Careers are future-proofed through relationships and opportunities, not skills. Skills are just the buy-in.
Getting and nailing a good opportunity opens doors for a fair bit, but that's rare.
So the vast, vast majority of future-proofing is relationship-building - in tech, with people who don't build relationships per se.
And realize that decision-makers are business people (yes, even the product leads and tech leads are making business decisions). Deciders can control their destiny, but they're often more exposed to business vicissitudes. There be dragons - also gold.
To me, the main risk of LLM's is not that they'll take over my coding, but that they'll take over the socialization/community of developers - sharing neat tricks and solutions - that builds tech relationship. People will stop writing hard OS software blogs and giving presentations after LLM's inter-mediate to copy code and offer solutions. Teams will become hub-and-spoke, with leads enforcing architecture and devs talking mostly to their copilots. That means we won't be able to find like-minded people, no one has any incentive or even occasion to share knowledge. My guess is that relationship skills will be even more valued, but perhaps also a bit fruitless.
Doctors and lawyers and even business people have a professional identity from their schooling, certification, and shared history. Developers and hackers don't; you're only as relevant as your skills on point. So there's a bit of complaining but no structured resistance on the part of developers to their work being factored, outsourced, and now mediated by LLM's (that they're busily building).
Developers have always lived in the shadow of the systems they're building. You used to have to pay good money for compilers and tools, licenses to APIs, etc. All the big guys realized that by giving away that knowledge and those tools, they make the overall cost cheaper, and they can capture more. We've been free-riding for 30 years, and it's led us to believe that skills matter most. LLM's are a promising way to sell cloud services and expensive hardware, so there will be even more willingness than crypto or car-sharing or real estate or whatever to invest in anything disruptive. We rode the tide in, and it will take us out again.
Getting and nailing a good opportunity opens doors for a fair bit, but that's rare.
So the vast, vast majority of future-proofing is relationship-building - in tech, with people who don't build relationships per se.
And realize that decision-makers are business people (yes, even the product leads and tech leads are making business decisions). Deciders can control their destiny, but they're often more exposed to business vicissitudes. There be dragons - also gold.
To me, the main risk of LLM's is not that they'll take over my coding, but that they'll take over the socialization/community of developers - sharing neat tricks and solutions - that builds tech relationship. People will stop writing hard OS software blogs and giving presentations after LLM's inter-mediate to copy code and offer solutions. Teams will become hub-and-spoke, with leads enforcing architecture and devs talking mostly to their copilots. That means we won't be able to find like-minded people, no one has any incentive or even occasion to share knowledge. My guess is that relationship skills will be even more valued, but perhaps also a bit fruitless.
Doctors and lawyers and even business people have a professional identity from their schooling, certification, and shared history. Developers and hackers don't; you're only as relevant as your skills on point. So there's a bit of complaining but no structured resistance on the part of developers to their work being factored, outsourced, and now mediated by LLM's (that they're busily building).
Developers have always lived in the shadow of the systems they're building. You used to have to pay good money for compilers and tools, licenses to APIs, etc. All the big guys realized that by giving away that knowledge and those tools, they make the overall cost cheaper, and they can capture more. We've been free-riding for 30 years, and it's led us to believe that skills matter most. LLM's are a promising way to sell cloud services and expensive hardware, so there will be even more willingness than crypto or car-sharing or real estate or whatever to invest in anything disruptive. We rode the tide in, and it will take us out again.