Ask HN: Are my software development skills going to be obsolete soon?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39637693

by ksd482 • 2 years ago

3 7 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I’m a backend software engineer and I have always loved working on the service/application layer.

Would my skills be irrelevant soon?

If the answer is yes, or even if it’s no, what all other skills can I invest in that will be in demand in the near/long term?

neom• 2 years ago

At least where I live, there is a real demand for skilled trades workers. Plumbers, electricians, woodworkers etc.

cc1012• 2 years ago

Having faced this issue through out my 56 years as a programmer, I can say with absolute certainty the answer is YES. My O29 keypunch programming skills are worthless. : )

Change in our profession is rapid, and only those who keep up with the right technology survive. How to pick the right technology? Aggressively seize opportunities when they arise and learn on the job. Change is so widespread and varied, it is often impossible to anticipate and prepare in advance. It is with good reason that career and careen are so similar.

Good luck. It is an exciting career.

syndicatedjelly• 2 years ago

What are some of your favorite skills that you have acquired through your career?

cc1012• 2 years ago

Structured programming was a life saver. Lack of its discipline was literally life-threatening. You can not know how grim things were for me before it came along.

Object Oriented Programming was nearly as life changing. Learning OOP was damn near a religious experience.

Learning these two things were among the high points in my life.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Skipping every other shiny new thing may not help with picking the right technology, but it certainly helps avoid the opportunity cost of learning all the wrong ones.

bhaney• 2 years ago

Anyone capable of predicting the future well enough to reliably answer your question would be spending their time making a killing off the stock market, not answering questions on HN like a fortune teller. Nobody actually knows the answer to what you're asking any better than you probably do. It's all guessing with different amounts of undeserved confidence.

My personal position is that it hardly matters, and a takeoff scenario where AI can properly replace complex knowledge workers (I assume this is what you're worrying about) is more or less assured to infect every other kind of work in a fairly negligible timeframe as it continues to improve. A machine intelligence exhibiting exponential growth that can already engineer software isn't going to be too far off from designing and manufacturing equipment to efficiently produce physical machines that it can operate. The question that everyone's arguing about is whether or not there's any intelligence in the system in the first place. If there is, it seems very unlikely that it'll hit a convenient growth wall right between the skills of human-level software engineering and marginally superhuman robotics design.

I'm continuing on with business as normal, with the assumption that if I get bit by AI, everyone else will be soon to follow and I won't be at any particular disadvantage for long.

gregjor• 2 years ago

This question asked over and over. I understand the worry but… don’t worry.

I commented at length in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39611611

Ask HN: Are my software development skills going to be obsolete soon?

Related Stories