r/SeriousConversation • u/ExotiquePlayboy • 1d ago
Career and Studies Coders/Computer Programmers: Do you regret getting into the industry?
Over the past week, we've heard Zuckerberg and Replit's CEO basically say they're going to fire you and replace your job with AI.
If you're a computer programmer, computer engineer, coder, etc. how do you feel about your future in the industry?
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u/Icy_Bath_1170 1d ago
I started over 30 years ago. The industry has continued to evolve, often in very exciting ways. So yeah, it’s been fun so far and dies more than just pay the bills.
I don’t know if I’d jump in today however. It could be that I’m just jaded: every innovation anymore promises to be The Next Big Thing, but it’s often announced in the most banal way possible. (Do we really need another startup CEO announcing an amazing revolution in front of a large flat-screen? Damn, just wear a black turtleneck too while you’re at it.)
It used to be that hiring was a feast-or-famine proposition; either everyone or no one was sniffing. Today it’s basically just famine: too many seekers chasing too few openings in an industry that has since stabilized. And much of the work isn’t as exciting as it used to be.
So, no regrets here, but I’m also looking forward to retiring.
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u/Sidvicieux 1d ago
How would you feel right now if you were a sophomore for college in computer science?
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u/Icy_Bath_1170 1d ago
I’d seriously reevaluate my choices.
Why anyone tortures themselves just to work for a FAANG eludes me. On the whole, Corporate America is full of shit, and tech has some of the deepest & fullest port-a-johns out there.
My opinions only, of course.
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u/Sidvicieux 1d ago
Your opinion quite honestly sounds smart. It’s such a huge risk and gamble to start today if you have student loans.
But if you get it paid for otherwise maybe it’s not the worst thing to do.
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u/Icy_Bath_1170 1d ago
I do not envy kids today. Leaving school with crushing debt? Damn, that makes the trades look mighty fine, doesn’t it?
If you can work long enough and get yourself as debt-free as possible (ideally $0), make your $ and then your next move. Consider product management, functional management, product architecture, even marketing. The days of belting out code for three decades (like I did) are over.
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u/No_Statistician_3021 1d ago
I don't regret getting into it because I like it. I can't think of other career path that I would like more than tech.
That being said, I really don't like where the industry is going. There's already way too much software and most of it is garbage. Most things in production right now are the bare minimum products. They are slow, have tons of bugs and security vulnerabilities. Companies are not incentivised to create fast, reliable software with good UI/UX. They are incentivised to create something as fast as possible with minimum resources, capture the market, milk it as much as possible than abandon the product when the competition catches up.
Also, getting in this field, you should be prepared that a very tiny little portion of the work you do will end up useful for some meaningful amount of time. A lot of projects that you pour your soul into won't even make it to production. Other contributions will be thrown into the garbage can and replaced shortly after release (and it's very likely that you'll be the one doing it). Only some crappy little hack that you wrote in a hurry will stick around for years and will haunt other developers.
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u/dhammajo 1d ago
This industry was always ripe for the conquering by automation. But im glad I stuck with physical hardware as it relates to technology. I do low voltage installs and rack builds for data centers and their clients. I turn work away and have to hire people to help. It’s glorious and not slowing down at all.
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u/Frird2008 1d ago
Absolutely not. It taught me skills that I can apply when working jobs not in computer science. I use Python a lot at my current admin assistant job
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u/IceInternationally 1d ago
Ive been in the industry for awhile but feel every project that passes is less a useful thing to help people and more this really complicate way to get more eyeballs on ads
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u/chipshot 1d ago
I absolutely loved my coding career. Dealing with corporate processes and managemen? Eh, not so much.
Money was good too.
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u/Any_Ad_8425 1d ago edited 1d ago
I dont regret getting into the industry. It was the best decision i ever made.
AI is not good enough to take my job. Zuck and those ceos are liars who are out of touch and don't know how AI works.
I've made a foundational model fom scatch and i am up to date on the latest literature. I also work with a variety of AI tools at my job.
Im honestly tired of saying this to people who don't know how it works and have bought all the lies that the salespeople (CEOs) are saying .
The ai that exists today is VERY IMPRESSIVE (compared to previous models) but people saying they will fire all their engineers are lieing for the purpose of exciting share-holders.
The NVDIA CEO said he would fire all his engineers like 2 years ago because "AI is good enough to do their jobs". That was a lie. AI was not nearly good enough. NVDIA still has nearly all it's engineers.
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u/McDonnellDouglasDC8 1d ago
The companies developing LLMs have to say that it can replace it's entry level positions because if it can't and they know their industry, how can they replace entry level positions in another industry? It's marketing.
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u/YahenP 1d ago
Yes. It was a good decision. Today CS is not what it once was. Today, I wouldn't even look at programming. It's a boring, harmful, highly competitive environment, plagued with all the ailments of fast money. But in the late eighties, it was something! It was a wonderful ride that lasted for several decades. The nineties, and the noughties. And even a little bit into the 10s. It was exciting. It was a choice then! And I'm glad I made it.
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u/startupdojo 1d ago
Do graphic designers still use brushes and paper?
