Ask HN: Would you enter Software Engineering again if starting from zero today?
Given the advances of AI, will SE as generally understood today be a promising field for students starting today?
Plus it seems like it's the best paying career that's 'practical' to get into for most people too. Like, menial office work is being automated or replaced. Most entry level jobs pay like crap with terrible working conditions. Trades and manual work are hard on the body, especially in the long run.
Software engineering is something that anyone can learn without a specialised degree, which can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year based on the company and location, and which has a hell of a less luck involved than say, becoming an athlete, musician, influencer, etc.
If AI perfects its current abilities which is basically "intelligent autocomplete" then being a software developer will continue much as before except with less drudgery. Things like remembering how to write a linked list won't be useful skills anymore. The focus will switch to architecture rather than writing algorithms. Designing and testing systems rather than rewriting the same sort and search algorithms over and over in slightly different contexts. There'll still be drudge work, lots of compliance testing and proof reading. But overall speed of development work will go up a lot and we'll type a lot less.
However, if AI is able to reach the next level where it can generate entire applications then the job of software developer will change drastically (this is probably several levels up actually). If we reach a point where you can say "create me a highly secure and performant email application that can run in the browser and that has the potential to scale up to a hundred million users" and then get a result that works (after some rounds of refinement and tweaking), then we're in a new paradigm. In this case I can see the job of software developer switching to being one of testing for security and compliance, at least until we reach a point where AI can do that too.
... However, amazing as ChatGPT is, it's a long, long way from this right now and my personal opinion is that the current technology is not sufficient to reach this level. But AI research is progressing at an incredible speed right now so who knows? Maybe there's already been a breakthrough that will allow this and it's sitting on some researcher's desk awaiting publication right now.
As to whether young people should still train to be software engineers: absolutely. Skills are transferable between domains and writing software teaches you to think logically and split tasks up into small manageable chunks. This is useful in many areas of life. If the AI takes our jobs, we'll find new ones.
If, by then, AI and automation have reduced the number of available jobs to the point where people smart enough to learn software development can't switch careers, then we'll have bigger problems than worrying about choosing the wrong career. We should probably be thinking about how to overthrow the oligarchy and redistribute the world's wealth instead. Maybe we can ask the AI to create a plan for doing so.
This is already the case with libraries. Who implements a sort method outside of an interview?
The profession itself is mid-tier, but there are plenty of opportunities within the field to have a high status position.
Then I could just find ways to make money easily and also understand math at a much deeper which is something I believe has kept me from getting further faster.
With the exception of the 0.1% exceptionally good programmer, SE should only be a tool.
As someone with an engineering background, I have always regretted leaving a possible "real" engineering career to become a SE.
However, one of the first victims of AI explosion will be real engineering jobs where the rules are somewhat clear.
AI is probably going to put a lot of power in hands of people who exploit human inefficiencies and weakness, like lawyers, advertisers, marketeers, politicians ....
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