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Comment by yagodragon | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a similar situation. I have 1,5 year of experience working in a web dev full-stack job, but the FOMO is so strong with all the advancements in AI. I fear my skills won't be future-proof and eventually AI is going to take my job. These thoughts are taking a toll on my mental health and as a result, I can't focus on improving my skills because of the constant fear of me losing the hype train / making the wrong career decision.

Is this fear justified? How should I proceed? Is software development dead? So many questions and uncertainties...

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One thing you have to consider is how context plays a very important role in your job. AI does not have the context of your job/codebase and therefore can only do very small tasks that have probably already been done before (e.g. "Write a function that reverses a string" - which can be found in a few seconds by Googling).

You have nothing to worry about until we're able to feed entire codebases into an AI and have them generate features or fix bugs, and even then, having the context of what the task is on a human level requires even more advanced computing. We're just not there yet.

* if I were college age I'd definitely try to get as much exposure to AI-related courses as I can

* in our line of business nothing is future-proof, in 10 years your resume will retain at most 20% of the buzzwords you put on it now

* In the last 15 years backend development has lost its shine (interesting problems moved to DE/MLE or got replaced with cloud services). You stand a better chance with frontend development and native mobile Swift/Kotlin stuff is probably a natural extension

* it was said 20 years ago that software development was not a promising career and the developers would be replaced by this or that (e.g. RAD/no-code, AI, automation, outsourcing); IMO jobs moving to cheaper locations is actually the highest risk with FWH normalized at scale for the first time in history

If AI will be able to do your SWE job I can't really see why it wouldn't be able to do basic to mid-level AI work. So in that case lots of data scientists will lose their job as well...with perhaps a tiny tiny minority of freak geniuses still developing and experimenting with better AI techniques. I see where you're coming form but don't make huge changes based just on fear. You'll keep being afraid even if you move to AI...it's in our DNA to be worried all the time.

1. watch out for your mental health 2. learn about time management 3. give yourself time to learn new things and experiment with them, it should be joyful experience

I'll be honest, ChatGPT gave me a ton of FOMO. Suddenly it felt like I was irrelevant and useless.

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