This month it’s been 20 years since I started my first real job in software. It’s also 20 years since I created my profile on LinkedIn. I think it’s fair to say that the field of software has changed a bit since then.
The first programming I ever did as a kid was learning Turbo Pascal with the kid next door, whose dad taught us. It was mainly getting the speaker to go beep, and printing funny words on the matrix printer.
Next I borrowed one of those C64 books with full code for a small game. After typing for hours, I was gutted that there were no graphics. That was the end of programming for a while.
Starting my 20’s I was actually aiming for a music career, but to get going I needed a website. So I started learning to make websites, and got a bit of education. I though I would be an entrepreneur, but turns out that is not what I actually enjoyed. It was the learning.
Tinkering with a problem, and figuring out how things work. That was the real joy.
So I got a web dev job. And it was a lot of this:
$(".that-button").click()
Building a bunch of websites I had no interest in, but it allowed me to learn stuff while building them. An that has basically been the same since. Building things for others, with the payoff that part of the job is picking something apart, and see what makes it tick.
That balance appears to be in danger, thanks to recent developments in the imitation machines. “Don’t spend time learning that, just make the machine learn it, and then ask how to do it”.
That is like watching someone else learning to play the guitar.
So I fear that if the current trend continues, there will be no joy left for me in my current profession. Which then begs the question: Where do we go from here?
I have no answer to that. It is still going to be around 20 more years before I can retire. So if I could spend 20 years getting to here in software, could I spend the next 20 doing something completely different? What would that even be?
Maybe the bubble will burst, and some sanity will return to the world. Or maybe we will never speak to an actual human again, because that is just too inefficient.