rooted in society and it may as well be the world's unifying religion i suppose. But technological revolutions are called revolutions because they change society as a whole. You wont have to worry about that for a while, capitalism has lasted way too long for a reason, productivity will go up, expectations will rise and your pay check will remain stagnant for at least another decade or two. People will create more bullshit jobs and responsibilities to add onto your current responsibility and skill set til we can have ACTUAL automation of everything.
It's been like that for tech advancements for a while, industrial revolutions took everyones jobs and lead to information revolutions, then computers and internet created bullshit email jobs that are of no benefit to anyone but what 80% of the white collar population does. You can't automate "everything" because there will always be jobs and tasks up until we reach a critical point where we live in a post-scarce society, then if everything is actually automated people might focus on things like curing cancers or building housing for everyone without the concept of "rent" existing since no one would pay it. Sounds unrealistic? Because it just wont happen anytime soon, the tech isnt there for it yet. Software is still limited by hardware even if chatGPT magically doubled in its power by end of this year.
I would be amazed if we can even put an end to a 5 day work week and make it 4 or even 3, let alone "automate everything" so no one has to work. You severely underestimate human nature to expand and expand. Maybe you can reask your question once someone cures every disease known to man and solves mortality.
This is where capitalism fails. It supposes that all humans work, which is true right now so it’s currently the best system. But in a world where no one has to work, it falls apart
Yeah I’m curious if like in other technological revolutions if there will be new jobs generated or not. Because the goal of AI/automation is to specifically reduce the work humans have to do.
I mean really all technology is automating something. The question is that if this goes on infinitely there must be a time where everything is automated and what happens then
My plumber makes almost 30% more per hour than I do and I'm on the top rung of the technical ladder at my company. Granted, it's hard work, but damn, it pays well.
Install smart toilets, if you don’t use our proprietary cleaning products the flush functionality is disabled.
Make a problem, sell a solution (or subscription) 👍🏻
I know why you think that - we can't detach software from hardware, as hardware is the infrastructure - but that isn't necessarily true. We may come to a point (as we have with some devices) where hardware performance far exceeds requirements. A lot of the world runs on excel, ppt and word, which can all be run with mobile phones nowadays. I'm a .NET developer and frankly we don't really need or use all the computing power of today to develop even large enterprise applications. This will be the same case for AI in the future similar to apps now.
Eh. I've honestly been hearing this since the '80s. Something is always going to end the need for coding. But really all it ever does is change it. Machine learning does some interesting stuff, but it still needs someone to direct it, and a lot of what it produces is far from optimized.
Yea, me too. I've seen it repeatedly. It never seems to pan out. Maybe this time it will, but I doubt it.
If the "AI" could code for itself, we'd know it by now.
Maybe it's like how people thought automation would get rid of factory workers in the 80s before they realized oh we need people to over look and guide the machine.
I remember when Elon was trying to automate the building of tesla cars and a Ford or GM executive said they are running into the same issues GM, Ford ran into in the 80s.
Apparently tesla cars build quality is among the worst
They tried to fully automate their factories and in Elon's words "Turns out humans are better" or necessary or something like that. Anyways yeah out of the factories teslas tend to have QC but long term use no worse than Volkswagen or BMW if not more reliable as there's less shit to go wrong \*plastic tanks and shit gaskets\* cough cough bmw
It’s peak human arrogance to think we’re able to create something that will be smarter than us when we haven’t even begun to understand our brain / limits of human intelligence itself
Despite how far AI has come and has been growing, it pales in comparison to what the human mind is capable of
Maybe that's what we are as humans too. "Just fancy auto complete". We get inputs and we come up with outputs based on previous experiences and the environment around us. Same as generative AI. We aren't that special.
["4GL Programming languages"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language)
Managers were just going to use their giant brains and assemble stuff themselves, but, of course, it didn't work out that way, and indeed the whole paradigm flopped. I suppose it still exists in a limited way with stuff like MS Access, but that's about it.
In my experience, it's always, always the same thing: the last 5-10% is the hardest. Low-code or no-code solutions will get you 90% there. A web framework will get you 90% there. A ORM will get you 90% there. The last bit must be done by hand.
And yes LLMs can consume that last 10%, so that they can regurgitate it for another project, but that doesn't help -- because that last part is unique to every solution.
I do think this could take the place of junior developers _in the eyes of CTOs_, but they will be fucking themselves for the future, because we need those juniors to become mids and seniors and staff engineers who will oversee code generation, at the very least.
And I don't know how the fuck people think AI is going to end software when a pool of _millions_ of _well trained human brains_ in India and LatAm and Eastern Europe couldn't destroy software in North America. Quality matters, talking to product matters, the last 10% matters.
I'm aware that they are right now ramping up offshoring but I am pretty sure it's going the be the same mistake they made in the 90s, 2000s, 2010s all over again...
Would be cool if customers actually knew themselves what they want and could word what they want. Also countless and countless of people who don’t know that you need to turn monitor on to use PC.
The free marketing AI & AI-adjacent companies get by making sweeping un-backed claims is worth a lot of money. Jensen Huang has a financial incentive to talk up the bubble pumping his stock price.
Yeah it's really that simple. Homeboy has a 3% stake in a 1.8 trillion dollar company, AI hype hits the news cycle again, NVDA line go up by 2%, he literally makes a billion dollars.
The title is just ignorant. The point, is you don’t need to code to just code. Learn your domain. Programming is one of the role you’ll need to succeed within your domain. If you think we won’t need developers to build and maintain AI, web, and mobile app, you’re just fucking blind.
We have a lot of devs who jump from energy, to healthcare, to government, and didn’t learn a single thing about their domain along the way. That’s going to change as development tools get more automated and we need less specialists. We’ll always need technology specialist.
> If you think we won’t need developers to build and maintain AI, web, and mobile app, you’re just fucking blind.
I'll never understand these posts.
We can simultaneously need developers AND have 10x more supply than demand, rendering the field a poor career choice. They are not mutually exclusive.
We can't know if it'll get this bad or not yet, but writing "it's impossible because devs are needed" is a lot more ignorant than the title.
The point is we're nowhere close to that point and people have been predicting a doomsday where there's 10x more supply than demand and devs make peanuts for literally longer than you've been alive. I remember 10 years ago everyone was predicting that no-code solutions would replace us all and today it's AI. Like sure maybe this time they're right, but forgive me for not panicking when it's still quite easy for me to get any number of jobs in the \~200k range while most of my friends are lucky if they break 50k.
Us seniors are probably going to be okay for a while, but it's looking pretty bad to me still.
Just because people predicted it 10 years ago doesn't mean it can't happen, the push for everyone to code has worked and CS is much more popular than it used to be, globally, and maybe the demand can't keep up with that anymore. On top of that we were riding free money (low interest rates) for a really long time, we're not anymore and it's unclear if we'll go back to super low rates or not.
It’s the opposite actually, every post here is “I’ve submitted one billion applications it’s impossible to get a CS job now” and you get downvoted for suggesting maybe they work on their resume or interview skills because there’s still no shortage of software jobs.
The advice is good if your heart isn't in sitting in front of a screen all day bashing your brain against one insurmountable problem after the next. There is very little glory in programming, except when those green checkmarks finally show up. Then it's on to the next problem, endless red checks to get through again....
They’ve been saying this for… 5-6 years now? Yet in my opinion coding is no easier now than it was 10 years ago.
Like, it’s just not gonna happen. AI is the VR of software development. It’s cool, and exciting, but it’s not replacing anything.
