Ask HN: What are your career plans in the age of AI?
I expect more and more professions getting affected in the next 3 to 5 years, not all on the positive side. Software dev is already changing.
What are your plans? Are you planning to quit software altogether? Or stop coding and adapt, accept AI but stay in software field? Or something else? If you’re not in software, what plans then?
It would be helpful if you can include what career level are you at (or age range, if you prefer)
I did a PhD in Machine Learning before, and then worked as an AI Engineer / Data Scientist (still manually doing the programming, but basically only python).
Now I'm realising that I love building apps, also because AI makes it so much easier to do... but also devalues it, anyone can do it. So I'm still seeing where my technical background is helpful and where not, though nowadays app building seems way more about marketing than about building. Still, I'm discovering that the building and owning my own projects is just a lot of fun. For now it's not paying enough though, so I'm also taking a job as an AI Engineer / Consultant, might as well keep up to date with AI advancements and their applications in business while it keeps being the big thing.
I'm a 12yoe dev but don't work at FAANG/Mag7. I think the extent to which companies have pulled out all the stops and sacrificed any order in their systems by pushing devs to vibe up massive amounts of code is a tech debt bill that will come due quickly.
I think comprehension debt will keep people employed and make for many opportunities. We will be using AI to make refactors, but the reputational risk being taken on by so many companies is something that hasn't been priced in.
I have no career plans. I will work my job until I die or am fired. If I'm fired I'll end up working at walmart or something similar, at least until the cost of robotic replacements is low enough for them to layoff most workers. The future is bleak.
I work for a consulting firm that rebranded itself as an AI solutions firm. So yeah, I'm pretty much expected to use A.I. pretty heavily to keep working here, and so I do.
So I'm guessing that experience will help me get whatever my next job is, but I also think my next job might end up being my last job in the field.
I'll either go into management, or just semi-retire and work on my own projects, or leave the field entirely and start working in the board game industry, I don't know, something.
If I switched fields I'll probably take a major pay cut though (if I go into the board game industry I'll probably be lucky to make a quarter of what I'm making right now). But paycuts might be coming anyway to the software engineering field as a whole before too long anyway.
Keeping up the motivation was already difficult before A.I., I'd already dealt with so much startup, small business, and corporate crap over the years it was starting to pile up. I might need to take a sabbatical at some point, or at least a couple of months off.
I've been working in software engineering in some form or another for a little over 20 years now.
Plan A -> this year I've started a company on the side, planning to leave my job before the second half of 2027.
Plan B -> keep trying to get jobs in software, trying to adapt to still bring some kind of value to the table.
Plan C -> run my parents kindergarten, but the birth date drop is making this option challenging.
Plan D -> real estate broker and fix and flipper.
Plan E -> Buddhist monk
I have never thought of myself as merely a code writer, but rather as a creative person who gets satisfaction from solving problems, helping people and exchanging ideas.
Since you asked: I'm 40+ with decades of experience in tech.
In the age of AI I feel the possibilities in terms of what software products I could build have expanded enormously. So lately I've been thinking about things I want to create with the help of AI and I am genuinely inspired.
From my position, software development is limited to web-based software. For the last five years, I have created and developed a platform, including, the website, the server set-up and the app development. At the present time, I am trying to show what I've built to as many people as possible. As for AI, I don't use it to replace coding. I find it more useful to think of AI as a way of solving problems I run into much faster. AI can be very helpful when I'm stuck on certain technical issues, and wanting a solution that I may have overlooked.
Use my tech skills for vertical integration in an old industry where regulations require a licensed operator.
Specifically, I’m training to be a CPA and the idea is to absorb a couple of small 1 man firms and write software to make them more efficient, then expand.
Mine? I retired in February. I'm 64. (This isn't advice for how to handle the changes. This is saying I didn't have to personally figure it out.)
I'm retired too, but I'm worried that if enough people end up unemployed that'll break social security, and the markets and everyone's retirement accounts.
I'm medically out of the labor market, if SS disappears, I will end up homeless.
The weird limit they put on Social security contributions is strangling the system.
