Coding Boot Gamp Graduates Find tough Prospects In an AI-Powered World (msn.com)
- Reference: 0175534625
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/24/2159232/coding-boot-gamp-graduates-find-tough-prospects-in-an-ai-powered-world
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/do-coding-boot-camps-make-sense-in-an-a-i-world/ar-AA1uECIJ
> Between the time [construction worker Florencio] Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a "golden ticket" to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to [2]one count . At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting. Mr. Rendon says he didn't land a single interview.
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> Coding boot camp graduates across the country are facing a similarly tough job market. In Philadelphia, Mal Durham, a lawyer who wanted to change careers, was about halfway through a part-time coding boot camp late last year when its organizers with the nonprofit Launchcode delivered disappointing news. "They said: 'Here is what the hiring metrics look like. Things are down. The number of opportunities is down,'" she said. "It was really disconcerting." In Boston, Dan Pickett, the founder of a boot camp called Launch Academy, decided in May to pause his courses indefinitely because his job placement rates, once as high as 90 percent, had dwindled to below 60 percent. "I loved what we were doing," he said. "We served the market. We changed a lot of lives. The team didn't want that to turn sour."
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> Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 percent, according to data compiled by CompTIA. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 percent. "I would say this is the worst environment for entry-level jobs in tech, period, that I've seen in 25 years," said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
A Stack Overflow survey of 65,000 developers found that 60% had used AI coding tools this year, the article points out. And it includes two predictions about the future:
Armando Solar-Lezama, leader of MIT's Computer-Assisted Programming Group, "believes that A.I. tools are good news for programming careers. If coding becomes easier, he argues, we'll just make more, better software. We'll use it to solve problems that wouldn't have been worth the hassle previously, and standards will skyrocket."
Zach Sims, a co-founder of Codecademy, said of the job prospects for coding boot camp graduates" "I think it's pretty grim."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/do-coding-boot-camps-make-sense-in-an-a-i-world/ar-AA1uECIJ
[2] https://layoffs.fyi/
What's Next? (Score:1)
Remember when all the politicians told the coal miners to learn coding skills... what's next for them now?
Re: (Score:2)
> Remember when all the politicians told the coal miners to learn coding skills... what's next for them now?
Tell the next group of laid off workers to learn coding skills? Or did you mean the coal miners?
So, you build houses for (Score:2)
A few more years while the market turns again. Coding is absolutely a boom-bust field. Surely the reputable coding bootcamps are transparent about that. Right? Heck, did they say that they’re down from a 90% placement rate to 60%? For a wave-your-nose-over-the-book short course on a technical field, a 60% placement rate is still phenomenally good.
Re: (Score:1)
Yip, I doubt the slump has anything to do with AI.
Here's my prediction (Score:3)
Senior programmers are not currently replaceable by AI. AI is too shit to produce high-quality code, and it's not gonna change anytime soon.
Junior programmers however, who are typically used to piss boilerplate and gradually move on to dicier, more complex code projects as they advance in their careers, are mincemeat: AI is good enough to code the shit they code.
Therefore, here's my short term prediction: senior programmers will keep their job until they retire (at least those who are senior enough, i.e. old enough) and junior programmers will never get a chance to enter the computer programming field at all and build a career like we did.
And here's my long-term prediction: eventually there will be no more competent programmers left, and nobody will understand what the hell code AI is spewing out. And if you think "standards will skyrocket" when nobody understands what they compile anymore, you're delusional.
Long term, I predict a total code quality catastrophe across the board. Fortunately, I'll be on a boat in the middle of the lake spending my time fishing by then. But I pity the youth who chose that cursed career path and now find themselves being phased out before even getting a chance to get phase in, and the adult fools who gave up a paying job to become an unemployable code monkey.
Re: (Score:2)
Look at Cobol. Already 'obsolete' back in the early 90s, there was such a demand for it that you could get non-credit courses just so you could find a job. And a few old timers either stayed in the market or came back for $$$.
So my prediction is that short-sightedness will lead to a lack of good future senior programmers in the career pipeline, but those who make it anyway will be in high demand because of their low supply, and they will be paid very well.
Re: (Score:2)
The AI code generators I've tried have all been glorified code completion that looks like a new undergrad's homework. It will take massive amounts of electricity and computing power to replace a single engineer.
Assembly Language (Score:1)
Perhaps the situation is a bit like how the introduction of high level languages displaced the need for people who could write programs in assembly language or machine code. It's not that programming stopped, but more ambitious programs now became easier and quicker to write. The demand for assembly language programming skills decreased, and programmers took on what would have previously been seen as a more design or architecture role, combining set pieces, rather than building them from scratch.
Boot Gamp. (Score:2)
A Gamp is a sloppily tied up umbrella. Like Slashdot's spelling. Regarding simple typos - one thing AI coding is very good at is finding logic issues and typos such as this.. I'm sure many of us have spent countless hours finding relatively simple mistakes in code. Although AI is scary especially to "nuts and bolts" junior coding, I can't shake the feeling that this is a good thing - I wish I could have had those countless hours back to do more productive things.
Re: (Score:2)
In my understanding, a gamp is an old, leaky umbrella. It's also a brand of condoms :-/
Marketing vs. Reality (Score:2)
Marketing, is a mere half dozen Slashdot topics ago bragging about “Code” being Saturday-morning-cartoon hip and cool.
Reality, is you trying to find a job with that cartoon replacement.
Being good at programming requires... (Score:2)
...a special kind of mind, and not all can be good at it. Talent is real.
The profession got a reputation for being well paid, so the wannabes got excited.
Others saw a willing pool of customers and opened "boot camps", selling the illusion that any random person could take a few lessons and make big bucks.
Reality bites back, hard.
Hopefully you just did a boot camp (Score:2)
There was always going to be a time where commodity programming jobs dropped off. It was always past the horizon though. It took some fundamental developments to converge.... but here it comes. Remember back in the 1999s when anybody who could wrap their head around html could briefly get a job as a designer? That bubble was a tiny version of the one unsophisticated CRUD developers are facing now.
One problem is that the education ecosystem will gladly milk applicants long past the viability of their offerin
This will be a problem in 10 years (Score:2)
When the senior devs retire and there's no one to replace them.
we will hire for seniors at the jr pay rates! (Score:2)
we will hire for seniors at the jr pay rates!
Re: (Score:2)
Ex Stanford FTE here in both profit-center- and academic-sides. Don't get me started on the wink-wink "no proctor" policy. Grade inflation at Ivies is rampant. If you want competent STEM employees, hire from competitive public research universities. Ivy people have a reputation for skewing towards being entitled, lazy, under-educated, unrealistic, and unfamiliar with how the world works.