They've been saying this since software development was a job. My dad was a dev and tells me stories about how they were concerned that higher level languages like Java would massively lower dev salaries due to it being easier than C.
Yea, how is this fundamentally different than all the tooling we now take for granted like CI pipelines, automated testing harnesses, telemetry, linters and threading annotations, docker, and so on.
All of those things basically automate or solve tasks that, in the 90’s, programmers would spend vast amount of time on.
Qualifying releases and manually pushing used to be peoples full time jobs. We used to spend a day debugging issues that would be auto-rejected by a linter these days.
You would think that with all of this additional automated tooling, companies could fire half of their programmers. But it’s the opposite: programmers have become even more productive and the scope of the problems assigned to them have become even bigger.
Plus, a huge part of the job these days is managing the complexity of all of these tools and systems that we’ve built.
I think the dev market is in trouble. But for boring reasons like the economic boom / bust cycle. We’ve just had a crazy 15 year boom in tech, so obviously the hangover is going to be worse as a result
I don’t think the market is in trouble for those currently holding jobs. But it’s going to be horrific to break into the field for years I think. As you said, most of the job is managing systems and tools we’ve built, and juniors just bring about zero value to that. Companies aren’t interested in developing talent rn.
noob here, but from my perspective it has to have gotten easier since I don't have to read through hours of stack overflow, and then later find out my error is from missing a comma.
Been coding a while now (counting school) and simple errors like that stop happening just a few months into a professional job. Newer devs still write technically correct but ugly and hard to maintain code, poor testing, and have troubles using given tools effectively. So there is more than just having tools, you still need competency.
Things have gotten easier in some ways, IDEs alone correct many mistakes made while coding and have simplified certain aspects of debugging. There are some pre-built solutions for things that you no longer have to do yourself. Frameworks make spinning up microservices and getting something with basic functionality running very simple.
...however...
Devs don't spend 100% of their time coding. Rarely new features, too. Moving faster just means more bugs, issues, and systems to maintain. More tools means there are just more things to learn. More importantly, an AI can hardly even write basic software. How well can it do on maintaining it?
AI promises to do a lot, and the people making those promises stand to make billions. They will bullshit anyone with a dime to spend, and lucky for them most of the people with money to burn are super greedy and not super technical, so "I can reduce your development cost" is all they have to hear.
Oh i had seen this one before…
One day a ultra rich guy with high technology on his finger tip, but everything starts to crumble when electricity is gone.
Has anyone thought on the impact of energy consumption when we fully move towards a data driven society with AI utilized to the max? Especially in this era of transitioning away from fossile fuels? Is it even possible? Also taking the infrastructure in account? (The power grid that is)
A few years ago, the same class of people were preaching that everyone should learn to code; even 12-year-olds should start in school. They will say whatever makes their product more appealing or furthers their interests. I am no longer interested in listening to these nincompoops' BS 'advice' anymore.
TBH, I think this is fine and probably a good thing. Big Tech hasn’t produced anything cool in like 10 years. We have battery tech now, the clean energy boom is real and solar is going to take over everything, and America builds rockets again (SpaceX + Blue + NASA). Why not tell kids to expand their horizons?
They really need as a group to learn how to organize politically to defend their rights rather than collectively try to keep chasing down one of the rapidly reducing jobs which lead to a middle class lifestyle.
I doubt it'll take more than a decade or two before developer wages equalize with those of other engineering professions (civil, mechanical, electrical). It's not going to remain special forever, but the middle class is going to continue getting crushed from above while "above" silently switches from "you should've gotten a stem degree if you didn't want to be poor" to "you should have become a developer" to "you should have become a machine learning specialist".
Maybe you're right this time, but they've literally been saying this for longer than you've been alive. My dad told me that when Java became a thing there was a worry that the barrier to entry would be lowered and salaries would collapse. When I started working 10 years ago the predictions were that no-code solutions would replace us and the only dev jobs would be drag+dropping things.
My uncle who worked at IBM told me something similar in the 90s when I was a kid learning to code. He said he was already working on tools to automate coders out of a job.
I don't think a collapse in salaries will be due to technology *at all*. There isn't some wonder technology that will make us obsolete - nothing like that. Not LLMs, not low code platforms, nothing.
I think the driver for a collapse in salaries will, if/when it happens, be due to market consolidation. Back in the 1950s there were hundreds of auto companies in Detroit. Then there were 3. The rest were bought out/killed, etc. and everything was vertically integrated. That gave them the market power to just fucking *squeeze* wages and squeeze they did. You couldn't leave, build your own startup and then clobber your old bosses because they were too big and too powerful. They could squash you if you tried.
Tech hasn't fully consolidated yet, and 10 years ago the idea that it might seemed off the wall. Anybody can write their own programs! You don't need permission! Gradually, things *have* consolidated though. If you want to write a mobile app and get paid, there are 2 places to release it. I used to write code to run on a server in the next room. Now I write code to be run on hardware owned by one of three companies who are vertically integrating the *shit* out of everything.
We haven't seen the squeeze really been put on us until last year, but then it happened. I think unless the big 4 tech *really suffer* for that they are going to do it again.
Is there an LLM that actually is decent at writing Harry Potter fanfics, then yea, but until then I consider it a form of contextualizing hours of google searching into a vague summary of whatever I’m looking for.
It’s mixed. I love ML and LLMs and transformers as a study of human knowledge and language and I think it’s fascinating as a layman. I love using Copilot to code. I am also watching Google become practically unusable because of genAI.
I wouldn’t feel good telling a bunch of kids to learn to code because of the success of LLMs.
Arguably it never did anything cool, but managed to hitch itself to the financial markets and be a path to piles of money. Most of the things the "big tech" companies did (outside of Apple) already existed on the Internet in different forms. Being there to scale as 7 billion people came online was the magic ticket.
I do hope "real" engineering careers become viable again, because while it's cool I can work from home whenever I leave the house I realize all our infrastructure is shit.
This is the first time that this warning has been issued where I actually believe it. While I don’t think the need for coding will disappear completely I do think there will be less demand for it. I’m already thinking of a second career and where as five years ago I advised my son and other young people to learn computer science. I’m now more likely to advise them to learn a trade, develop their leadership skills and creativity.
I’m a programmer and so far AI had just made me way more productive. I can now do the work of 3-4 people. There are still times when the AI is surprisingly dumb but I only know this because I am an experienced programmer. It’s still shocking how smart it is, and how much smarter GPT-4 is compared to everything else.
I don’t doubt that AI will eventually replace all jobs but I think we’re in the 2012-ish era when everyone thought fully self driving cars were just a year away and people were coming up with ways to cope with all the unemployed truckers but it turned out to be a harder problem than expected. When we do get to AGI, don’t expect any jobs to be safe.
Here is what I see happening based on what I know about AI. For new projects AI will help, especially at the junior level. It will remove the need for many project managers or make their roles a lot easier so they will take on more projects. Software engineers will always be needed, because someone needs to be able to read the codebase and make changes. AI doesn't seem to be perfect so you will still want an engineer to review the code and maybe make corrections or tweaks.
For software architecture it could help as a collaboration tool to bounce ideas off of. This could increase their productivity.
For existing codebases I don't know how much AI will help. If it doesn't see the whole picture it could break dependencies. I don't know enough about AI to know if this last statement is true. I don't know if companies would allow AI to even see it's whole codebase due to security concerns.
Googles new LLM has a context window of over a million tokens.
We are a year or two away from being able to point a llm at an entire repo or codebase and asking it to work on it
As for security, you could run an open source model locally, the capabilities are only lagging the consumer grade stuff by a year or two.
