Ask HN: Is anyone seriously considering a career change? There may still be engineering jobs today, but I honestly wonder how long that can last and how long they'll still pay well. I'm in the middle of looking for my next engineering role but also wondering if I should be going back to school in my 40s instead. |
I'm 43 and I've been thinking I might just retire if I get laid off and can't find something new. I'm frugal and have enough saved up that I could make it work if I leave my high cost of living area.
I'm not worried about engineering jobs being eliminated. I'm more worried that companies are going to expect insane velocity because of these tools and I'm not going to be able to keep up in part because I care about quality. At my company, the people that use AI to generate the most code seem to get the most recognition.
With AI, every engineer will need to become a manager to manager one or more AI assistants who do a lot of the work. The good news is that this will not involve dealing with performance reviews, psychological problems, and raises. You will also remain close to the code.
Look at the manager role again, and see which parts of it will be needed to manage AI agents. Learn those parts from standard management books. You will kind of pivot, but still remain close to the code.
On the other hand, if all you enjoyed is typing in code, but hated working with product people to understand the intent, doing code reviews, or building software that is easy to QA, there will be fewer and fewer such jobs.
Communication is key, and it always has been.
I'm moving more to management after 13 years of IC work and being lead for the last year. We are all in on AI for everything at my company, and that's not just lip service.
Well... my timescale is 20 years. Many people reading this now are older than I will be in 20 years. So how will things look in 2046?
Can't say, but I find it worth thinking about.
To me it seems like the sentiment has already shifted among developers on what the scope of change we'll see with AI will be. It seems like at any point in time there's a lot of skepticism that it will ever be able to get over whatever the current big limitation right now is. But when thinking of careers they don't play out over 5 years or even 10 but 20 30 or more years.
If you are concerned about employability then I think going back to school or investing in a masters or some technical courses could be interesting. Or even moving to coordination/leader/engineer roles?
But if you have a hobby, maybe you could consider trying something different like either doing it in parallel, or maybe combining with engineering. e.g. I'm considering something like Blender3D + drawing using Grease pencil. Blender can be programmed with Python too, and this way I'd combine two things that I like.
I read it in a report, and I wrote it here in HN many times in the last few weeks: AI amplifies... It amplifies the success of the good professionals, and it amplifies the failure of the bad ones.
Good professionals are needed so that AI is used the proper way. I think that the way we do our job will change, but there will also be place for developers, PMs, POs, Team leaders, etc.
I'm not sure it's that bad if you do it full-time like any other student. Getting a degree should be doable even at 40+. I used to be a university lecturer in CS, and occasionally I got older students who did very well.
That being said, I think the issue is employability. You may get a degree, but is anyone getting to hire an older person with not experience?
Each progress hasn't been a full on "career change" but rather, a sort of side project I was interested in took over my entire world.
Doing theatre, I'd work with video guys. While in Video department, I did graphics to turn to Digital Content. While doing digital content, I automated a lot. learned to code Excel VBA, while trying to survive in a PA job, I automated Google Sheets While doing google sheets in a company, I side gigged doing online growth. While doing online growth, I learned to code. I coded my own site, I did more and more google sheets and created Better Sheets 5 years ago.
Now I play board games because I want to get off screen with friends/family. I am considering creating a physical gaming center/board game cafe. which might be a new career that I didn't go to school for and didn't have to even think about transitioning. If some side project becomes a full time work... great!
I started off as a javacript developer. Then I was a full stack SWE. Then I was an Applied AI Engineer. I think enterprises will have a need for folks with technical expertise to deliver value - often new software - for a long time.
Until an enterprise like capital one can operate without anyone in the organization knowing how any of their technical infrastructure works (never?) I expect I'll be able to find work.
In fact, during the push for workers of other jobs to get closer to dev, through vibe coding for example, it may be realized that there are workers who aren't good at their jobs and it's dev that's been filling in the gaps all along.
The first is certification for high-growth jobs that exist as short-term accidents of history and policy-making. Think of the droves of people doing rote medical billing and coding, mostly as an artifact of the current state of the US healthcare system. Or think of an over-saturated nursing specialization.
