Problem is, people want a silver bullet and there just isn’t one.

You need to create an economy that works for everyone where skilled workers from all professions can be successful. You can’t cram everybody into one job and expect everything to just work out.

Just about all jobs are important, and all workers deserve a living wage and fair compensation.

No amount of Band-Aid job stuffing is going to make up for a leadership that doesn’t believe that everyone ought to be able to live a good life.

As a software engineer who uses AI agents daily, let me tell you: now is as good a time as any to learn to code. LLMs won't replace any developers.

We are still a long ways away from AI being able to replace programmers. The amount of sheer bullshit code and wrong stuff it writes currently will cripple any information system currently keeping economies up and running.

Learn code anyway. LLMs can't code worth a shit, so there will be plenty of jobs available to clean up their mess.

The code will break and they will be back. People are buying into the bullshit until they realize its just marketing and has no practical application

It's not so much we need manual labor but skilled technical labor. Like plumbing, electrical, working with pulse logic controllers, Mason, welder, Nursing, emergency room technicians. Etc

The Learn To Code hype was being driven by employers to create a work surplus to drive wages down. Now those same employers think they can use AI instead.

I remain deeply skeptical that AI can solve the types of complex problems that require human thought. AIs will never be able to abstract away details correctly or design sensible workflows for boutique problems.

I've been hearing that line for more than 20 years. Anytime there is a tech downturn you hear it loudly - this has happened several times since 2000. However the fact remains that most coders make far more money than most people in construction. The exceptions tend to be people who own their construction business - though if you do the paperwork construction is one of the easiest businesses to work for yourself in once you have skills.

Typical pork cycle. By the time everybody was pushed towards IT/Coding and all the hundred ways to get into IT popped up, there were already too many people wanting an IT job. You were basically called stupid if you didn't "just learn to code" to get a well paid, stable job. It's your own fault for chosing a manual labor job instead of applying yourself and learning some coding skills! So everybody was pushed towards IT and made to feel stupid if they didn't try to learn coding.

Well, anyone who knows anything about the current iteration of AI knows that it's not really happening.

Btw, people have been saying that since GPT-3 (which everyone nowadays admits was kinda shit if it wasn't for the novelty), so only 5 years left until my career is over.

Lol anyone who thinks you don't need any programmer in 10 years of time will burn and crash in the next few years when finally realizing that AI isnt as intelligent as we're being sold.

Good luck trying to troubleshoot the code AI wrote tho.

The use of AI by non-developers to produce code will greatly increase the hourly rate I can charge.

The number of security holes produced is absolutely fabolous.

I'm fairly sure the "learn to code" thing was just a media campaign by corporations to assure an abundance of programmers, leading to decreased labor rates. Years earlier it was a push for electronic engineers and technicians.

As soon as I graduated, 'too many people are fighting for IT jobs, depressing salaries, meanwhile we're paying plumbers $100/hour.'

That was 2001. Almost 25 years later, I recently paid a plumber $300/hour.

Nah, it's just changed from

Learn to code

to

Learn to AI prompt engineer, bro!

Remember when Biden told coal miners to learn to code

"My liberal friends were saying, 'You can't expect them to be able to do that,'" Biden told his New Hampshire audience. "Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God's sake."

These politicians and policy makers don’t know what they talk about when it comes to tech. Any one who tells you that programming jobs will be gone because of AI has never written a complex piece of software before. Also the trades pay well because there is a shortage of workers. If everyone starts going into the trades wages will crater. It’s just cycles. I remember when nobody wanted to go into the trades because it didn’t pay well. This created the shortage of workers. And since salaries are better now because of the shortage lots of people want to go into the trades This will create an oversupply of tradespeople and the cycle will repeat.

the only job that can't be replaced is... venture capital guy

Yeah sorry that's my fault. I literally started to learn to code 2 months before all the articles started... Then all the YouTube videos were "no one will ever hire JR devs again!" and so I stopped. Since I've stopped it looks like the consensus has gone back to "learning to code is still a good idea."

I'll let other people enjoy a good life, so I won't try to learn it again and ruin it for everyone I'll stay in this shit factory lol

I have a great deal of job security by not being a software engineer and knowing "how to code"

they love me at my job in supply chain b2b marketing because I can build an API connector to the DoT database, and build a simple savings calculator in WordPress that connects to hubspot and Salesforce, or I can parse 20 csvs and exclude all duplicates in python...

all low level stuff but if you don't know what a variable even is it seems like magic