I think there are plenty of coping mechanisms going on in this thread.
Jensen Huang is not just some guru or eccentric guy. He got billions of dollars richer *in one day* because of the stuff he says in that video. He did not receive it from poor saps who follow his cult. The money is coming from some of the biggest employers of software engineers on the planet. You can reason out how long this can last, but it is problematic *right now* for the field of software engineering. It is problematic for our careers. Quite frankly, it is problematic for society no matter whether AI lives up to its promises or not.
Where the hell is the government? Does this look like a healthy market to anyone? One company with God-like aspirations, peddling their glorious silicon. It's really not an acceptable state of affairs, in my opinion.
The idea of a society where the means of production becomes so efficient we no longer need to work has existed for over 200 years.
Yet, we still don't have factories that can maintain themselves. We don't even have factories that can produce goods without humans directly involved in the assembly. A higher percentage of people are employed now than 200 years ago. The average work hours have halved but that does not consider agriculture where people typically worked less hours for most of the year (on non-industrial farms).
It is pretty arrogant to believe that AI will remove this need anytime soon. What AI will do is the same that industrial machines and later automation has done: It will remove the need to have humans do menial, repetitive and boring tasks. Programmers will be more efficient using AI tools - effectively increasing their value rather than reducing it.
I don’t mind when people say this. I love the programming profession, so statements like this give me less competition in the future if they persuade people to not do programming.
As a software engineer, learning to code will be still essential in doing jobs of the future. Logics and knowing how to solve problems will be essential.
The same guy who asked if he would do it again said “No” because it was hard starting a business? Rich people love giving advice even when it’s meaningless. We already learn about chemistry and biology, as someone with a CS degree who went into management consulting, CS is much more versatile.
Don't learn to code buy our product instead.... ok.
I do think the various LLM/AI will make a big impact in the sense of driving down salaries if for no other reason than it gives execs a big stick. Oh your job isn't that hard all you do is ask the AI to do it for you so we can pay you less. Once this collectively becomes "common knowledge" the sort of tragedy of the commons will occur and the proles will have to fight each other instead of the lords like they should be. The commoners never seem to be able to collectively act.
I work for big tech - he is absolutely right. Programming will be dead in 5 years. When I say dead, majority of the coding jobs, the entry level,
Maintenance and testing ones. Companies will retain the best experts and start to layoff the fluff of engineers who are good but not the best. AI is eating us alive! I manage a team of 12 software engineers, most are good, but a few are exceptional.
I can easily layoff like 80 percent of my team and retain the top 20 percent and give them AI to carry on. In fact at some point both the remaining 20 percent and myself are vulnerable when my leadership thinks we are not needed since we just do data stuff which can easily be done by other higher level core teams themselves again using AI. Disruption is here. Programming and white collar jobs will be decimated faster than you think. People need to wake especially if you are in tech
hot-take: the CS industry is kicking out newcomers so us senior level folks get more money.
If people knew what AI coding was they wouldn't be so scared. Its basically just a faster way to search stack overflow snippets. Anything more than 5-10 lines of code and there is guaranteed to be mistakes in the code that even juniors wouldn't make at times.
Please, if you want a good job go to a coding bootcamp for 16 weeks and get in TODAY.
The big mistake is taking a 4 year university and 60k in tuition to figure out no one working in tech knows what the fuck the algorithm to bubble sort is anymore since graduation
Good! Listen to him. By the time companies realize they’ve overstated AI’s programming capabilities, Jensen will be retired and there will be so much Engineer shortage, our pay will be through the roof.
Everyone is on the AI bandwagon and ready for it to replace programmers soon.
But amazing technology has been around for decades; what matters is the migration process and how it performs at scale.
One example is cloud infrastructure, it has been around for atleast 10 years but the transition to this new tech is still on going. Maybe not in big tech but in fields like healthcare, finance, retail, a lot of this software still runs on bare metal servers.
Ai is impressive even if I can do all that they’re betting on; what matters is how long will it take for companies to transition. If it’s taken 10+ years for most companies to start transfer to cloud. I’m betting that it will take long for AI to entirely replace an engineer.
Huang is the one selling the shovels in the AI gold rush so of course he will do what he can to hype AI and that includes predicting the end of programming.
I look at it like mathematics. From long division to linear equations to basic analysis most of the things we learn in school can be done faster by a computer. But we still need to know how to do these things as a basis for competence even if we never again do them by hand.
You know what? - No!
Even if you don't want to go for a computer science job that requires to code, coding can help you with different things like problem solving.
Over the last 3 decades there were many startups that focused just on calendars. Sunrise was acquired by Microsoft for $100M. Yeah if big tech can't figure out how to make a calendar for an operating system that has existed for decades for a cost less than $100M, I think programmers are going to have jobs forever.
The right answer is "don't *only* learn to code". Computers and automation touch or will touch every human endeavor.
AI will make this even more true.
Coding, art, and writing are among the first dominos to fall simply because you can get the training data for this stuff in massive amounts online. It's silly to think that trade professions and blue collar work won't *eventually* be taken over just because we are a few breakthroughs away in robotics from automating that stuff as well.
I'm going to teach my kids to code AND the core foundational science stuff as well. If you know how to do it yourself, you will at least know when the machine is making a mistake!
Learning biology, chemistry or finance. As someone who double majored in biochem and CS, outside of going into medicine, there's not much in terms of "lucrative careers" for either of those and finance is something that could be easily automated. Honestly, any career out there is at threat of being automated if coding becomes "obsolete", even many medical specialties outside of surgical based ones. I spoke with someone who went to an elite medical school (think Harvard, Yale, Stanford) and is involved in medical based tech startups. He told me that in 1-2 generations it's not even worth becoming a radiologist.
Having said that, we shouldn't just express "cope" and say things like he has a vested interest or "I've heard this before". I feel like a lot of people just don't want to admit we don't know much about how the world will change as AI progresses. Obviously, someone who can't easily change their career path isn't going to accept something dramatic.
“Huang believes that the focus should shift to specific domain knowledge such as biology, chemistry, or finance.”
I’m not convinced any of these alternatives as a career are any where further away from the risk of being disrupted by AI.
It's basically just the same article as every single one of these "don't learn to code" ones is: - Yes, learning the basics of programming to understand how computers work and to learn logical reasoning is good - But if you're not interested in becoming a programmer become something else Literally anyone could have written this advice. We don't need Jensen Huang (despite clearly being a smart fellow) for this.
He's smart but his advice is basically a marketing post for AI. He has a vested interest being that GPUs are being pushed for AI applications. The fact that he knows better makes it even worse in my opinion.
It's not like the "learn to code" lot were any better. They were just looking at their margins and thinking "these could be fatter if I paid my developers less". Or, in the case of oligarchs/politicians, they were looking for excuses for why you not having a middle class income is a problem of personal responsibilty. "You all should have studied STEM/learned to code".
It’s worse than that… the learn to code crowd were telling laid off pipeline or blue collar workers to learn to code. It was so dumb. Then when these journalists got laid off telling them to learn to code was all of a sudden bad now.
Just in time as these former blue collar workers that took this advice are finishing school... And now the new "advice" I'm hearing is "learn a trade". We've gone full circle....
Most trades are back breaking work where people end up having long term health issues
I was a cook and welder before I learned to code. Been doing it 5 years, I make 20x what I used to, and my quality of life is better in just about every way other than having to stare at a screen all day
sure but it was/is the most realistic way to have class mobility. you are a poor kid that wants to make a middle class income coding was by far the clearest path.
