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Comment by chrysoprace | Hacker News Reader

There might be a time when software developers become obsolete, and I don't pretend to know the future, but if today's models are anything to go by then it won't happen any time soon.

At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

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I'll be curious to see how the next generation of highly skilled technical experts will be raised.

I have a nasty suspicion that far fewer of them will be, that CS and SE based professions will end up collapsing and consolidating into a handful of AI megacorporations and a guild-like elite of AI-herders will be what's left.

Guilds of Knowledge hoarders and AI adepts are my bet as well.

That's an interesting paradox of the current AI: useful enough to make the industry less competent (either directly by helping students to not learn or indirectly by replacing people in entry level formative jobs) while not being smart enough to replace all the chain to the top

> software developers become obsolete

> there’ll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts

Two different things.

Yes, many, many software developers will become obsolete in certain industries. It’s already happening. Putting on blinders doesn’t make it go away.

Yes, highly skilled technical experts will absolutely still be needed.

> At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

Well, this is kind of obvious right. Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine. The point is millions of highly skilled successful people of today could soon be below average category, jobless and can be called clueless, stuck in old ways who didn't simply see what is happening in the world.

And I am not blaming anyone. Despite seeing changes coming even I am not able to do much either. Just hilariously trying to do "cloud technology" courses which folks did decades back, made money and by now even forgot about it.

> Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine.

I would bet for the opposite. In a huge rush to optimization and job elimination, early career people suffer the most. However it also makes it impossible to switch careers, start from scratch, and etc.

In my experience, many highly experienced professionals are already below average. That's not to say they don't work hard, but if their solutions are on par or worse than what an LLM can produce, then they might see themselves out of a job if the LLM can work harder.

As another commenter said, we'll likely see a big change on the junior end, which will affect the more experienced hire pool as time goes on.

> At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

Why? There was a time when there was a need for highly skilled seamstresses. And we never developed the technology to do their jobs as well as they could. But people just learned to deal with mass produced clothes that didn’t fit perfectly because it was so much cheaper.

Not sure what the point is here because highly skilled seamstress is still a well-paying job, and all the mass-produced clothes are also still sewn by hand.

Where do you live that skilled seamstress is such a valuable job? Just because a handful of people make bank doesn't mean there is some large unfilled market for those skills. I can find some highly paid blacksmiths too, but 99% of people who know how to blacksmith well will never make more than a paltry sum if anything at all off of it.

Pretty much anywhere being a competent seamstress pays well. The difference between highly skilled and competent is open to interpretation. The difference between being competent and the very basics that can assemble cut and sew patterns is huge though. Pretty much anyone can do cut and sew with like a week of training which is all the mass produced clothes.

But someone who is competent and can do quality alterations, mending, customize patterns etc, is going to make decent money. But I'm pretty sure where ever you live there are seamstress working and making good money.

I'm not even really sure where automation would have impacted being a seamstress. Sewing machines have been around since the 1700's and if anything the demand for textiles has increased more than the speed of production.

Maybe you are thinking more of knitting, which is highly automated and used to be a big job, now it's basically just a hobby.

Blacksmiths just evolved to modern day welders, iron workers, boilermakers etc. Still pays well.

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