I recently went to university orientation programs, accompanying my brother and one thing that perplexed me is that people are actively discouraging people from becoming software engineers or pursuing any degree related to computing. They see computing as being the first field being wiped off by Ai.
Ai is firing tech workers en masse, apparently
Robots are running big tech, no more humans are to be seen in offices. This is the picture that is slowly forming in unacquainted minds. Software engineers are a relic of the past if we are to listen to some people. Yes layoffs did happen. Yes, it is linked to Ai but it's not that we won't need software people. And we need to give Ai-washing some study.
If software is cooked, we are all cooked
What we don't realise is that, if software is cooked and we don't need people building systems, this means that we don't need the people running the systems in the first place.
If for example a company is building software for lawyers to automate all of their tasks. Now we say we don't need people to build the software. Fine. But, why do we need lawyers in the first place? We can automate what lawyers do, and build a software for that too, in addition. Software engineers translate field expertise into software that is useful. If you outsource your job to a computer, you can be easily automated. We do have cases of people using Clause or ChatGPT to prepare their court cases and winning. Of course, we do have people being sued for presenting hallucinated documents.
Writing code means writing something that a machine validates. Previously you needed special programs to understand the code. But now a neural network can write code. And maths. And call the program to execute what it has written. It is peak automation, imperfectly but good enough for many applications.
Ai has encoded information related to many fields. If your job is doing x, y or z, we can use Ai to get a mid level of what you are doing.
Ai at full speed still takes time
I spent days coding for a single project. Turned YOLO mode on. And it still took time for the software to finish and get things right. Post code writing, you need to cater to bugs and additional insights. And, as the codebase grows, you need to keep everything sane. So, yes, i think we still need humans around and we can build software that is useful.
People actually pay for peace of mind, not fighting fires. This is why people focus on their business and ignore side quests. Software is one of the side quests. Yes you can take it, but, we do it for you.
Building a company when tools are powerful
Automations have always rocked industries. Each wave of automation is a wow moment. And people do adapt or phase out or are still around doing what they were doing in the face of powerful automation. As the bread industry for example. Business is about making money. It's a skill. And making money using software is one skill we are trying to master. Even if automations are accessible to a great part of world's population.
So, we are up for the challenge and believe that crafting software is still a thing!
-- Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer