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Ask HN: Is Engineering Doomed?

3 points Rugu16 | 1 comments | 22 Oct 24 17:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.217s | source

My question is for Sr. SEs of the industries and veterans. Did you ever feel in your career that your job and field it self will be gone in few years. Looking at history I can see internet era was a big one when lots of people thought all their windows and console programming knowledge is gone, next was apps and iphone when people thought all their knowledge of web programming is gone and now with AI i am seeing reports all the time that machines will make programming obsolete. How can one keep motivation to do anything at this point? How can you compete with creating any product when it can just be replicated by AI in a day?
1. ankurdhama ◴[24 Oct 24 07:29 UTC] No.41932958[source]▶
FYI, the move from desktop apps to web apps to phone apps to whatever in future will not make your programming knowledge obsolete. Programming at its fundamental level is same as it was earlier - you write instructions to read, process, write data. What changes is the tools/frameworks/languages etc which you should be able to pick and learn as you move to new things.

Overtime the abstraction level of programming has changed, earlier you would write a sort function in assembly, now you just call the standard library. This was bound to happen due to the idea of software/code re-usability. AI for programming, if it kept improving, will be just another abstraction layer in the same way but that doesn't mean anybody who has no idea whatsoever about fundamentals of software engineer and programming can just use AI to create (complex enough) software.