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Remember that phrase?
I do.
It's referred to, on Wikipedia, as a series of slogans and public influence campaigns from the 2010s and beyond, particularly gaining steam (ancient energy metaphor) when then-President Joe Biden suggested (just six short years ago) that out-of-work coal miners had an obvious option and alternative career path, if only they'd stop resisting the inevitable dissolution of their livelihoods and get with the program:
According to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
[Also, a]ccording to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience.
Lordy me. Taking Biden in good faith, rather than the opposite, I daresay he was saying that those experiencing a downturn in their career circumstances did have options, and were certainly smart enough to take them, if the opportunity arose.
And yet.
Here we are today: https://futurism.com/future-society/software-developers-ai-jobs
“The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there,” Amr Awadallah, CEO of Palo Alto-based AI startup Vectara, bragged to the paper. “We don’t need the junior developers anymore.”
Got that? They didn't need you when you were down the mine, and they still don't need you, now that you've learned to code.
Where do we go from here?
Discussion (58)
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Since my husband's family are a bunch of brick/stone masons, learn to lay brick! Or, learn to pull wire (as my electrician dad used to say). Where do we go? Listen to Mike Rowe and not anybody in the government. ;)
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They are going to need people who write test cases to verify the proper functioning of that code, both in implementation and design. The problem with that is that testing is the kind of thing that the junior programmers learn debugging their own work. If they're not doing that ...
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Get jobs that require physical presence: Skilled Trades, Nurse, Doctor, Manufacturing Engineer, etc. Law Enforcement and Military.
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If they don't need junior developers any more, where are the senior developers going to come from?
I had a good example of how accurate some AI are. I was trying to get some additional detail on my grandfather. The only things right that Google's AI had were his birthdate, death date, and his army enlistment date. The other things they listed about him were interesting and totally false. They included: the army sent him to Haiti to oversee the turnover from the US, he received the Legion d'Honeur award, he returned to the US and later became the Commandant of Fort Benning.
Like I said - interesting and totally false.
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Totally agree. I just paid a local firm a bunch to do exactly that. My upper body strength isn't up to it.
Got the wire-pulling thing entirely respectable on my own account. Hated having to do it. But, it was worth it!
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