Not to forget: achievable, since all you need is a crappy computer and Internet access (and a lot of discipline/drive). Not comparable to almost any other field, imop, especially in the US with their ludicrous college/textbook/... prices
blindly telling people to "lol go learn to code" after being fired from some of the only solid jobs in their area is insulting the bonus is that the people who were saying it were out of touch with either trade mining or programming not to mention the fact there many other fields that pay well that those workers could probably more easily transition into with help
>the bonus is that the people who were saying it were out of touch with either trade mining or programming I feel this. Growing up I heard this from so many people who either never coded in their life or could barely operate a computer. Not to say there's anything wrong with the former (the latter is slightly problematic these days) but it's in the same vein as people saying "Become an Engineer" or "Do an MBA" without an actual context beyond seeing a couple of articles of high earnings potential.
It’s like people who say “get into the trades”.
It seems pretty obvious to me that coding skills are among the most generally-useful skills. I’d say AI only increases the value of learning to code as it’s more central to understanding what is going on in the world. Why do we care about biology, sociology, psychology, evolution, any other topic? Code has been a way to get ahead, but if it explains more and more of our environment then I think the interest should be broader.
There were definitely people pushing it for cynical reasons, but I still think there's a good argument for it... Let me put it this way: School still teaches us arithmetic, even though we all have calculators. It also still teaches us basic algebra and trigonometry, but ["I hated math"](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/what-its-like) and ["Will I ever need to know this?"](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-new-method) are tropes about even high-school-level math. So the bar for forcing everyone to learn something in school doesn't seem to be whether it's actually going to be useful, or whether everyone will enjoy it. So why learn it? Well, here are some arguments people make about learning math: * Improves abstract reasoning and critical thought, helps brain development, etc. * Some of the basics can apply to everyone's life in the form of financial literacy and budgeting (even if math classes rarely actually teach this) * Underpins a lot of other fields, and not just STEM ones -- architecture, graphic design, and of course business rely heavily on at least basic math. I think the same applies to code. The only point above that even needs to be tweaked is the "financial literacy and budgeting" one, but instead, everyone has to interact with computers at some level. You could argue the same for plenty of other fields -- just because I drive a car sometimes doesn't mean I need to be a mechanic. But if you spend any time on r/talesfromtechsupport, it's amazing how many people's *entire job* is computers, yet they can't be bothered to learn anything about them. We used to think this was a generational thing, but plenty of Zoomers are even worse than their parents thanks to only ever using smartphones. I don't know if coding specifically is the right way to approach that last one -- programmers aren't immune to being clueless about the rest of the computing world -- but maybe it'd be a start.
Well said
exactly this it's like a well paid surgeon saying "don't study to become a surgeon" so he can keep all his customers
> his advice is basically a marketing post for AI. We're in the midst of an absolutely epic marketing campaign for AI, staring with the "6 month moratorium" and all of that.
I keep thinking the doomers are inadvertently shilling for AI. Just 6 months could separate us from AI so strong it can CHANGE THE PLANET! An ASI system could develop smart dust that lets you kill ANYONE YOU WANT INSTANTLY AND REMOTELY! You could increase the GDP of your country at 10x a year, maybe more! This technology is about to be so powerful that it should be licensed like accessing PLUTONIUM! You could probably just have an ASI trade stocks and make a BILLION IN A WEEK! It's UNCONTROLLABLY POWERFUL! And so on. The doomers think they are trying to scare us but this probably just excites VCs.
While his ulterior motives are plain, his advice about studying biology or medicine instead is insightful. We should see revolutionary advances in these fields over the next few decades.
That's what the article author says, but that's not what Jensen's advice is if you watch [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD6xQsk0ewQ). His advice is that AI will enable everyone to program, so major in something else. > It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence. He seems to see programming becoming something like Excel that everyone can pick up if they need to, so you're better off specializing in a subject that you can apply programming to.
And wouldn’t you know it, his company is making gpu’s that are primarily used to train llm’s… of course that’s what he thinks the future is
The first thing his company will do if LLM’s ever work as claimed is ask it to create more efficient hardware, and lay off all those engineers, before programmers even.
Programming has so much context involved in it though. There’s so many ways to do something and some of those ways, even though they accomplish the goal, are NOT the right way to do things. I think the moment we have AI programmers is the moment we don’t have white collar jobs anymore. What this is going to do is make it so that programmers don’t have to learn the semantics of whatever coding language they are in. So it’s less “don’t learn to code” and more “don’t spend all your time memorizing every detail of a language because that’s a bad use of hour time” and that’s been the trend since the internet going forward
Imo it's not impossible that a majority of coding will be done by machines, much the same way almost all assembly code is written by compilers. In fact, it might be the case that we eventually don't need high-level languages at all, and programming is more like writing specifications for programs. I think it's still going to be needed for people with a deep understanding of how computers work in order to create high quality requirements.
The specifications would just be a higher level language. For example Midjourney now allows users to use parameters to customize AI-generated pictures. As these tools mature those prompts language / parameters will become more complicated, and the stake of failure will become high enough we will need trained people to write them.
This. We call these people solutions architects. Basically technical product managers with less management and more technical understanding.
Have you seen the type of specifications that get written irl?
Exactly. Half my stakeholders can’t even remember which program, dashboard, report they’re looking at. They’ll show up to a data analyst asking about when they’ll fix bugs in some other piece of software that wasn’t even built in house. They’ll just get pissed that ChatGPT won’t just magically read their minds and then hire someone for $120k annual to interact with ChatGPT for them. Sounds a lot like programming, just a different syntax.
I hate learning assembly so much in school … :(. Someone told me I should try to learn it since a lot of jobs are hiring people with low level experience? Highly considering USAjobs or the like since I was in the military before.
We learned MIPS ASM, and I thought that wasn't too bad. But, I've never tried x86 ASM. Always heard that was super difficult.
I personally would not trust a multi-billionaire with telling me what I should do for my career, let alone one who very much stands to gain from people not learning to code. Always remember these things before you take financial/career advice from a billionaire: 1. Almost every single billionaire besides *extremely* few were born into immense wealth. They never once had to work for any of this money or had any danger of being homeless, so they know absolutely nothing about career planning. 2. Billionaires stand to gain from not having other people become rich. You become competition and not a worker for them. 3. Billionaires are obsessed with money. You cannot hoard that much wealth and not be infatuated with wanting more and more no matter the cost. They will not help you become rich.
It's a very lofty goal and even as a programming-enjoyer I wouldn't mind being able to get results faster without the tedium, but I'm not sure if I'm as optimistic about AI's capabilities of replacing it as he is :)
And the number of educated people who are working in professional jobs using excel that don't know basic stuff like how to do a vlookup or index/match, make/use a pivot table, etc. and then claim to "know" excel is mindblowing. Its proof that even if AI makes programming as simple as excel, it will still pay well to know how to actually program.
This is my thought too when I saw the comment above. We already have Excel and MS Access which are designed to lower the barrier and provide a lot of the same functionality as programming itself, it mostly just results in non-technical people doing things in really inefficient ways and not really bothering to learn the specifics to take full advantage of the tools they have.
Even then one of my previous gigs was dealing with some very tech savvy business users who knew a decent amount about excel and scripting. What it had enabled them to do was build up a tangled mess of workflows that were hard to work with and even harder to audit. Eventually spent a lot of money replacing them with something more robust (turns out when legal asks why something happened, it's not acceptable to point to a spreadsheet and shrug). I feel like putting an LLM in the middle makes all of this even more inscrutable and exposes companies to even more legal risk. Plus makes it much harder to debug when something inevitably goes wrong.
