Ask HN: Future Career Moves

3 points by mickmack_ 3 years ago | 7 comments

So I am currently employed in a rather large US tech company in Europe as a software engineer, I have a masters in comp sci etc etc. I have 3 more years of RSU stocks. I reckon with the speed of generative AI, that lines up pretty well with when my usefulness will be roughly equal to 0.

Problem is I am now 32, will then be 35. It might be a bit late to start a new career path at that stage, so should I pull the trigger now instead? I am thinking either plumbing or carpentry as the EU has a new directive where every house has to be above a certain energy threshold, which should give me some respite for a while.

What would you do in my situation?

MilnerRoute 3 years ago |

You have to consider that you're wrong that it's just 36 months until your usefulness is 0. (I mean, why not 72 months?) You just don't know that with that level of certainty.

One scenario: some AI-written code makes a horrific mistake that makes the news. There's a huge backlash, and a number of companies decide they're more comfortable with human programmers. (Or at least, human programmer reviewing the code, or writing the code with an AI assistant.) Or for that matter, that there's legacy code at old-fashioned companies that just never got around to grafting on AI-powered programming tools. Bottom line: I think there will still be jobs for programmers, far beyond your three-year timeline.

A better question is: what do you want to do? If you really want to be a programmer, you could try "future-proofing" your skillset. (For example, going into AI programming -- the one job title that's going to increase in an AI-dominated future.)

My other bit of advice: start saving money now. Everyone should do this at your age. There's huge tax advantages to putting money into retirement accounts -- and it just grows and grows over the decades. (But also, if you're truly worried about your high-paying career ending -- then start socking it away now.)

MrVandemar 3 years ago |

> I reckon with the speed of generative AI, that lines up pretty well with when my usefulness will be roughly equal to 0.

Unless you are in a tight specialty area where the writing is on the wall, and you're already close to being replaceable, I think you're over-estimating things. We don't have the much-vaunted paperless office, we're still not really with it with driverless-cars, robots haven't replaced us all yet and we have more work rather than less: so much of what people thought was the future is really a bunch of stuff that isn't there yet, or is not going to actually happen.

I'm nearly 50, and what I've learned is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

> It might be a bit late to start a new career path at that stage.

You can start whenever. There's a story of a woman, at 80, who said she wished she'd taken up violin at 60. "If I had, I could've been playing for 20 years".

matt3210 3 years ago |

I keep thinking "nobody is going to have an AI design X" but I couldn't think of X where it was likely...

niij 3 years ago |

You think a Masters in Computer Science will be useless in 3 years?

mickmack_ 3 years ago | |

100%. Once the cost of the context window lessens as it naturally will, as well as the window itself increases then you will have the entire code base in the AI memory. Then literally anyone, a PM, CEO, lunch lady etc. Could add whatever feature requested in plain english in seconds.

Only value left would be in cutting edge research but that is a very hard area to get into frankly. Maybe IoT could be something.

niij 3 years ago | | |

I guess we'll see how it plays out. I'm much less convinced that any person off the street will be able to write and validate most software tasks in 3 years, LLM or not.

I'll wait until redundancy (if that even happens) to figure it out. Make hay while the sun's shining and all that. Besides, Software Developers are educated and make up a small enough percent of the economy that I don't see an issue with the market absorbing the redundancies.