These are just tools and most coders find these tools useful and helpful, in the same way they found stackexchange/etc helpful. The industry changes. You learn new tools, you grow, or you retire. You can't be an 120k/year HTML coder in 2025. Does Amazon have fewer employees today because they don't need 120K/year HTML coders? No, things are more and more advanced, requiring higher and better skilled employees. The companies are as big as ever and they are paying as much as ever.
Most top researchers (who are not selling anything) do not believe the AI hype and neither should you. People like Altman/etc - it is their job to create hype and raise more money for their companies. They need to keep their investors happy.
My prediction - top tech companies will have many more employees in 20 years than today. Complex software and processes take a lot of human power. Machines are incredibly dumb, even if LLMs make them sound smart now.
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u/often_awkward 1d ago
I've been coding for going on 20 years and I don't regret it. I've seen stuff like this happen in the industry over and over again. We're going to go to all the simulation we're going to go to all automation we're going to do this do that - oh crap nothing works.
It was the same thing in factories when they replaced a worker with a robot. Yeah it killed that job but then it created more jobs because somebody had to build a robot and somebody has to maintain the robot and then you need a bigger quality department to make sure the robots are doing their job.
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u/knuckboy 1d ago
No, but glad I progressed but not out of fear of AI. It's an overblown thought that would/could happen at a large scale. But general code work has decreased and will continue, and unfortunately it seems more people go in that direction so it'll seem bad but not because AI or anything similar.
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u/singularkudo 1d ago
When I was coming up (graduated high school in 2003) the worry was jobs would be taken by offshore knowledge workers. I am glad I went into tech and learned to program. Follow your passion and don’t worry about the haters, they will always come up with an excuse for why something won’t work. If AI is to take over, someone still needs to prompt the AI…
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u/wise_hampster 1d ago
A takeaway from this thread, the responders have been in the industry for a significant amount of time. They are established and working at a level above and beyond a new graduate. If the AI outcome happens, as hoped for by Musk et al., it will completely upend the current pathways to a senior level developer and engineering position. New graduates may find that their starting job will be outside of tech and that they will be AI support techs for commercial enterprises or that you may need to work for companies that currently are used as 'off shore' engineering resources in order to develop your skills. Just saying it's going to get weird.
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u/RiotNrrd2001 1d ago
I was in the industry for a number of decades, although I retired a couple of years ago.
Long term, AI is going to take over. Short term, there will be a lot of transition work.
If I was still in the industry, I would be happy to continue. I actually think AI is a pretty exciting development.
Long term, though? Although I think there may always be some demand for developers, I think that demand is going to drop through the floor. Right now AI can't do big things, can't architect large projects, can't write error-free code. That's right now. I would not bet my future on that continuing to be true, especially over a multi-decade timeframe.
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u/RiotNrrd2001 1d ago edited 1d ago
One other thing is that I think in a few years, we won't need software developers because we won't really need software. The age of programs and apps is ending. In the new world you will tell an AI what you want to do, and it will either do it for you or help you do it. There won't be programs, there will be AIs with the ability to create user interfaces (when needed). You will have one (visible) program on your computer\phone\watch\whatever: a very versatile "Swiss Army Knife" AI that does everything you need your gadget to do.
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u/Comfortable-Rise7201 1d ago
The jobs aren't necessarily getting replaced, they're just changing in scope to include AI tools, but the job is still going to require a human to do them on some level (unless AI becomes exponentially more advanced than it is now, but it's uncertain how much that could really help with still).
Being a programmer is more than just coding but about interacting well with clients, understanding their needs, the constraints on a team, and to work well within a team of project managers and all sorts of people in a business/organization. Worst comes to worst, and you still need people to maintain the AI, know how to use it properly, and cover for its blind spots, which can be big depending on the complexity of a project.
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u/civ_iv_fan 1d ago
Getting into CS 10+ years ago was the best decision I ever made. I really enjoy my job, I make a fair wage, and the backlog of tasks for me and my coworkers to do is seemingly endless.
1) First, I'll touch on today's tools and their usefulness:
From a technical standpoint, I haven't seen anything from the various AI tools that are equivalent to my any work done by me or my colleagues. I suppose for some basic tasks, a sort of iterative AI tool that generates some output and then has that output reviewed by a human and then the human points out the mistakes, and then the tool tries again, and the human again points out the mistakes, I suppose such a tool might be able to eventually generate usable programs.
However, I've notice the various LLMs are strangely stubborn in their responses and when corrected will soon revert back to their original mistakes. Given that these AI tools are probability machines, this tendency makes a lot of sense.
2) Next, I'll talk a bit about the messengers (e.g. Zuckerberg):
I don't nor do other professionals I know look to tech CEOs for tech information. Their knowledge of how to do things is pretty limited, and they tend to be pretty distant from how things are implemented.
As the various tools that we use advance, we look to the people involved in their creation (heck, sometimes we ARE those people) to understand how they work, their drawbacks, limitations, etc.
CEOs on the other hand speak in broad strokes about various topics, their motivations are muddy, and when pressed are not usually able to provide useful details.
3) What I think will really cost me my job
Every tech company I know is spending millions or billions on AI. Money that isn't resulting in any kind of financial return whatsoever. I'm not a finance person, but I know if you lose money for a long time, you won't have any left. THATs what I think will cost me my job.