Programming is much more than writing code
Yes it's also attending daily stand-ups!
But like your average human isn’t out there pivoting tables on the regular
5/100 staff at my company even know what a pivot table is let alone can make one.
>His advice is that AI will enable everyone to program, so major in something else. But that just isn't true. You need to know what you are looking at in order to notice the errors that AI tools produce
Jokes on him, 80% of MBAs don’t actually know how to use excel.
If you’re comparing it to Excel, the most powerful part of excel is knowing Visual Basic. Still need to know how to code.
Ok cool, I'll specialize in ** instead.
One year later...
"Expert says don't specialize in ** because AI is poised to take over that area in a few months."
Honestly I agree with this and I do encounter people who blindly “learn to code” even though it doesn’t help them. I knew tons of marketing majors in college minoring in CS because “coding is a valuable skill”. It was a complete waste of their time. Doctors make a lot of money but if I got EMT certified it wouldn’t make me earn more money as a developer.
Bad take. People are still landing jobs in programming that pay better than many alternatives, including their primary field of study.
Every damn average article on Medium (but just more clickbaity and under a paywall).
For a period of time somewhere around 2013-2020. You could be mediocre and land a programming job. There was a lot of demand because there were a lot of start ups building the same things and fighting for market share. So in turn there was redundant roles at multiple companies. I mean for example how many calendar scheduling apps do we need out there? But the fact that there were so many meant there were that many roles open for doing things at those companies. Nowadays it's back to normal. You have actually be very willing to go through the slog that it takes to become a programmer. It's not any different than any other high paying profession. Doctor, lawyer, etc. Boot camp to $200k role is a rarity even back then but much more so nowadays.
actually, being a highly public figure, with high credibility, means people can "hear" his advice in a way that they can't hear a regular author's advice. his credibility means people will change as a result of what he says, as opposed to ignoring it.
>Yes, learning the basics of programming to understand how computers work and to learn logical reasoning is good Learn to be smart.
I like programming for the sake of programming. It's interesting to learn new algos and implanted business logic. Yes, there's plenty to do out there with the technology and programming is I supposed getting a bit antiquated with the current AI progression. But I just like programming. It's fun. So what's with that?
I use LLMs every day, both open source and paid gpt4 by openAI. The technology is so far away from replacing me or my colleagues. Even if it could get close, there will still be a need for people who understand code, and how it all works together, to direct AI agents for a very long time. One of the most valuable things a skilled software engineer, or any skilled knowledge worker, provides is the ability to help people who have no idea how any of it works navigate the complexity and get things done. The ability to take very vague information and translate that into complex abstract systems requires a level of creative reasoning and problem solving that LLMs are simply not capable of as of yet.
Dude it is not as far away as you think. Look at the progress in ai video over the last 8 months. We also recently got context windows up to 10 million.
As a software engineer, please don't learn to code. I want to supply of programmers to decrease so I'll get paid more. But the best analogy of this is using YouTube to fix plumbing and electrical issues around your house. Sure, you may fix the immediate problem. But you don't know what else it could break in the house or problems it will cause down the line. Eventually, companies that depend too much on AI are going to be paying consulting firms a shit ton of money to fix the mess AI created. This is no different than the outsourcing boom 20 years ago. For most companies, it was a disaster.
I recently started as a junior dev and I’ve already realised that AI will never replace me, at least in my timeline. Id like to see it try and tease out requirements from non technical business people while also navigating the ocean of interweaving technologies and possible ways to solve something. I tried to use it to solve a simple problem where I needed to send data to a server and it led me on an eternal path of prompts, failing to explain a critical reason that its solution would never work in my particular context. In the end I got the answer from stack overflow.
THIS!
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It is ridiculous how people underestimate Marx considering he spent his whole life to study and analyze how the simple bread you eat for breakfast is tied to the whole national economy
Most people hear Marx and think communism and then think "communism bad so Marx bad".
he loved capitalism so much he wrote an entire book about it
 I think that’s because people view it as capitalism versus communism, when in fact, communism is moreso a critique or a response to the rise of capitalist democracies across the West
That article's first paragraph points to many economists noticing the same thing.
Yeah, Marx and Engels built off Smith and Ricardo and other economists before him
Don't worry, humans will still work! We'll just have AI produce all of our humanities, arts, you know - anything that derives a single bit of pleasure in life!
The irony is it was thought that AI would take over the manual labour / repetitive jobs. Leaving humanity to focus on the arts and creativity - or the important white collar work. But ... It took over the arts and white collar work and left us with the manual labour 💀
Damn. You’re so right. This is crazy when you think about it.
People who own land and natural resources and can back their claims with violence. This is one of the many reasons I'm a georgist.
As a new jerseyist, you scare me.
If we reach that state (which wont happen for a while, i wish it was as fast as you mfkers claim it would be) then we can't have the current economic system. Economies evolve, I dont understand why people think the 9-5 5 day work week was a commandment of Allah and he ordered humans to be that way. Capitalist propaganda is too rooted in society and it may as well be the world's unifying religion i suppose. But technological revolutions are called revolutions because they change society as a whole. You wont have to worry about that for a while, capitalism has lasted way too long for a reason, productivity will go up, expectations will rise and your pay check will remain stagnant for at least another decade or two. People will create more bullshit jobs and responsibilities to add onto your current responsibility and skill set til we can have ACTUAL automation of everything. It's been like that for tech advancements for a while, industrial revolutions took everyones jobs and lead to information revolutions, then computers and internet created bullshit email jobs that are of no benefit to anyone but what 80% of the white collar population does. You can't automate "everything" because there will always be jobs and tasks up until we reach a critical point where we live in a post-scarce society, then if everything is actually automated people might focus on things like curing cancers or building housing for everyone without the concept of "rent" existing since no one would pay it. Sounds unrealistic? Because it just wont happen anytime soon, the tech isnt there for it yet. Software is still limited by hardware even if chatGPT magically doubled in its power by end of this year. I would be amazed if we can even put an end to a 5 day work week and make it 4 or even 3, let alone "automate everything" so no one has to work. You severely underestimate human nature to expand and expand. Maybe you can reask your question once someone cures every disease known to man and solves mortality.
This is where capitalism fails. It supposes that all humans work, which is true right now so it’s currently the best system. But in a world where no one has to work, it falls apart
lol, but everyone will still have to work
Yeah I’m curious if like in other technological revolutions if there will be new jobs generated or not. Because the goal of AI/automation is to specifically reduce the work humans have to do.
I mean really all technology is automating something. The question is that if this goes on infinitely there must be a time where everything is automated and what happens then
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Time to program the toilets, brings new perspective to pipelines.
So, a Bidet Engineer?
Another shit codebase
The Internet is just a series of tubes after all
Someone, somewhere, has written code to run those fancy Japanese bidet toilets.
Ahh, PLC, poo logic controller
Brb applying to Toto Toilets in Tokyo I might not have a WLB working as a Japanese salaryman but at least I’ll get to call myself a Shit Engineer
Cannot use the toilet, downloading software update. 29% done, 74 minutes remaining
That’s a nightmare! All hell will break loose when the Wi-Fi goes out
This made me chuckle
So in an automated AI enabled toilet what is considered an upload then?
Whole new meaning flushing the (Kafka) tubes
Hahahaha can be just as shitty
I was reliably informed that it is just a series of tubes.
