Learning coding

[shahar uriel]

Hi guys.

I am 30 years old, just finished a degree in a field which I do not want to work in.

I have the opportunity to join a coding bootcamp for free. 4 - 5 months of learning coding like a full time job.

I am afraid that skill will become obsolete in the near future because of AI, hence my dilemma if i should go for it.

Would really appreciate your opinion.

Thanks.  

[shahar uriel]

 @Leo GuraHi Leo. sorry for being rude. would really appreciate your opinion on the subject, since you have prior experience in the field.
 

Edited Thursday at 10:14 AM by shahar uriel

[Lyubov]

I almost went to a bootcamp in 2022 when ChatGPT launched. Here is why I decided to quit on becoming a web developer. It is not easy work, it is mentally challenging, you have to constantly be learning, I did not take to it naturally or find myself to be exceptionally good at it. There are a ton of tech layoffs and remote work is being cut, which is important to me. It's gotten incredibly competitive. If your heart is in it and you believe you will be able to support yourself while learning and land a job after that you can tolerate to support yourself further, go for it. If you are on the fence about it, then it may not be worth the effort. It is not a walk in the park for most people, this is a very competitive field now. You need to be good at it to land a job usually. 

Edited Thursday at 10:43 AM by Lyubov

[bazera]

33 minutes ago, shahar uriel said:

I am afraid that skill will become obsolete in the near future because of AI,

That's already the case, manual coding is becoming obsolete more and more. But building products isn't all about writing code, there are other aspects as well. 

Not sure if it's a good idea to learn now, because AI really disrupted the whole industry, but give it a shot if you feel like it.

Getting a job as a junior has become very competitive as well. There isn't a lot of vacancies available. 

 

[Stick]

You need to be cracked at one sector at coding. That way, you wont be replaced by the generalist AI and be extremely valuable.
I am also thinking about taking machine learning for my Bachelor's degree.

[Oeaohoo]

Funnily enough, I’m a couple of months into a similar course. I don’t see why anyone would want to hire me though as AI can do basically everything I can do and much more quickly… I have heard from other people that demand for junior developers has decreased drastically because of this.

[LastThursday]

@shahar uriel I know it's early stages but you should do it anyway. AI didn't learn from nothing, it learned from human coders. In fact human coders invented the AI in the first place.

For some high level insight into how AI is affecting the industry then this is enlightening:

 

[integral]

I don't see the point in learning coding anymore. It's largely solved by AI. If you learn coding for the next 4 years straight you're not going to be better than the AI is today. And AI is only going to improve from here on.

But a developer is more than coding, you're trying to solve problems businesses have or people have.

You're supposed to know how to ship products and do it well.

AI has not solved any of this and will not come anywere close to doing this job.

Your a product developer, not a software developer and not a software engineer, or coder

Edited Sunday at 05:30 PM by integral

[bazera]

3 hours ago, integral said:

Your a product developer, not a software developer and not a software engineer, or coder

What do you think, how can we transition more and more into product development in practice, when before the role was clearly defined as front-end developer or backend-developer or whatever, that roles and distinctions are being blurred more and more, and I expect that to continue further.

So when you think of career advancement, what skills are you targeting to master? Like more clear communication with business? More managerial positions, or what?

[integral]

26 minutes ago, bazera said:

So when you think of career advancement, what skills are you targeting to master?

Getting attention. The most valuable thing on Earth right now for a business or for a personal brand or for anything is how much attention you can get.

If you mastered getting attention then no matter what you build you could push it to any audience, and you'll know how to build it for that audience, and you know how to sell it to that audience.

You'll also be Irreplaceable , a company would give you Millions if they knew they could reach a wider audience through you.

There's No Limit now to what you could build, you could build anything you can imagine at this point 10x faster than anyone 3 years ago. 

So solve problems people need, and get eyeballs on it.

Edited Sunday at 09:15 PM by integral

[bazera]

@integral Yes, when doing your own thing. I meant when you're searching for employment opportunities, not in marketing sector.

As far as your own business goes, I think it's always been the case that getting attention was the hardest part. Even without AI, the trickiest part in solo projects was marketing, not building the actual project.

[integral]

9 minutes ago, bazera said:

I meant when you're searching for employment opportunities,

I ment it for that, know everything you can offer a business, at this point there are no real skills to develop, its a matter of knowing what they need and offering it to them.

