THE FUTURE OF PROGRAMMING: SHOULD I STILL LEARN TO CODE? 😉
I don’t give our career advice without deep knowledge of the individual and the industry. I have a few cognitive flaws and that is overestimating people, and I find that it’s counterproductive.
However, I would say that the population of most white collar jobs will decrease, and rather drastically, on the scale of the farming to labor, and the labor to automation, and clerical to computer shifts.
So any opinion anyone gives on the future is worth whatever monetary bet they are willing to put on it, and nothing more. Me included.
That said, I see programming very quickly elimiating programmers per se, and instead, the work left to people who tell AI’s what to program, and people who tell AI’s what to test, and what to fix or improve – and so ‘programming’ will require fewer people. Even if I suspect the high end will always consist of ‘cunning humans’ who augment their theories with AIs that make testing those thories cheaper.
Example, when I first started writing applications I was surpised how much more productive I was than the prevoius generation of programmers (cobol fortran etc). Then when I built my first consulting companies, as the PC world replaced the iron and expanded further into more niches, then it might take 25-75 people to write some software application. But within a few years that number dropped to five. Same thing with games. I wrote some amazing games in assembler when in my early twenties. But today it can either take a whole studio many years to produce a game, or an individual just a few months.
The difference ‘now’ is that we have been rapidly increasing the population of programmers, and we have been producing a lot of bad (sh**t) code, because the browser tech encourages bad (sh**t) code. So I expect AIs to not only replace masses of programmers writing bad (sh**t) code, but that such a replacement will add to a change in the browser tech (long overdue). Furthermore if you look at my company’s app (which is on hold at the moment) it replaces dozens of other apps, becasue most apps aren’t, apps or platforms, they’re features begging to be consolidated.
So what I look at that horizon I see work to be done in programming, and perhaps more better code, but I can’t tell if a drop in the existing employment is short and mediumterm, or long term. Or whether the meaning of programming is just shifting to using english instead of progrmming languages and that many more people will be needed to produce better software more cheaply.
Cheers
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