If AI + a nontechnical person familiar with business needs can replace me in coding, I expect something resembling a singularity within 5 years.
I think that software engineering is a great career if you have an aptitude for it. It’s also way easier to tell if you are good at it relative to most other careers (ie, Leetcode, Hackerrank, and other question repositories can help you understand your relative performance).
So my answer is that either AI can’t automate software engineers for a while, or they’ll automate every career quite soon after software engineering. Maybe 30% of my job is automating other people’s. As a result, software engineering is a pretty good bet as a career.
I’d be curious to hear from folks who can imagine worlds where software engineering is nearly fully automated, and we don’t automate all jobs that decade.
Thanks for that perspective. Given that I don’t have experience in the programming space, I couldn’t project a timeline between fully automated software production and AGI—but your estimate puts something on the map for me. It is disconcerting though, as there are many different assumptions and perspectives about AGI, and a lot of uncertainty. But I also understand that certainty isn’t something I should expect on any topic—let alone this one . Moreover, career inaction isn’t an option I can afford, so I’ll likely be barreling down the software dev path very soon.
If AI + a nontechnical person familiar with business needs can replace me in coding, I expect something resembling a singularity within 5 years.
I think that software engineering is a great career if you have an aptitude for it. It’s also way easier to tell if you are good at it relative to most other careers (ie, Leetcode, Hackerrank, and other question repositories can help you understand your relative performance).
So my answer is that either AI can’t automate software engineers for a while, or they’ll automate every career quite soon after software engineering. Maybe 30% of my job is automating other people’s. As a result, software engineering is a pretty good bet as a career.
I’d be curious to hear from folks who can imagine worlds where software engineering is nearly fully automated, and we don’t automate all jobs that decade.
Thanks for that perspective. Given that I don’t have experience in the programming space, I couldn’t project a timeline between fully automated software production and AGI—but your estimate puts something on the map for me. It is disconcerting though, as there are many different assumptions and perspectives about AGI, and a lot of uncertainty. But I also understand that certainty isn’t something I should expect on any topic—let alone this one . Moreover, career inaction isn’t an option I can afford, so I’ll likely be barreling down the software dev path very soon.