I have been on this rollercoaster of reading with ya. I'm mid 30s, 10+ yoe. When you start swe you can live under illusion your job is coding, its really not. Y

I have been on this rollercoaster of reading with ya. I'm mid 30s, 10+ yoe. When you start swe you can live under illusion your job is coding, its really not. You are building tech behind a business, depending on the business that range 10-95%. You do not want to be coder. They will get wiped, I recon, at least in 10-20 year span. (I remember some dude on twitter was flexing a week ago, he got a quote from dev for 5k and he did "the app" in 3 evenings using chatgpt. That is all great, but it's also why we work on contracts. We mostly expand and maintain what is already there. Building new things for every new caveat is not a way to tackle serious complexity. I have seen companies that are writing an aws lambda for every small subproblem, they do it mostly cause they lack decent engineers to tackle domain complexity) You want to be engineer working on a product, that means engaging in understanding customers, engaging in understand product/business etc. I think this is safe space to be for a long time. Now, for a quite some time a path to this led through coding. You would join a product as junior/mid developer and senior devs will throw at you stuff that they don't want to be bothered with. You would gradually gain more knowledge and insight and eventually become one. Near future. I think the first thing that might come up is a flow(github terms used) like this one: write an issue > click the pull request that pops up after 5 minutes (ai generated) > write a review of possible mistakes > another commit pops up (ai generated) > do the last fix manually (just some renaming etc) > approve pull request. The above is my best effort speculation, seeing capabilities of ai things nowadays. Will this contract or expand the pool of jobs is hard to say - safer to bet on neither. Some anxiety about this is good, but also I think that people anxious often are the first to adapt properly. Problems will hurt more oblivious people who often hand wave stuff till dawn.