HACKER Q&A
📣 kashfi

Dorsey Warns AI to Effect Junior SWE Candidates; Advice for CS Majors?


https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/22/jack-dorsey-ai-will-jeopardize-entry-level-software-engineer-jobs.html

What advice would you recommend to soon to be new grads—maybe a year/two oit—to help secure a new grad position / junior position?

On top of being having real human intelligence and a CS degree, what skills/expertise would be desirable?

  👤 nostrademons Accepted Answer ✓
The very first job that the software engineering profession automated was its own. Assemblers, compilers, libraries, frameworks, package managers, macros, shell scripts, scripting languages, IDEs, unit tests, code browsers, and refactoring tools are all ways that the software engineering profession has taken mundane work that used to be part of their job description and handed it over to a computer. A compiler is literally the computer writing code for you, and they were invented in 1959. Many of these innovations were seen as forms of AI when they were invented.

My advice for students learning CS is: don't wed yourself to any particular technology, learn your CS fundamentals, and late-bind your particular tech stack choices. The idea of writing HTML by hand is pretty quaint today, but it provided people with $100+/hour jobs in the dot-com bubble. Similarly, it's entirely possible the software jobs of the future won't be writing mobile apps or wiring microservices together - but there will still be software jobs writing whatever tools end up writing the mobile apps.