Working in tech has always required constantly staying up to date. The rate of progress increases exponentially, meaning this rate of catchup required increases over time. Basically there's no long-term stability in tech. On the bright side, this makes it easier for newcomers and people who have the time + energy to enter the industry (eg. I imagine most who profited off the AI craze didn't have an AI background)

This phenomenon will start affecting every industry including ones that used to be considered stable like law + medicine. No one is safe.

My advice to anyone in tech is to not get married to any one framework, language, or part of the stack. Assume it will be obsolete in a few years. Learn the 80% needed to be productive, but that extra 20% required for mastering that specific tool is prob not worth it given churn.

I personally think we're going to see the rise of generalists. Jobs will become more managerial, delegating tasks to AI + cheap offshore labor. Companies and especially startups will hire less employees and they'll be expected to be able to handle any task, leveraging AI to learn. LLMs like ChatGPT make it drastically easier to get up to speed on anything, and AI code autocomplete tools like GitHub Copilot lesson the need for knowing specific syntax. Eventually coding will just be writing in plan English (Copilot can already do this, it's just very slow now), as well as everything else (eg. managing infrastructure). Eventually one will just say "create a cron job that scrapes this API every X minutes, filters the results on these keywords, stores the filtered results in a database, and sends me an email notification" and the whole thing will be created. The tech for this is already possible.

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