Ask HN: Transition away from embedded SWE due to AI?
Hi all,
as the title suggests, I've been increasingly worried about the current trends in replacing all sorts of SWE with agentic coding, and would like to shield myself (as I'm sure everyone would...) from the upcoming changes in my career field.
I do mainly embedded work, so microcontrollers and -processors with RTOSes and baremetal. I've always been very passionate about this field, so much so that my main hobbies revolve around making PCBs for myself and tinker with new technologies. In the past I've also had positions in which I did mainly 3D design, though that was at a "junior" level, so to speak. Right now I'm considered a halfway senior in my role, both in terms of IC skills and managerial skills, though I'd personally like to learn much more stuff before hailing myself as a senior dev.
I think I'm gonna be replaced in the near future, whether AI can actually perform my job or not, because that's the trend all companies are pursuing; so I wouldn't mind just changing careers, since I could still pursue embedded work in my own free time, though I really wouldn't mind working in something adjacent to that field (hardware/firmware).
What do you personally recommend doing in my position? I realize we're all in the same pot and that I have no right asking guidance to other people that may be struggling even worse than I am, nevertheless if you feel like sharing a suggestion (in any direction) I'll be very thankful for that. Why the hell would you want to transition out of one of the niches that are the least vulnerable to AI? There aren't going to be any LLMs in your lifetime that can figure out when the vendor's datasheet is lying to you or whether an issue is an electrical glitch, bug in the hardware, or an actual software bug. Yep that's true, on the other hand the trend I've been seeing in the last months is worrying me, in that the company I'm working for and other adjacent ones, the focus is to hand off the development to "managed agents" or whatever, relegating embedded engineers to basically just V&V or QA.
The increase in crap code has been duly reported by employees such as me and promptly discarded, considered just FUD by upper management