Ask HN: Automation is going to affect our jobs soon, right?

First of all your fears are completely unfounded. Statistics are still predicting growth in IT and software development. And looking at how tooling has evolved, yes in some ways it is now a little easier to create a 1995 style website, BUT websites have become super complicated and now it is the full time job of somebody to work on just the front-end. A 2020 website still takes a lot of effort to produce, in fact definitely much more effort than a 1995 website.

Secondly you mention a bunch of fields, some of which I have experience with. These more fundamental fields have little demand, and because of that the pay is relatively bad. If you go work at Intel writing NLA libraries using Fourier Transforms, you would be lucky to get paid market average salaries and certainly much worse salaries than doing generic SWE stuff at FAANG.

And thirdly, honestly you won't be able to transition into these more technical fields because it is just too much of a steep learning curve. And nobody would hire you anyway. There's no shortage of graduates fresh out of uni with multiple semesters of theory, practical projects and internships.

The actual way to prepare would be as always: maximize your salary and save as much as possible.

> My strategy, albeit likely flawed, is:

- focus on fundamentals: so instead of learning a graphics API like OpenGL 2.1 or OpenGL 4.x [...]

I agree on that we should learn and focus on fundamentals, but we also need to learn the specifics. So, from my poiint of view there's no shortcut. Example: let's say you want to design the infrastructure of some online services: you need to know the fundamentals of networking (NAT, subnets, firewalls, VPNs, etc.) but you also need to be proficient when it comes to use the tools you have available at the moment to implement your infrastructure (e.g., terraform, k8s, ansible, bash, etc.). These tools change from time to time (hence we need to keep learning all the time).

One needs to have solid fundamentals and one needs to be proficient in ephemeral tools. It's tedious.

We (mostly) don't code in assembly anymore because there are compilers. Your can say that writing high level code (merely "configuring things" in your parlance) is more "boring" than say, register hacks, but that's a bit shallow. (Also, something something leaky abstractions making the whole "it'll only be configuring things!" kind of a moot point.)

Consider programmers from the 80s/90s or early 00s. The ones that still have jobs today are the ones that have kept up with trends and adapted, or otherwise had the luck of being at a place that hasn't. It's the same for the future. Stagnate on old tech, have your career die on the old tech.