The second role of education has been the lowest rung on the ladder to join a prestige profession, like medicine or architecture. It takes a significant chunk of your lifetime, and there are ingrained cultural expectations around the age at which you do it and what your future prospects look like.
A lot of people who fantasize about a midlife pivot have no personal history with any other profession, and mostly seem to aim for occupations that are easy to describe and get saturated easily.
I love working with AI and agents.
But I don't know how long this will go, so I'm investing on getting fit again for random jobs like moving atoms.
Or realizing my life's dream: become a lifeguard in public swimming pool or learn the trades to maintain swimming pools. There's a shortage of them where I live and it's enough money to pay for food etc.
I love swimming and watch people happy enjoying the water, it's such good vibes I'd do this forever.
Our life is mostly suffering and grinding through... but people on swimming pools are always smiling, having a good time & having the basic pleasures of enjoying the water and the moment.
From what I saw, people might be able to produce code faster, but at least for now its design frays heavily at the edges (scaling, resiliency, security).
On back to school, I can personally report that I tried that and gave up because uni knowledge cramming felt much more boring compared to learning work-related stuff.
There will always be a demand for licensed Professional Engineers, the folks who can sign on the dotted line certifying something won't collapse and kill someone.
I think its up to your goals (you go after what drives you ) if its moeny then go wherever money-industries go, if its passion then go be creative and let the passion drives you.
Best of luck whatever you choose
I would have no problem leaving if something better came around, and I have no problem adapting if I need to, I just believe that there is going to be a MASSIVE increase in demand for high performing software professionals with experience... we just aren't seeing it right now because of the business cycle.
I'm pretty concerned for early career developers. The industry is failing them by 1) Allowing the early career devs to outsource their critical thinking to AI and 2) Actively hiring fewer early career devs because they're extracting more work from their existing develops with AI. They're failing themselves by relying too much on AI, and not developing those important long-term skills and intuitions.
For that reason I feel pretty safe in my (admittedly niche) career space, and have a similar prediction that in 5-10 years we will have created a experience gap that we can't fix. Experienced engineers with good troubleshooting and debug skills will be even more valuable.
My p(doom) is now so high and I feel the singularity is so close that I've decided I'm just going to make the most of the little time I have left when my job ends.
The considerations I'm making now are more about how I can prep for whats coming more broadly. I've been prepping for the biological threats AI presents for some time now, although these timelines largely assume malicious human actors.
I've also been prepping for various AI infrastructure attacks which might leave me without energy, water or food for a prolonged period of time.
I think I may be able to survive 5% of the "doom" scenarios which I like the odds of these days...
Still amazes me people are seeing what's happening around and just looking at the immediate changes that are coming in terms of their careers to be honest. Assuming doom isn't coming what are you even planning to reskill in that a clanker wouldn't be able to do better that you within a decade or two?
And even if clankers can't take your job, if there's only a small subset of jobs that humans can still do then everyone is going to be competing for those jobs and you're going to be paid horribly any way. If you're jobless we're all jobless and the economy doesn't need 1 in every 5 people to be plumbers.
These are fundamentally unserious concerns. It's only marginally more sane that the people suggesting those losing their jobs to AI in design or consumer service roles could just become prompt engineers. Project forward a decade and start prepping for that.
The economy is so messed up right now that the only jobs I found that didn't require a degree or several years of prior experience were hard labour for minimum wage. Even McDonald's apparently requires 3 years of experience.
So, my advice would be that school is expensive, wages are low, and if you're in a spot where you can reasonably get a decent paying job, you should take advantage of that. (as much as I would love to work in an industry that isn't the total shitshow that software is right now)
1) But can they pay you in the altcoin of your choice and what altcoin would that be?
2) Then have other disillusioned/perplexed/frustrated tech bros follow your processes and choices including using crypto debit cards.
3) Foster uptake with non-techies.
4) Embed the altcoin into real-world assets (tokenization) including the ones you own.
5) Wait for the altcoin value to explode.
Problem solved - well the problem isn't really financial or "AI" - it's communal and lack of shared vision which propagates wealth inequality.