SS will be "saved" as it's too political not to be. But I'm guess is they'll do that by increasing taxes and the money supply, causing the benefits to be worth little.
Also, the limit isn't weird when you consider it is intended to be a single payer system with a cap on the benefit.
> The weird limit
Weird? That was intentional, it was just maintained for decades by the weird politicians your generation was obsessed with to destroy the system by the time you all aged out. Sorry to hear you're worried about it becoming insolvent. You should also be worried about the working population _not really caring about you_. We have kids now. Good luck.
At least if I could still work, there's a chance I could hold on. It sucks being medically frail.
And yes, I do care about society in general, and societal collapse.... what worries me is that the right seems bent on taking away the social safety net that's keeping me alive, and the left seems to be worried about not making waves.
I help people settle in Berlin. The guides on my website used to be a bible for immigrants.
So far LLMs have killed 75% of my traffic, but my income is still acceptable, so I'll keep going. If it gets worse, I don't know.
The information I share is as hard as ever to acquire. I still need to poll experts and my audience, but my audience is shrinking and I can't incentivize experts with as much business as I used to. All the spoils go to parasitic AI companies and slop sites.
Still, the work matters, and the job is fun. I'll keep doing it for as long as I can. In any case, my backup profession (coding) is also threatened by AI.
One thing I'm trying is building a community for immigrants. You still need humans, and I want to build their watering hole.
Have you investigated how much of your business has been diverted by AI agents scraping articles from your site and essentially presenting them to the users through their UI?
And related, do you see a future where info products become much more proprietary/hidden due to scraping?
75% of my traffic, last I checked. It's affecting everyone putting out information on the internet.
That future is already happening. Many websites have shut down or gone private. More and more content requires an account to see.
Go back to medical school, I'm only very early in my career and in my home country you can restart medical school at any point in time (it's also extremely rare to do so).
I am a founder of a software company so I am not a traditional software dev anymore. However, we are doubling down on AI and improving tons of internal and customer facing solutions with AI. This will impact some people for sure.
Anyone who is just an order taker or bills by the hour or keeps people waiting too long is going to be eliminated by AI. That is the brutal and honest truth. Companies have always wanted to move fast and now AI removes the dependency on humans to a great extent. I personally have started coding again with AI to move things faster at our company. Not in everything but for anything new/experiements/product dev work.
Tthere are tons of opportunities for senior devs to adjust and use AI to make them more valuable. If you work a regular corporate 9-5, your options may be limited unless you have a say. But if you work for yourself or smaller companies, get on the AI bandwagon if you want to keep you job and excel further. For example, one of my close friends is very senior level at a company and she is now vibe coding in house tools and working with her management team to show the ROI. She otherwise manages a team of over 1000+ people across global locations.
Remember, if you can't beat them, join them. Good luck.
Eng manager. This is March or Die scenario. I love building software products, but if I won't be able to do it at any decent company, I'd start my own.
- micro SaaS
- consulting for AI solutions
- robotics or other hardware
Unless we have a well planned distribution channel, SaaS is tough now that code has no moat - correct?
Consulting might still be around at least in the short term, I guess…
I have some ex-colleagues that entered the indie dev scene, one man micro SaaS factories. According to them the space has never felt more "toxic" whereas before if you announced your new product you'd see other people in the community congratulating, giving helpful critique, now you see two three people just saying "here's that product but for $0 made by claude" with a vibe coded copy.
I get the sense it's becoming like an influencer marketplace (think instagram or twitch), where you attract new users through your brand as a persona and not so much the product itself.
My plan is to buy a house till inevitable happens and then become barber.
Find something outside of tech field eventually (currently employed but getting increasingly tired of staring at various sorts of slop, and where the field is headed), if nothing at all pans out, find a rock cut i can drive into.
Let computers stay a hobby, where it started, on my own terms.
(mid 40s, no family, 20+ years exp, System Admin + coding, including some embedded stuff back in the day + some performance work, but mostly admin -> now Security Engineer)
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OnlyFans
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Welfare mooch.
I have no education outside high-school, my entire career has been in software with no valuable domain or specialized experience.
Its either that or gig work slave.