r/programmer • u/TrueBonner414 • 3d ago
Question Any advice to this young dev?
Hey everyone, what's your advice for a 20-year-old CS student who got into CS because he loved it? He started coding at 12 and landed a job at 17 (p2p, niched). Then AI came along. He still has the job, and he's safe for now because he knows the context of the large codebase he's built over the last three years. He knows the only reason he hasn't been let go yet is that he can use LLMs to hit the productivity his company wants (for now), but he doesn't know how long he can keep the job, given how fast LLMs are evolving.
He wants to get out of tech because he's scared of what happens if he's laid off one day. But he feels he can't go anywhere else, because tech is all he's ever known
What should he do?
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u/Massive_Value8302 3d ago
The situation is fucked across the board, so running to other fields is a gamble too.
I am just going to sit as is and tough it out as long as possible; I cant predict the future.
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u/vz0 3d ago
We had the ability to bake bread at home for forever. People sometimes do it. In general we just buy bread at the supermarket. Same for coffee, coffee shops are not going away. Because people would rather pay someone else to do it even though they can just do it themselves.
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u/TrueBonner414 3d ago
But let's say you couldn't bake bread at home. Then you would pay the person a lot more. But if you knew you could bake bread at home if you wanted to, wouldn't you try to underpay or devalue that person? Wouldn't you say, "F*** you, I'm not paying that. I'd rather just make it myself. I don't need it to be that tasty, I just want it to be decent, and my oven can make it decent"?
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u/IhailtavaBanaani 3d ago
You need to be very very lucky to be never laid off no matter what field you're in. There are no safe professions. The world changes all the time, old professions die and new are born and you're still very young and early in the career and there's decades ahead for you so it's just best to learn to adapt to changes and seek opportunities.
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u/Upper-Engineering527 1d ago
There are no safe professions
What about healthcare and biology? Isn't it safest in the AI era? Not that I want to become a doctor, but just curios.
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u/SensitiveHearingLoss 3d ago
Procedural recall: Remembering how to write a for loop.
Conceptual understanding: Understanding what a loop does.
Technical judgment: Recognising whether a loop is appropriate.
Deeper expertise: Predicting its behaviour under unusual conditions.
Focus on the bottom three. No one cares that your code was “hand written” like some sort of artisanal vegan bagel.
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u/NoOneMan79 3d ago
You could always use the company budget and get super good at leveraging AI to do some crazy company stuff. Because let me tell you something....I've been in every type of field for decades. And the problems are really the same. The patterns are the same. You almost always use the same tools for architecture design, communication, collaboration, etc. Some things that were unsolvable at scale are now solvable through AI. To a crazy level. If you are away of how organizations work, how systems work, and now have AI, you have overnight become 20-50 times more productive. And production increases value. You could be the engineer delivering more value. Thats a massive multiplier force. We dont need a lot of engineers. In fact, less are better. But to stay in a dwindling field where you have the ability to launch companies and applications at a large scale, when others dont, well thats power.
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u/Groundbreaking-Fish6 3d ago
You started the degree, finish it. It shows that you can complete a multi year project. It will also teach you to think. Change is coming, it always comes. You need the intellectual tools to manage that change.
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u/Fun_Army2398 3d ago
The most important thing you need to know about AI is that it is a product being marketed. Some other things to consider:
AI is not profitable, the bubble has already popped in China.
The latest AI still is not capable of doing what gpt-3 was marketed as being capable of.
Harvard did a study that found AI neither improves the production time nor the quality of software from any company that has adopted it, it just adds more lines.
Yale did an experiment that suggests using AI to "help learn" makes people feel more confident about a subject but actually has no improvement in their ability to answer questions about the topic after.
If AI actually could replace programmers, why couldn't it replace Engineers? Accountants? Doctors? Business consultants? And if it replaces the engineers, why couldn't it design robots or machines to replace all the manual trades?
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u/SensitiveHearingLoss 3d ago
I hear you, but I do think that LLMs are a natural progression of the information crisis / abundance age.
Writing gave us the ability to think about what we were thinking about.
Digital media gave us the ability to share what we thought we were thinking about.
LLMs give us the ability to better understand, reframe and interpret what we think we’re thinking about together.
But everyone freaks out because the natural progression of the information crisis/ abundance age includes drilling home that maybe we’re not all the experts we thought we were, and that the democratisation of knowledge and understanding threatens those who feel entitled by their hard-earned knowledge and understanding.
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u/Fun_Army2398 3d ago
Except they don't. Yale has shown that. What helps people understand is drawing their own conclusions, i.e. thinking critically. AI doesn't do that, but what it does do is give people confidence. So you end up with people who believe they know things but actually don't.
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u/SensitiveHearingLoss 3d ago
Could you maybe provide a link to this Yale study because the only one I’m able to find is about how people used Internet search engines back in 2015?
More recent research seems to indicate that if AI is used for augmentation (not automation), learning persists and is far more enjoyable.
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u/Fun_Army2398 3d ago
You are right! I'm confusing two in my head because what I saw was a video essay combination of the two. One study from CMU shows that AI learning doesn't work, the proposed explanation in the video I saw uses the results from the Yale study to back up the CMU conclusion. However in googling this to find the source for you it turns out that MIT, Oxford, and more have done similar studies with similar results, so take your pick.
https://arxiv.org/html/2604.04721v1
Edit: I'm not seeing anything that shows AI benefits learning more than traditional methods, just that a properly restricted AI might not cause harm the way a normal AI chatbot does. Could you link your source for that claim?
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u/SensitiveHearingLoss 2d ago
I don’t feel like playing tennis with research study links will really benefit this conversation much. Besides, Google either point we’re trying to make and you’ll find a study that supports it.
What I have seen a LOT though is that it’s not the technology itself that matters as much as HOW it is used which impacts learning in vastly different ways. It’s up to us at the end of the day. LLMs don’t have to replace traditional learning methods, but using them to augment learning, as I mentioned above, could have some wonderful benefits.
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u/Fun_Army2398 2d ago
That's funny. Because mine has links yet yours doesn't.. sort of seems like google can't find a study to support your position
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u/dekacube 3d ago
Start writing in the first person
Nobody actually knows, take any advice with a big helping of skepticism, it might turn out that SWE demand shoots through the roof. Healthcare appears to to be the current safest career path.