Ask HN: Future Career Moves

One scenario: some AI-written code makes a horrific mistake that makes the news. There's a huge backlash, and a number of companies decide they're more comfortable with human programmers. (Or at least, human programmer reviewing the code, or writing the code with an AI assistant.) Or for that matter, that there's legacy code at old-fashioned companies that just never got around to grafting on AI-powered programming tools. Bottom line: I think there will still be jobs for programmers, far beyond your three-year timeline.

A better question is: what do you want to do? If you really want to be a programmer, you could try "future-proofing" your skillset. (For example, going into AI programming -- the one job title that's going to increase in an AI-dominated future.)

My other bit of advice: start saving money now. Everyone should do this at your age. There's huge tax advantages to putting money into retirement accounts -- and it just grows and grows over the decades. (But also, if you're truly worried about your high-paying career ending -- then start socking it away now.)

Unless you are in a tight specialty area where the writing is on the wall, and you're already close to being replaceable, I think you're over-estimating things. We don't have the much-vaunted paperless office, we're still not really with it with driverless-cars, robots haven't replaced us all yet and we have more work rather than less: so much of what people thought was the future is really a bunch of stuff that isn't there yet, or is not going to actually happen.

I'm nearly 50, and what I've learned is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

> It might be a bit late to start a new career path at that stage.

You can start whenever. There's a story of a woman, at 80, who said she wished she'd taken up violin at 60. "If I had, I could've been playing for 20 years".