My friend (who is not in technical field) was asking me if it is good idea that his son chooses a software development career.<p>If he asked me this question two years ago, I could definitely say that there will be always opportunities for him. Now it looks like it is not that easy to answer this question. We see that the coding performance of LLMs are getting better and better.<p>If your non-technical friend asks you and what would you suggest?<p>Do you see in your circle that the demand for junior developers are decreasing?
The best field to go to is electrical engeering with a focus on computer engineering (EE/ECE), and I say that as an ex Aerospace Engineer who taught himself how to code and worked at startups and big tech.<p>Most every single talented ECE person can easily get any software job with minimal prep. Half of the leetocde style coding questions are pointer manipulations, the other half rely on some n linked lists, both of which you get a lot of exposure to when working with low level algorithms.<p>Furthermore, in the scope of AI, we aren't really close to AGI, and even if we were, the power draw of compute is still quite large. There is a lot of progress to be made in making the compute more accessible to average person.
All my devs who try to use ChatGPT or similar tools end up wasting more time that those who just jump into the code and try to work everything out themselves. How long till this balance changes is not known to me.
> Do you see in your circle that the demand for junior developers are decreasing?<p>I expect the demand for junior developers to increase exponentially in the next years when the market adapts to the new AI tools as more than ever, every business will be a tech business.
While LLMs can appear to write code, they can not execute, maintain, or design the systems that use this code.<p>The actual "code" was never the hard part to begin with.<p>Developing software is not going away soon. LLMs only addresses a small part of what it means to develop software.
I don’t know anyone who’s looking for junior devs today. That was not the case 3 years ago.<p>Re LLMs: most people responding here seem to assume there will be zero progress in ML after today. I don’t understand why. It’s likely we will get gpt-5 later this year, followed by Opus 3.5 and Ultra 1.5. I expect all three to be significantly better at coding than current models. Again, all three are expected within the next 6 months. Next gen after that (gpt-6 level): 2025-2026. Again, I don’t see any reasons not to expect further improvements. At that point (2026 at the latest) it will be strange to pay humans to write code, at least in the typical way we view SWE role today.
I dont think I'd suggest a computer science or engineering degree. Maybe something quicker/shorter. being a junior myself (almost 4 years as a data professional) I must say that I lost the will to learn programming deeply. For many reasons: bosses already demanding high productivity knowing that you can use LLMs for faster coding (in the python/sql realm). But ofc knowing the basics of logic and how to ask/prompt helps a lot
IMHO there is a huge misconception in what is the impact of AI. AI will not take engineering jobs. It will help engineers do more. That's it. Engineering is all about automation, performance improvement. Expectations will be "you have a wonderful tool, we expect you to do more".