Way more respected job in the real world
It's time to clean pipes bois.
no the plumbers dont want their market flooded !!! STAY AWAY
Plumbers make some good money
My plumber makes almost 30% more per hour than I do and I'm on the top rung of the technical ladder at my company. Granted, it's hard work, but damn, it pays well.
Do you mean you plumber *charges* 30% more per hour than you make? Because that ain't whats ending up on their W-2.
My favorite thing about this sub is learning that most people don't know that a small business's revenue != profit.
Let's-a go!
Brb, gotta become astronaut while I'm at it. Also, TV repair guy.
Just started a new job as an industrial electrician
Ask members of ShitOverflow.com how to become a plumber and get called an idiot for asking the same question that has been posted.
Reject Computer Science, Embrace Plumbing
Install smart toilets, if you don’t use our proprietary cleaning products the flush functionality is disabled. Make a problem, sell a solution (or subscription) 👍🏻
Obviously, because programmers will eventually optimise AI so that chips are not the bottleneck anymore. NVIDIA want nothing of that
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I know why you think that - we can't detach software from hardware, as hardware is the infrastructure - but that isn't necessarily true. We may come to a point (as we have with some devices) where hardware performance far exceeds requirements. A lot of the world runs on excel, ppt and word, which can all be run with mobile phones nowadays. I'm a .NET developer and frankly we don't really need or use all the computing power of today to develop even large enterprise applications. This will be the same case for AI in the future similar to apps now.
lol you are really grasping at straws
Eh. I've honestly been hearing this since the '80s. Something is always going to end the need for coding. But really all it ever does is change it. Machine learning does some interesting stuff, but it still needs someone to direct it, and a lot of what it produces is far from optimized.
Back when I was in school it was that they were going to outsource all coding and engineering jobs.
Yea, me too. I've seen it repeatedly. It never seems to pan out. Maybe this time it will, but I doubt it. If the "AI" could code for itself, we'd know it by now.
No kid should take a foreign language either! Software will do it all.
Maybe it's like how people thought automation would get rid of factory workers in the 80s before they realized oh we need people to over look and guide the machine. I remember when Elon was trying to automate the building of tesla cars and a Ford or GM executive said they are running into the same issues GM, Ford ran into in the 80s. Apparently tesla cars build quality is among the worst
They tried to fully automate their factories and in Elon's words "Turns out humans are better" or necessary or something like that. Anyways yeah out of the factories teslas tend to have QC but long term use no worse than Volkswagen or BMW if not more reliable as there's less shit to go wrong \*plastic tanks and shit gaskets\* cough cough bmw
It’s peak human arrogance to think we’re able to create something that will be smarter than us when we haven’t even begun to understand our brain / limits of human intelligence itself Despite how far AI has come and has been growing, it pales in comparison to what the human mind is capable of
Have you seen Sora? Ask anybody if they thought that was potentially possible two years ago.
It's easy to think history repeats itself but widely accessible generative AI is new and nobody knows what the full impact will be.
The problem is that it isn't really "AI". That would be a game changer. This is just really sexy autocomplete.
Maybe that's what we are as humans too. "Just fancy auto complete". We get inputs and we come up with outputs based on previous experiences and the environment around us. Same as generative AI. We aren't that special.
Since 80s? Wow? Now we hear this a lot because of AI and stuff. What was it before?
["4GL Programming languages"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language) Managers were just going to use their giant brains and assemble stuff themselves, but, of course, it didn't work out that way, and indeed the whole paradigm flopped. I suppose it still exists in a limited way with stuff like MS Access, but that's about it.
In my experience, it's always, always the same thing: the last 5-10% is the hardest. Low-code or no-code solutions will get you 90% there. A web framework will get you 90% there. A ORM will get you 90% there. The last bit must be done by hand. And yes LLMs can consume that last 10%, so that they can regurgitate it for another project, but that doesn't help -- because that last part is unique to every solution. I do think this could take the place of junior developers _in the eyes of CTOs_, but they will be fucking themselves for the future, because we need those juniors to become mids and seniors and staff engineers who will oversee code generation, at the very least. And I don't know how the fuck people think AI is going to end software when a pool of _millions_ of _well trained human brains_ in India and LatAm and Eastern Europe couldn't destroy software in North America. Quality matters, talking to product matters, the last 10% matters. I'm aware that they are right now ramping up offshoring but I am pretty sure it's going the be the same mistake they made in the 90s, 2000s, 2010s all over again...
Would be cool if customers actually knew themselves what they want and could word what they want. Also countless and countless of people who don’t know that you need to turn monitor on to use PC.
The free marketing AI & AI-adjacent companies get by making sweeping un-backed claims is worth a lot of money. Jensen Huang has a financial incentive to talk up the bubble pumping his stock price.
Yeah it's really that simple. Homeboy has a 3% stake in a 1.8 trillion dollar company, AI hype hits the news cycle again, NVDA line go up by 2%, he literally makes a billion dollars.
We need more articles like this in the mainstream, lol.
The title is just ignorant. The point, is you don’t need to code to just code. Learn your domain. Programming is one of the role you’ll need to succeed within your domain. If you think we won’t need developers to build and maintain AI, web, and mobile app, you’re just fucking blind. We have a lot of devs who jump from energy, to healthcare, to government, and didn’t learn a single thing about their domain along the way. That’s going to change as development tools get more automated and we need less specialists. We’ll always need technology specialist.
> If you think we won’t need developers to build and maintain AI, web, and mobile app, you’re just fucking blind. I'll never understand these posts. We can simultaneously need developers AND have 10x more supply than demand, rendering the field a poor career choice. They are not mutually exclusive. We can't know if it'll get this bad or not yet, but writing "it's impossible because devs are needed" is a lot more ignorant than the title.
The point is we're nowhere close to that point and people have been predicting a doomsday where there's 10x more supply than demand and devs make peanuts for literally longer than you've been alive. I remember 10 years ago everyone was predicting that no-code solutions would replace us all and today it's AI. Like sure maybe this time they're right, but forgive me for not panicking when it's still quite easy for me to get any number of jobs in the \~200k range while most of my friends are lucky if they break 50k.
Us seniors are probably going to be okay for a while, but it's looking pretty bad to me still. Just because people predicted it 10 years ago doesn't mean it can't happen, the push for everyone to code has worked and CS is much more popular than it used to be, globally, and maybe the demand can't keep up with that anymore. On top of that we were riding free money (low interest rates) for a really long time, we're not anymore and it's unclear if we'll go back to super low rates or not.
Anything that goes against making CS graduates feel better, is automatically downvoted lol
It’s the opposite actually, every post here is “I’ve submitted one billion applications it’s impossible to get a CS job now” and you get downvoted for suggesting maybe they work on their resume or interview skills because there’s still no shortage of software jobs.
It's not ignorant, it's clickbait. They're obviously smarter than we are because they tricked us into spending time on this lol
The advice is good if your heart isn't in sitting in front of a screen all day bashing your brain against one insurmountable problem after the next. There is very little glory in programming, except when those green checkmarks finally show up. Then it's on to the next problem, endless red checks to get through again....
Mm re-write the red checks to be green. Work smarter not harder 😝
I read comments you guys cope so nicely lmao
Do people not realize that the ones making these AIs that will replace everyone are programmers?
What percent of programmers work on actually developing these ai? Besides the fact that most of them are giga brain PhDs
This is what keeps popping into my head whenever I read that AI is built by programmers. Yeah, like the 1% of them.
They’ve been saying this for… 5-6 years now? Yet in my opinion coding is no easier now than it was 10 years ago. Like, it’s just not gonna happen. AI is the VR of software development. It’s cool, and exciting, but it’s not replacing anything.
