Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine
Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we&#x27;d all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017.<p>His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn&#x27;t even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky &quot;translators&quot;, i.e. software developers.<p>I said it then and I will say it now. If your managers could specify what they need in a manner that no-code tools, or now AI, can generate the code they want, they will have to be extremely exact in their language. So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language.<p>Since they hire software developers to make the specification more rigid, and the managers don&#x27;t seem to be getting better at this over time, why would you believe this skill set is going to go away?<p>In essence what has happened in software development is that the level of abstraction has gone up while the machine has taken over more and more of the nitty gritty details. From punchcards, to assembly, to COBOL, C, Perl, Java, Python, Erlang, Rust.<p>Of course I&#x27;m leaving out some languages here, but the level of abstraction has been rising.<p>But the rigidity of what is needed to specify a program that really does what you want hasn&#x27;t. Especially evidenced by the fact that recent programming language developments often have a specific area where they shine, but not raising the abstraction level that much.<p>I&#x27;d be surprised if the next step is &quot;Hi, I&#x27;m an ideas guy, please give me an app that does Uber, for bicycles, but better.&quot;