This has been my cope mantra so far. I don't mind if my job changes a lot (and ideally loses the part I dislike the most — writing the actual code), and if I find myself in a position where my entire skillset doesn't matter at all, then well a LOT of people are in trouble.
I have seen programmers express that they dislike writing code before and I wonder what the ratio of people who dislike it and people who like it, is. For me, writing code is one of the most enjoyable aspects of programming.
It's my favourite part, except maybe debugging. I really like getting into the guts of an issue and working out why it happens which I suppose will be around for a while yet with AI code. It's a lot less fun with transient network issues and such though.
If you dislike writing code were you pushed into this field by family, education or because of money?
Because not liking code and being a dev is absolutely bizarre to me.
One of the most amazing things about being able to "develop" in my view is exactly in those rare moments where you just code away, time flies, you fix things, iterate, organise your project completely in the zone - just like when i design, paint or play music, do sports uninterrupted, it's that flow state.
In principle i like the social aspects but often they are the shitty part because of business politics, hierarchy games or bureaucracy.
I enjoy the part where I'm putting the solution together in my head, working out the algorithms and the architecture, communicating with the client or the rest of the team, gaining understanding.
I do not enjoy the next part, where I have to type out words and weird symbols in non-human languages, deal with possibly broken tooling and having to remember if the method is called "include" or "includes" in this language, or whether the lambda syntax is () => {} or -> () {}. I can do this second part just fine, but it's definitely not what I enjoy about being a developer.
Interesting, i also like the "scheming" phase, but also very much the optimisation phase.
I completely agree that tooling, dependencies and syntax / framework github issue labyrinths have become too much and GPT-4 already alleviates some of that but i wonder if the scheming phase will get eaten too very soon from just a few sentences of business proposal - who knows.
The worst future is where there still are plenty of jobs, but all of them consist of talking to an AI and hoping you use the right words that gets them to do what you need it to.
Not really. As long as there is no universal basic income, any job with decent salary beats unemployment. The job may suck, but the money allows you to do fun stuff after work.