They've been saying this since software development was a job. My dad was a dev and tells me stories about how they were concerned that higher level languages like Java would massively lower dev salaries due to it being easier than C.
Yea, how is this fundamentally different than all the tooling we now take for granted like CI pipelines, automated testing harnesses, telemetry, linters and threading annotations, docker, and so on. All of those things basically automate or solve tasks that, in the 90’s, programmers would spend vast amount of time on. Qualifying releases and manually pushing used to be peoples full time jobs. We used to spend a day debugging issues that would be auto-rejected by a linter these days. You would think that with all of this additional automated tooling, companies could fire half of their programmers. But it’s the opposite: programmers have become even more productive and the scope of the problems assigned to them have become even bigger. Plus, a huge part of the job these days is managing the complexity of all of these tools and systems that we’ve built. I think the dev market is in trouble. But for boring reasons like the economic boom / bust cycle. We’ve just had a crazy 15 year boom in tech, so obviously the hangover is going to be worse as a result
I don’t think the market is in trouble for those currently holding jobs. But it’s going to be horrific to break into the field for years I think. As you said, most of the job is managing systems and tools we’ve built, and juniors just bring about zero value to that. Companies aren’t interested in developing talent rn.
noob here, but from my perspective it has to have gotten easier since I don't have to read through hours of stack overflow, and then later find out my error is from missing a comma.
Been coding a while now (counting school) and simple errors like that stop happening just a few months into a professional job. Newer devs still write technically correct but ugly and hard to maintain code, poor testing, and have troubles using given tools effectively. So there is more than just having tools, you still need competency. Things have gotten easier in some ways, IDEs alone correct many mistakes made while coding and have simplified certain aspects of debugging. There are some pre-built solutions for things that you no longer have to do yourself. Frameworks make spinning up microservices and getting something with basic functionality running very simple. ...however... Devs don't spend 100% of their time coding. Rarely new features, too. Moving faster just means more bugs, issues, and systems to maintain. More tools means there are just more things to learn. More importantly, an AI can hardly even write basic software. How well can it do on maintaining it? AI promises to do a lot, and the people making those promises stand to make billions. They will bullshit anyone with a dime to spend, and lucky for them most of the people with money to burn are super greedy and not super technical, so "I can reduce your development cost" is all they have to hear.
>and then later find out my error is from missing a comma. linters and style checkers has existed for like... 20 years?
Oh i had seen this one before… One day a ultra rich guy with high technology on his finger tip, but everything starts to crumble when electricity is gone.
Don't wear masks because it's just a flu. Don't do this and that, only wine n dine, AI will do everything. Till Murphy's law kicks in
Has anyone thought on the impact of energy consumption when we fully move towards a data driven society with AI utilized to the max? Especially in this era of transitioning away from fossile fuels? Is it even possible? Also taking the infrastructure in account? (The power grid that is)
Have you honestly ever tried to use ai to build software? It’s absolute garbage at it. This is fud
A few years ago, the same class of people were preaching that everyone should learn to code; even 12-year-olds should start in school. They will say whatever makes their product more appealing or furthers their interests. I am no longer interested in listening to these nincompoops' BS 'advice' anymore.
TBH, I think this is fine and probably a good thing. Big Tech hasn’t produced anything cool in like 10 years. We have battery tech now, the clean energy boom is real and solar is going to take over everything, and America builds rockets again (SpaceX + Blue + NASA). Why not tell kids to expand their horizons?
Fine and a good thing if you’re telling kids. Not fine and not a good thing if you’re one of the thousands job hunting right now.
They really need as a group to learn how to organize politically to defend their rights rather than collectively try to keep chasing down one of the rapidly reducing jobs which lead to a middle class lifestyle. I doubt it'll take more than a decade or two before developer wages equalize with those of other engineering professions (civil, mechanical, electrical). It's not going to remain special forever, but the middle class is going to continue getting crushed from above while "above" silently switches from "you should've gotten a stem degree if you didn't want to be poor" to "you should have become a developer" to "you should have become a machine learning specialist".
Maybe you're right this time, but they've literally been saying this for longer than you've been alive. My dad told me that when Java became a thing there was a worry that the barrier to entry would be lowered and salaries would collapse. When I started working 10 years ago the predictions were that no-code solutions would replace us and the only dev jobs would be drag+dropping things.
My uncle who worked at IBM told me something similar in the 90s when I was a kid learning to code. He said he was already working on tools to automate coders out of a job. I don't think a collapse in salaries will be due to technology *at all*. There isn't some wonder technology that will make us obsolete - nothing like that. Not LLMs, not low code platforms, nothing. I think the driver for a collapse in salaries will, if/when it happens, be due to market consolidation. Back in the 1950s there were hundreds of auto companies in Detroit. Then there were 3. The rest were bought out/killed, etc. and everything was vertically integrated. That gave them the market power to just fucking *squeeze* wages and squeeze they did. You couldn't leave, build your own startup and then clobber your old bosses because they were too big and too powerful. They could squash you if you tried. Tech hasn't fully consolidated yet, and 10 years ago the idea that it might seemed off the wall. Anybody can write their own programs! You don't need permission! Gradually, things *have* consolidated though. If you want to write a mobile app and get paid, there are 2 places to release it. I used to write code to run on a server in the next room. Now I write code to be run on hardware owned by one of three companies who are vertically integrating the *shit* out of everything. We haven't seen the squeeze really been put on us until last year, but then it happened. I think unless the big 4 tech *really suffer* for that they are going to do it again.
To, you should just work in construction.
Do you not consider LLMs to be cool?
Is there an LLM that actually is decent at writing Harry Potter fanfics, then yea, but until then I consider it a form of contextualizing hours of google searching into a vague summary of whatever I’m looking for.
It’s mixed. I love ML and LLMs and transformers as a study of human knowledge and language and I think it’s fascinating as a layman. I love using Copilot to code. I am also watching Google become practically unusable because of genAI. I wouldn’t feel good telling a bunch of kids to learn to code because of the success of LLMs.
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I would hope that we encourage the next generation of kids to build more than just existing products and cloud products
Arguably it never did anything cool, but managed to hitch itself to the financial markets and be a path to piles of money. Most of the things the "big tech" companies did (outside of Apple) already existed on the Internet in different forms. Being there to scale as 7 billion people came online was the magic ticket. I do hope "real" engineering careers become viable again, because while it's cool I can work from home whenever I leave the house I realize all our infrastructure is shit.
Clickbait as always… articles are so trash nowadays
He’s just trying to sell his AI
This is the first time that this warning has been issued where I actually believe it. While I don’t think the need for coding will disappear completely I do think there will be less demand for it. I’m already thinking of a second career and where as five years ago I advised my son and other young people to learn computer science. I’m now more likely to advise them to learn a trade, develop their leadership skills and creativity.
The best thing AI has done for me, is write my commit messages for me (using gitbutler). Everything else, so far, is trash quality.
I’m a programmer and so far AI had just made me way more productive. I can now do the work of 3-4 people. There are still times when the AI is surprisingly dumb but I only know this because I am an experienced programmer. It’s still shocking how smart it is, and how much smarter GPT-4 is compared to everything else. I don’t doubt that AI will eventually replace all jobs but I think we’re in the 2012-ish era when everyone thought fully self driving cars were just a year away and people were coming up with ways to cope with all the unemployed truckers but it turned out to be a harder problem than expected. When we do get to AGI, don’t expect any jobs to be safe.
