BECOME ENGINEER

Should you become a software engineer now that Chat GPT is around? I've waited more than 6 months to share my thoughts on this because I think it's a genuine question. I've been writing code for more than 10 years and I've worked in various software engineering positions and now I run my own startup. I've had this discussion with many of my friends who work in senior engineering positions at big tech companies as well as founder friends who have built their own startups and sold their company. Before I answer, don't forget to give me a follow if you want me to help you on your programming journey. When I think about these questions, I often try to look back at the past as a guiding indicator for what might happen in the future. When the first internet browser came around in 1993, there were only around 200 jobs in tech and now there's an estimated more than 7 million. In the 2000s, I remember that many people were put off software engineering because they were told that many of those jobs would be outsourced. In the 2010s, automation was really kicking off and many people worried that most of their jobs would be automated. But in every one of these cycles, there has been a common pattern. New jobs in technology have been created and it goes back to this principle in economics which is called the lump of labor fallacy. Which is this inherent belief or assumption that there is a finite amount of work in an economy, which basically means that people believe there is a fixed amount of work in an economy and that if one person is employed to do that job, that means another person is unemployed. But where this becomes a fallacy is that there is no fixed number of jobs in an economy. When an economy grows, the number of jobs increases. Now how does this relate to software engineers potentially not having a job one day? I think it is very possible that AI will take over software engineering, but it will take a very long time and here's why. Software engineering in today's world is more than just writing code. Airbnb's codebase, for example, that probably has millions of lines of code developed by engineers that have come and gone over the years is quite frankly a behemoth. Adding anything to a codebase like this requires an immense amount of context and understanding not only of the codebase but also the third party integrations, interconnected systems. ChatGPT and language learning models do a great job of taking you from zero to one, writing a Python script that maybe shows you the latest stock prices, but it doesn't yet have the capability to take this sheer amount of complexity that is a codebase that's been around for a decade. It will take time and I think there will be a day when this happens, but for now, I think the best thing that you can do as a software engineer, computer science student or anyone just entering any kind of job role is to set up your career to be more dynamic, adapt to these changing circumstances. Because there is a very high chance that one day we may re-skill in order to change and adapt to the emergence of new sectors or jobs in technology. In short, I don't think you should not study computer science or computer engineering right now, but I do think you should spend maybe 20% of your time keeping up to date and even developing new skills. If you found this helpful, make sure you follow for more.