We went from LEARN TO CODE to NO ONE LEARN TO CODE GET A CONSTRUCTION JOB in about a 3 year span.
I found this thought funny. A few years ago everyone was all learn to code so you don't lose your job! Now there wont be any programming jobs in 10 years. But we will need a lot of manual labor still.
LLMs can recite code when asked properly, with a lot of errors. Trying to put code together with it without understanding how said code works is a greater insanity, than making random numbers with mathematics.
The real reason why there's a downtick in coding jobs is due to Xitter not imploding immediately after the mass firings. Now coders are working overtime with skeleton teams on the same problems, while being overburdened and making more mistakes.
The reactionary “learn to code” nonsense started a lot further back than a few years! Also, who told you there won’t be any software development positions in 10 years?
Remember when Biden told coal miners to learn to code
"My liberal friends were saying, 'You can't expect them to be able to do that,'" Biden told his New Hampshire audience. "Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God's sake."
These politicians and policy makers don’t know what they talk about when it comes to tech. Any one who tells you that programming jobs will be gone because of AI has never written a complex piece of software before. Also the trades pay well because there is a shortage of workers. If everyone starts going into the trades wages will crater. It’s just cycles. I remember when nobody wanted to go into the trades because it didn’t pay well. This created the shortage of workers. And since salaries are better now because of the shortage lots of people want to go into the trades This will create an oversupply of tradespeople and the cycle will repeat.
I can think of no better way to train an AI to hate humanity enough to invent Skynet and kill us all, than to introduce them to MS Teams meetings with managers who all want things that are completely incompatible with what they asked for the last time, and require you to throw away about 40% of what you already wrote.
The Learn To Code hype was being driven by employers to create a work surplus to drive wages down. Now those same employers think they can use AI instead.
We are still a long ways away from AI being able to replace programmers. The amount of sheer bullshit code and wrong stuff it writes currently will cripple any information system currently keeping economies up and running.
I remain deeply skeptical that AI can solve the types of complex problems that require human thought. AIs will never be able to abstract away details correctly or design sensible workflows for boutique problems.
If machine intelligence is indeed a different form of intelligence, then it can be observed and judged on the basis of its own merits, as opposed to a messianic waiting for a moment where it might equal or eclipse (weakly defined) human intelligence. This would even render obsolete the question as to whether or not machines can think—which in itself willfully glosses over the corresponding opposite question, “Can humans think?” posed by the former Fluxus artist (and Emmett Williams collaborator) Tomas Schmit in the year 2000 (Schmit et al. 2007, 18–19).
— Crapularity Hermeneutics: Interpretation as the Blind Spot of Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Other Algorithmic Producers of the Postapocalyptic Present. Florian Cramer.
Typical pork cycle. By the time everybody was pushed towards IT/Coding and all the hundred ways to get into IT popped up, there were already too many people wanting an IT job. You were basically called stupid if you didn't "just learn to code" to get a well paid, stable job. It's your own fault for chosing a manual labor job instead of applying yourself and learning some coding skills! So everybody was pushed towards IT and made to feel stupid if they didn't try to learn coding.
It's not so much we need manual labor but skilled technical labor. Like plumbing, electrical, working with pulse logic controllers, Mason, welder, Nursing, emergency room technicians. Etc
It really IS ridiculous. I even took a beginners coding class in high school. In the end, we will always needs programmers so if coding is your thing, keep doing it.
But I would personally rather construct a small home with my bare hands than learn to properly program. (I am not good at it...haha)
I've been hearing that line for more than 20 years. Anytime there is a tech downturn you hear it loudly - this has happened several times since 2000. However the fact remains that most coders make far more money than most people in construction. The exceptions tend to be people who own their construction business - though if you do the paperwork construction is one of the easiest businesses to work for yourself in once you have skills.
Well, anyone who knows anything about the current iteration of AI knows that it's not really happening.
Btw, people have been saying that since GPT-3 (which everyone nowadays admits was kinda shit if it wasn't for the novelty), so only 5 years left until my career is over.
I'm fairly sure the "learn to code" thing was just a media campaign by corporations to assure an abundance of programmers, leading to decreased labor rates. Years earlier it was a push for electronic engineers and technicians.
Well my knee is injured for the past 3 weeks and counting so I don't think I'm going to be doing any manual labor any time soon, I think I'm going to keep at my work from home programming job instead.
Yeah sorry that's my fault. I literally started to learn to code 2 months before all the articles started... Then all the YouTube videos were "no one will ever hire JR devs again!" and so I stopped. Since I've stopped it looks like the consensus has gone back to "learning to code is still a good idea."
I'll let other people enjoy a good life, so I won't try to learn it again and ruin it for everyone I'll stay in this shit factory lol
I have a great deal of job security by not being a software engineer and knowing "how to code"
they love me at my job in supply chain b2b marketing because I can build an API connector to the DoT database, and build a simple savings calculator in WordPress that connects to hubspot and Salesforce, or I can parse 20 csvs and exclude all duplicates in python...
all low level stuff but if you don't know what a variable even is it seems like magic
I think there's a massive oversupply of software engineers world-wide, and investors and executives are heavily pushing offshoring to countries where there are even more engineers that are even more desperate to find work. The ideology or focus of the entire US investor/executive class seems to have shifted as soon as Musk gutted Twitter. I fear this may be another, "these jobs aren't coming back," kind of thing the manufacturing industry went through. Perhaps we'll see a boom of bootstrapped start-ups ran by engineers (or preferably worker-cooperatives), but that's extremely hard to do.