When I was in school, decades ago now, very few people went into CS compared to other majors. Everyone I knew going into it did it because they loved it. I would have done it regardless of the career opportunities because I want to build stuff.
Interviewing candidates over the years since then, my experience has been there are still very few of those passionate nerds and a lot of people who did it for other reasons, like the money or similar. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. I don’t fault people for it.
Maybe if we get very lucky, it will go back to a relatively few passionate people building stuff because it is cool?
I initially pursued my real passion which was math and physics and got a cold water bucket to the face only after grad school.
I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0".
And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more.
I don't look forward for every other software engineering branch to become like that.
I think we basically lost this when software/computer/internet entered the mainstream. Now, like everything else, it has to be bland, unoffensive, and a commodity.
But let me ask you this: has AI made life easier for illustrators, book authors, or musicians? They were affected by the technology earlier on. If they don't embrace AI, they face increased competition from cheaply-produced products that the average consumer can't distinguish from the "real" thing. But if they embrace it, they can't differentiate themselves from the cheaply-produced content! In fact, for artists, the best strategy may be to speak out very vocally against AI, reject it early on, and build a following of like-minded consumers.
Can you sit down with an unfamiliar domain and develop enough genuine curiosity to get good at it, without a syllabus or a credential dangling in front of you?
The kids who'll do well in a world where the field-to-security mapping keeps shifting are the ones who can self-direct — not the ones who picked the right field in 2026.
Although full disclosure I'm short humans and very long paperclips.
What does that mean in practice? Are there specific stock market bets you've made because of that world view?
tldr; Just like knowledge work, most trade stuff is probably mostly repeated (i.e. very trainable) task with a small amount of taste and discernment applied. The repeated will be trainable, the discernment may be trainable. I don't think the physical world is necessarily any safer than the knowledge world.
That being said, the absolute focus on trades from the fed right now just reeks of the wild pendulum swing. It used to be 'go to college to get a good job' then we had too many college grads. In ten years we'll have a glut of people trained in the trades with no prospects.
It just keeps swinging back and forth and somehow Joe Regularworker keeps losing.
Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.
https://serjaimelannister.github.io/wsj-article/
and I have also uploaded the github link on archive.org for persistence/archival purposes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260322213950/https://serjaimel...
I hope that this might help some people and I have another friendly suggestion to please donate to archive.org :-)
Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2
related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"
Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.
These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.
1) The supply of work will skyrocket when everyone will flock there for work
2) Demand will plummet as the white collar people who bought these services will loose their jobs and income
And of course if robotics will get solved to an acceptable degree most of those jobs will also get mostly automated.
When a robot can reliably do this work, I think it can reliably do any human job that requires physical ability and judgement.
> People stop learning programming.
> Programmers become scarce.
> Programmers become valuable again.
Maybe it's wishful thinking but I'm not going to be surprised if it plays out like this. In some sense the reverse happened over the last couple of decades - everyone and their mother got into IT and the industry became saturated.
There were always unqualified people coming out of college, but the amount of people in interviews that can literally do nothing these days seems higher than before.
There was always some cohort of people that somehow managed to graduate from college with a CS degree, and seemingly not learning anything, or at least not learn how to even write basic code (independently).
But it seems like AI is not reducing that percentage.
ramesh31•1h ago
Ifkaluva•1h ago
crop_rotation•1h ago
kokanee•1h ago
follie•1h ago
magic_hamster•1h ago
Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already.
Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?
generic92034•1h ago
mycall•39m ago
skybrian•57m ago
bossyTeacher•1h ago
Post-LLMs, the value of this (as differentiator) has dropped to zero. Domain knowledge (also known as business knowledge) is the obvious area to skill up on. It simply means knowledge about the area your organisation is working in. Whether it is yogurt delivery logistics, clothing manufacturing supply chain systems, etc. That's the real differentiator now. Anyone can invert a binary try in 5 minutes using an LLM. But designing a software system knowing well the domain your organisation is in is invaluable.
forgetfulness•1h ago
kurthr•1h ago
At the same time medicine, hardware design, good industrial, and specific domain knowledge (problems you solve in assembly or control loops) that are fundamentally proprietary and aren't well documented will continue to have value even when LLMs make solving the problems around them easier. Those might have increased leverage, at least for this round of LLMs. Now, maybe they succeed in World Models, but that is not today.
Really, I don't know what "kids these days" are going to do. I couldn't have predicted the influencer boom 15 years ago, but I also think there are geopolitical risks that are probably bigger than that shift, and "synergized" with the push to AI Everything, it doesn't look like a good time to be a learning/working human.
alephnerd•16m ago
Ain't nobody gonna hire a code monkey - you are being hired based on whether or not you can reason and enable workflows via tech.
If you're only name to grace is you can write pretty Python but cannot architect at scale or care to actually understand the bigger picture of what is being built and why, you will get offshored to someone who is also using Claude Code.
If I'm working on a fullstack for a cloud security product like Wiz, I'd rather hire an average developer who deeply understands the cloud security industry versus a NodeJS doc wiz who has zero empathy or interest in learning about cloud security. There are too many of the latter and not enough of the former in the American scene now, and especially on HN.
If HNers cry about how cut-throat the American market has become, they haven't seen it in China or India.
travisdrake•16m ago