The era of developing skills is over.

Next build a impressive portfolio.

Edited Sunday at 09:25 PM by integral

[bazera]

12 hours ago, integral said:

The era of developing skills is over.

A big chunk of modern skills should be doing creative things with AI, coding or otherwise. 

[Jirh]

AI is great for general cases, but it faces serious challenges with its capacity to produce high quality results when it comes to details and specifics, which is the future of human jobs.

Don't worry about the future. Worry about mastering the details and specifics of your work.

[bazera]

6 hours ago, Jirh said:

AI is great for general cases, but it faces serious challenges with its capacity to produce high quality results when it comes to details and specifics, which is the future of human jobs.

For coding, it handles almost all cases, but still needs experienced human reviewer for now.

[Fruehlingserwachen]

I have a formal education in programming, I think there is no equivalent in the US for this. It is below a bachelor degree but takes 3 years to accomplish. And now I am rather unemployed and live from social welfare than continue doing this shit. Coding really is the worst job ever. You are always stressed because there is no finish line. You develop bad posture because of sitting. You have to deal with the spaghetti code of other people and most of the time you are not even programming but try to understand something that somebody should had documented. You also have no agency and you are literally just a cog in the machine, but normal cogs are ghetting told exactly what and how they have to do. But as a programmer you always have tho figure this out for yourself. Not by reading some manual or the current ticket, but by mindreading what the ticket writer wants from you and by experimenting with your total abstract inhumane virtual machine. 

And then comes AI. No AI won't make codes unemployed. This idea is so delusional and comes from people who have no clue about how software development works. In reality AI won't make it easier but way harder to do this job. Because it automates the easy parts and these are the parts the junior developer once did to grow their skills. Now that everybody leverages their skill by using ai, the stack of requirements for being a good developer increases. You still have to master the basics but they expect you to outsource them to AI, so that you can focus 9-5 on the very disturbing, mind fucking tasks, that drain on you. And to even get there you have to master the basics in your free time. And the better AI becomes, the more stuff is considered as basic stuff that's done by AI, and the more hardcore the hardcore stuff becomes you as a developer have to deal with. But this is only if AI makes no mistake. Have fun debugging thousands of lines of code, that are ai generated and already implemented in the working system and only drop an error every few months. What you do now? Oh yeah, lets create a workaround to blow up the spaghetti code even more.

Modern software development is an evil shitshow. You rather work at construction. That gives you a nice healthy body, good sleep and you can use your mental capacity to do some creative stuff after work. That's way better than getting drained mentally and degenerated phyisacally at work like coders do. 

If you are a nerd and you love doing this, then do it. But if you just wanna have a job, then this is the path to suffering.

[Jirh]

3 hours ago, bazera said:

For coding, it handles almost all cases, but still needs experienced human reviewer for now.

It can already code better than a human. There's no doubt about that.

But like I said, when it comes to specifics and details, a human will always be needed. One persistent error will never be solved by AI alone. Human intervention is required.

And coding is just one part of the whole process. You need humans to walk the AI through the required process. This will always be the case, as far as any profession is concerned. So this does not only apply to coding, but virtually to all other professions.

AI can do most of the heavy lifting, but the finishing touches belong to us. Always will.

[Fruehlingserwachen]

44 minutes ago, Jirh said:

It can already code better than a human. There's no doubt about that.

But like I said, when it comes to specifics and details, a human will always be needed. One persistent error will never be solved by AI alone. Human intervention is required.

And coding is just one part of the whole process. You need humans to walk the AI through the required process. This will always be the case, as far as any profession is concerned. So this does not only apply to coding, but virtually to all other professions.

AI can do most of the heavy lifting, but the finishing touches belong to us. Always will.

No it can't and it never will. AI is just a large language model, that repeats patterns. It has no concept of what it is coding. And if it is good at making code, then this is even worse. Because it will create very subtle bugs, that no one can debug. Because for debugging you need a good understanding and this is what people will outsource more and more. Yes you can create more and better prompts and you cann tell the AI to create workarounds. But this will just bloat the code and and increases the need for processing power because the AI generated code becomes more and more unperformant. It is already a shitshow that we use AI to create code in languages, that are made for objekt oriented programming. OOP was developed to make the maintenance of complex software easier for humans but it is less performant.