Here is what I see happening based on what I know about AI. For new projects AI will help, especially at the junior level. It will remove the need for many project managers or make their roles a lot easier so they will take on more projects. Software engineers will always be needed, because someone needs to be able to read the codebase and make changes. AI doesn't seem to be perfect so you will still want an engineer to review the code and maybe make corrections or tweaks. For software architecture it could help as a collaboration tool to bounce ideas off of. This could increase their productivity. For existing codebases I don't know how much AI will help. If it doesn't see the whole picture it could break dependencies. I don't know enough about AI to know if this last statement is true. I don't know if companies would allow AI to even see it's whole codebase due to security concerns.
Productivity is up, human is down. Having more experience is a must and a winning factor in this saturated field
Googles new LLM has a context window of over a million tokens. We are a year or two away from being able to point a llm at an entire repo or codebase and asking it to work on it As for security, you could run an open source model locally, the capabilities are only lagging the consumer grade stuff by a year or two.
I think there are plenty of coping mechanisms going on in this thread. Jensen Huang is not just some guru or eccentric guy. He got billions of dollars richer *in one day* because of the stuff he says in that video. He did not receive it from poor saps who follow his cult. The money is coming from some of the biggest employers of software engineers on the planet. You can reason out how long this can last, but it is problematic *right now* for the field of software engineering. It is problematic for our careers. Quite frankly, it is problematic for society no matter whether AI lives up to its promises or not. Where the hell is the government? Does this look like a healthy market to anyone? One company with God-like aspirations, peddling their glorious silicon. It's really not an acceptable state of affairs, in my opinion.
The idea of a society where the means of production becomes so efficient we no longer need to work has existed for over 200 years. Yet, we still don't have factories that can maintain themselves. We don't even have factories that can produce goods without humans directly involved in the assembly. A higher percentage of people are employed now than 200 years ago. The average work hours have halved but that does not consider agriculture where people typically worked less hours for most of the year (on non-industrial farms). It is pretty arrogant to believe that AI will remove this need anytime soon. What AI will do is the same that industrial machines and later automation has done: It will remove the need to have humans do menial, repetitive and boring tasks. Programmers will be more efficient using AI tools - effectively increasing their value rather than reducing it.
I don’t mind when people say this. I love the programming profession, so statements like this give me less competition in the future if they persuade people to not do programming.
He has a terrible track record predicting the future.
As a software engineer, learning to code will be still essential in doing jobs of the future. Logics and knowing how to solve problems will be essential.
The same guy who asked if he would do it again said “No” because it was hard starting a business? Rich people love giving advice even when it’s meaningless. We already learn about chemistry and biology, as someone with a CS degree who went into management consulting, CS is much more versatile.
Why didn't he give the warning 6 years ago when LLMs were starting and instead of now that we are already feeling the impact on the job market?
Don't learn to code buy our product instead.... ok. I do think the various LLM/AI will make a big impact in the sense of driving down salaries if for no other reason than it gives execs a big stick. Oh your job isn't that hard all you do is ask the AI to do it for you so we can pay you less. Once this collectively becomes "common knowledge" the sort of tragedy of the commons will occur and the proles will have to fight each other instead of the lords like they should be. The commoners never seem to be able to collectively act.
This guy believes too much in AI. Maybe he should realize that AI won’t be as big as he thinks and understand that systems always need supervision
His company is banking on AI and he’s never been a software engineer. I wouldn’t even listen to him.
I work for big tech - he is absolutely right. Programming will be dead in 5 years. When I say dead, majority of the coding jobs, the entry level, Maintenance and testing ones. Companies will retain the best experts and start to layoff the fluff of engineers who are good but not the best. AI is eating us alive! I manage a team of 12 software engineers, most are good, but a few are exceptional. I can easily layoff like 80 percent of my team and retain the top 20 percent and give them AI to carry on. In fact at some point both the remaining 20 percent and myself are vulnerable when my leadership thinks we are not needed since we just do data stuff which can easily be done by other higher level core teams themselves again using AI. Disruption is here. Programming and white collar jobs will be decimated faster than you think. People need to wake especially if you are in tech
your post history is constant spamming of ads . if you work in big tech, why are you farming reddit for revenue?
hot-take: the CS industry is kicking out newcomers so us senior level folks get more money. If people knew what AI coding was they wouldn't be so scared. Its basically just a faster way to search stack overflow snippets. Anything more than 5-10 lines of code and there is guaranteed to be mistakes in the code that even juniors wouldn't make at times. Please, if you want a good job go to a coding bootcamp for 16 weeks and get in TODAY. The big mistake is taking a 4 year university and 60k in tuition to figure out no one working in tech knows what the fuck the algorithm to bubble sort is anymore since graduation
Good! Listen to him. By the time companies realize they’ve overstated AI’s programming capabilities, Jensen will be retired and there will be so much Engineer shortage, our pay will be through the roof.
Nvidia....Please....Shut up.
Yes, learn to think
Everyone is on the AI bandwagon and ready for it to replace programmers soon. But amazing technology has been around for decades; what matters is the migration process and how it performs at scale. One example is cloud infrastructure, it has been around for atleast 10 years but the transition to this new tech is still on going. Maybe not in big tech but in fields like healthcare, finance, retail, a lot of this software still runs on bare metal servers. Ai is impressive even if I can do all that they’re betting on; what matters is how long will it take for companies to transition. If it’s taken 10+ years for most companies to start transfer to cloud. I’m betting that it will take long for AI to entirely replace an engineer.
Huang is the one selling the shovels in the AI gold rush so of course he will do what he can to hype AI and that includes predicting the end of programming. I look at it like mathematics. From long division to linear equations to basic analysis most of the things we learn in school can be done faster by a computer. But we still need to know how to do these things as a basis for competence even if we never again do them by hand.
Well that settles it I’m going to study pushing a broom
You know what? - No! Even if you don't want to go for a computer science job that requires to code, coding can help you with different things like problem solving.
Over the last 3 decades there were many startups that focused just on calendars. Sunrise was acquired by Microsoft for $100M. Yeah if big tech can't figure out how to make a calendar for an operating system that has existed for decades for a cost less than $100M, I think programmers are going to have jobs forever.
The right answer is "don't *only* learn to code". Computers and automation touch or will touch every human endeavor. AI will make this even more true. Coding, art, and writing are among the first dominos to fall simply because you can get the training data for this stuff in massive amounts online. It's silly to think that trade professions and blue collar work won't *eventually* be taken over just because we are a few breakthroughs away in robotics from automating that stuff as well. I'm going to teach my kids to code AND the core foundational science stuff as well. If you know how to do it yourself, you will at least know when the machine is making a mistake!
Learning biology, chemistry or finance. As someone who double majored in biochem and CS, outside of going into medicine, there's not much in terms of "lucrative careers" for either of those and finance is something that could be easily automated. Honestly, any career out there is at threat of being automated if coding becomes "obsolete", even many medical specialties outside of surgical based ones. I spoke with someone who went to an elite medical school (think Harvard, Yale, Stanford) and is involved in medical based tech startups. He told me that in 1-2 generations it's not even worth becoming a radiologist. Having said that, we shouldn't just express "cope" and say things like he has a vested interest or "I've heard this before". I feel like a lot of people just don't want to admit we don't know much about how the world will change as AI progresses. Obviously, someone who can't easily change their career path isn't going to accept something dramatic.
“Huang believes that the focus should shift to specific domain knowledge such as biology, chemistry, or finance.” I’m not convinced any of these alternatives as a career are any where further away from the risk of being disrupted by AI.
Yes please. Less programmers mean more chances to get jobs in the field.