Ask HN: What will be future software job market be like in 10 years cuz of AI?

Over the last 10-15 years, competition among cash rich FAANG companies soaked up every person who could learn to write a for loop and read an API document and drove (American) software engineer compensation into the range of doctors and lawyers.

That’s not sustainable. There’s not enough useful engineering work to go around, and certainly not for that value. It just happened that money was cheap for a long while and those firms were using some of theirs to make sure nobody else had access to good talent.

Between money getting more expensive and LLM’s readily eating up the “for loops and API docs” class of work, the reckoning seems to be coming.

There will still be plenty of tech industry and software engineering work for talented, interested people and it will still probably pay a decent middle+ class salary. If that suits you, stick with it. That’s what a lot of us have already been a part of for decades. It’s not bad work. We’ll probably be using AI tools as part of it moving forward and working on some pretty cool projects because of that.

But if you struggle with the field and were hoping for an easy $$$$ lifestyle, you might want to look at a different career options. The landscape won’t be like you saw when you were in high school.

These tools cannot act on their own and still need professionals to be responsible for their application. If the promise of LLMs comes true, there will be much new work created in tuning models and integrating them into every worker’s job in the unique context of every company. It will likely take decades for companies to fully adapt to the potential, just like it took decades to adapt to the personal computer.

Study up, work hard and keep at it. Don’t dispair, be hopeful. And once you get a job and make some money, put some of each paycheck into the S&P 500 as a hedge that Labor will become worth much less than Capital for awhile.

Unfortunate reality is that software devs will go the way of the blacksmith sooner rather than later. If there is anything after this I would not even dare to question. There is always fridge repair!

Get into physical engineering. That's not going to be taken over by AI anytime soon.