these guys are just trolling you.. very uncharacteristic for HackerNews
I was in a similar situation to you during the dot com crash. For years I'd been reading about how all coding jobs were getting outsourced to India, and I was dreading entering the job market.
I never had any trouble with my job being outsourced, and years later I looked back on it and realized that the opposite had happened: Now it costs almost as much to hire a top dev in India/China as it does to hire one in the USA or Europe. The best of the best come to the USA and make a ton of money, and the incredible value that software engineers create feeds back into a healthy job market all over the world.
For one thing: Current "AI" can't actually program. You can't go to ChatGPT and give it an app idea and get something out. It can help you auto-complete code, but you're still the one programming.
For another: If we develop strong AI that can program (and for whatever reason it decides to hang out and be our slave..) the job of a computer programmer will go from what it is now (translate detailed technical requirements into working computer code) to something a little higher up the management chain. A coder 30 years from now might be doing a job that's more like what today's product managers or CTOs do. Rather than put you out of the job, it would just make you vastly more wealthy and productive.
I was in a similar situation to you during the dot com crash. For years I'd been reading about how all coding jobs were getting outsourced to India, and I was dreading entering the job market.
I never had any trouble with my job being outsourced, and years later I looked back on it and realized that the opposite had happened: Now it costs almost as much to hire a top dev in India/China as it does to hire one in the USA or Europe. The best of the best come to the USA and make a ton of money, and the incredible value that software engineers create feeds back into a healthy job market all over the world.
For one thing: Current "AI" can't actually program. You can't go to ChatGPT and give it an app idea and get something out. It can help you auto-complete code, but you're still the one programming.
For another: If we develop strong AI that can program (and for whatever reason it decides to hang out and be our slave..) the job of a computer programmer will go from what it is now (translate detailed technical requirements into working computer code) to something a little higher up the management chain. A coder 30 years from now might be doing a job that's more like what today's product managers or CTOs do. Rather than put you out of the job, it would just make you vastly more wealthy and productive.