> We got Rollar Coaster Tycoon written in pure assembly, but now folks who are not quite as legendary can make games too. And that’s not a bad thing!
While I agree that it's a good thing that more people can make games than ever before ― I've played many very good indie games from people that are much better designers/artists than they are programmers ―, there is something to be said for having very deep technical knowledge within a field. I'd argue that one reason that many companies need more software engineers than ever before is because the skill level of the average software engineer has been on the decline. Having to write in assembly to make a game, for example, filters out anyone who doesn't fully love programming as a craft, whereas the 6-figure salaries at large tech companies attract a very different crowd.
This isn't to be entirely pessimistic though; there are more resources than ever before to learn advanced things like assembly language, GPGPU programming, or whatever else you can think of. Those skills will always be in-demand, and LLMs have a very long way to go before replacing those jobs. In my experience, LLMs are only good at doing things they've seen before, whereas even the most standard of tech jobs require at least some basic ability to reason about relatively complex systems and come up with semi-novel, context-dependent solutions.
The very skilled engineers haven't gone anywhere, and I think you raise a good point that actually having real deep knowledge and problem solving skills is going to be solid job security for quite awhile even in the most pessimistic cases. And you see this in the examples where so many people say "our goose is cooked! It generated a generic CRUD web app, everything we've learned is useless!"
They don't seem to realize there were templates people set up on Github that would allow them to have generated these things with one command before LLMs hit the scene. You shouldn't have been writing this stuff from scratch anyway (unless you wanted to learn how to do it, which is great).
A lot of people wanting to take a 6 month bootcamp and some interview training by grinding competitive programming problems to get a 6-figure job. Which I totally understand, but that was never the job.
> We got Rollar Coaster Tycoon written in pure assembly, but now folks who are not quite as legendary can make games too. And that’s not a bad thing!
While I agree that it's a good thing that more people can make games than ever before ― I've played many very good indie games from people that are much better designers/artists than they are programmers ―, there is something to be said for having very deep technical knowledge within a field. I'd argue that one reason that many companies need more software engineers than ever before is because the skill level of the average software engineer has been on the decline. Having to write in assembly to make a game, for example, filters out anyone who doesn't fully love programming as a craft, whereas the 6-figure salaries at large tech companies attract a very different crowd.
This isn't to be entirely pessimistic though; there are more resources than ever before to learn advanced things like assembly language, GPGPU programming, or whatever else you can think of. Those skills will always be in-demand, and LLMs have a very long way to go before replacing those jobs. In my experience, LLMs are only good at doing things they've seen before, whereas even the most standard of tech jobs require at least some basic ability to reason about relatively complex systems and come up with semi-novel, context-dependent solutions.
The very skilled engineers haven't gone anywhere, and I think you raise a good point that actually having real deep knowledge and problem solving skills is going to be solid job security for quite awhile even in the most pessimistic cases. And you see this in the examples where so many people say "our goose is cooked! It generated a generic CRUD web app, everything we've learned is useless!"
They don't seem to realize there were templates people set up on Github that would allow them to have generated these things with one command before LLMs hit the scene. You shouldn't have been writing this stuff from scratch anyway (unless you wanted to learn how to do it, which is great).
A lot of people wanting to take a 6 month bootcamp and some interview training by grinding competitive programming problems to get a 6-figure job. Which I totally understand, but that was never the job.