Comment by WFHRenaissance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WFHRenaissance | Hacker News Reader

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GitHub Copilot arrives from the future. Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. It's probably already too late to mount a meaningful counter-revolution. The average software engineer's status and usefulness are eroding faster than ever. There's almost nothing you can do. If you're above average, I suggest you try to start a business or con a VC before this thing blows. If you're below average... good luck, and I mean that in the most sincere way. It's possible that a career pivot is your best bet. Eastern European devs were coming for your jobs anyways, but we just took a leap instead of a step with Copilot. Sure this is a bit exaggerated, but to be clear... in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

Sam Altman made the interesting observation that people who program might lose their jobs faster than people who move things around physically.

Which is funny when you think about it, but it does seem like it's headed in that direction.

I think a majority of Web jobs will be automated before most "trade" workers are automated. It just makes sense. The nature of Web work itself sort of self-documents the interfaces one would need to hand to a non-technical. Trade work on the other hand is dangerous, extremely context specific, and can't be done entirely from a datacenter.

this is really exaggerated and really really pretentious jesus

coding is only a fraction of SWEing, sure Copilot writes some code for you - but can it work with stakeholders, manage the complexity of a complicated code base, or any other part of a engineer's job

Gathering requirements will be the product manager's job. Implementation will be the job of the top fraction of our field. Complexity can be managed by a team of humans a fraction of the size of your current team. If you're a competent engineer, you have a better future ahead of you but if you're doing routine work or templating boilerplate... it's almost over for you.

And then you woke up

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