Poll: Is coding still a viable profession?

[Dorkeaux]

This article appeared on the BBC discussing the impact of AI and other factors on the decline of the Indian middle classes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2p4nqd352o

Also masses of posts on Linkedin suggesting that programming / engineering is on the decline, compared to architecture, analysis and design.
The suggestion being that if you want to forward your career, be something other than a coder.

Maybe we can test that..
Above is a poll.

Most important is answering the IN WORK question.

The other questions on role are meant to indicate your main function at work.
Nothing stopping you from choosing many, but try to stick to one if you can.

- By “Coder / Engineer” I mean someone that writes code as the main function of their job.
- “Technical Leadership” means leading coders or other technical staff.
- “Business Role / Management Consultancy” are the non-technical roles in the client business.
- “Other Weird Role Title” includes things like “Innovation Champion”, “Scrum Master” and suchlike.

The others should be self-explanatory.

I’m trying to see if unemployment is more prevalent among coders than other roles.

[b0redom]

Depends tbh. If you're just blindly creating code, then AI is probably a couple of generations away from eating your job. If you have to design stuff, do business translation, maintain legacy stuff etc - anything that's not just producing boiler plate new stuff, I think you're safe for the foreseeable future.

My experience with AI is that it's OK at producing simple apps from scratch, filling in boiler plate code, or even more complex code snippets if you give it a tight spec, but it WILL hallucinate if it doesn't know. I asked it to produce quite a complex AWS AMI filter and it just couldn't. This is using multiple LLMs on OpenLlama.

[willendure]

Depends tbh. If you're just blindly creating code, then AI is probably a couple of generations away from eating your job.

You mean human generations or AI generations? A new generation of AI seems to come out about every 6 months now. Saw a paper recently about an AI that is building better AIs too, so we can only expect this rate of AI evolution to get faster.

I have yet to see an AI code generator that can work really effectively - creating larger software systems, working on parts of a larger system alongside others, and so on. But I have seen it fix bugs in legacy systems, generate toy projects, and be a useful assistant and getting better at it too. Seems to me to be around about neutral right now on whether you use it or not - good enough to not be terrible, but still soaks up enough of your time that the overall return is not high. Some of the better systems may be internal to certain companies or expensive so I have never tried them though. It has very noticeably improved over the last year. So I do think it is only a matter of a few years before it is faster, cheaper and frequently better than humans.

[SussexSeagull]

For a variety of reasons I wouldn't recommend someone choose coding, or related disciplines, out of college or university anymore in the UK. By the sound of it AI is little more than a programming aid at the moment or a very good way to knock up a prototype but it will get better.

However, I think large scale development going abroad makes ir unsustainable as a career long term.

[willendure]

Unsure if coder is still a viable profession but a frequent route into coding is to study computer science, and I still think that is a viable route into a profession involving computers. We live in the information age after all.

[WTFH]

Yes, it is still a viable profession. (I say that with caveats, and also based on me not being paid to code)
In the late 1990s, a "web developer" was someone who knew FrontPage. Then it moved on to Dreamweaver, etc, and 25+ years later, anyone can throw together a Wordpress website in a matter of hours without any coding ability. Now if you learned FrontPage and never looked at anything else, you'd still be taking weeks to create websites that would look clunky and tired. You'd be left behind. If you moved on to newer ways of working, you'd still have a business, but you're either making a lot less, or the website is doing so much more than was ever dreamt of back then.
If you were coding for banks, pharma, petrochem, etc, their back end systems don't change that much. Some are using software where the code is still based on stuff from the early 1990s. There may be changes to the front end look and feel, but the backend is very similar. New variations and enhancements tend to be bolt-ons on top, rarely a complete re-write from the ground up.

Someone who has been coding on backend systems for the last 20+ years still can find work, it is still viable. Someone still using FrontPage 95 maybe less so. Weird and niche changes slowly, popular and fashionable goes out of date very quickly, so you end up having to hop from one thing to another.
Someone who is thinking of studying to start out on a career, yes, I would say that studying IT is not a dead end. Learn the principles, and don't just look at what the current trendy coding is, but understand the fundamentals.

[sadkingbilly]

Yes, it is still a viable profession.
If you were coding for banks, pharma, petrochem, etc, their back end systems don't change that much. Some are using software where the code is still based on stuff from the early 1980s. There may be changes to the front end look and feel, but the backend is very similar. New variations and enhancements tend to be bolt-ons on top, rarely a complete re-write from the ground up.

Someone who has been coding on backend systems for the last 35+ years still can find work, it is still viable. .

FTFY

[edison]

Unsure if coder is still a viable profession but a frequent route into coding is to study computer science, and I still think that is a viable route into a profession involving computers. We live in the information age after all.

This is something I've been wrangling with as my son is looking at applying next year for either a Computer Science and/or Maths degree.

It's a very mixed picture for recent Computer Science and Computer Engineering grads though.

A recent graduate labour market survey in the US found of 74 degree subjects, Computer Science had the 7th highest unemployment rate, Computer Engineering 3rd highest and Information Systems Management 9th highest. So 3 IT related degrees in the worst 10 for unemployment.

The flip side is those that did manage to find a job were more likely to find a degree level one. All three subjects had much lower than average 'underemployment' rates. Median salaries for early career grads (under 27YO) were still very good, but I suspect are flatlining or declining now.

This is consistent with what I've been hearing anecdotally from UK IT recruiters.

In short, it's probably still a good degree but make sure you go to a decent uni and get some related internship or other work placement experience.

[eek]

This is something I've been wrangling with as my son is looking at applying next year for either a Computer Science and/or Maths degree.

I will repeat my default advice here - Degree Apprenticeship first (and the Civil service do a lot of very good ones) and University second.

[Dorkeaux]

Interesting comments so far, thanks for contributing.
In retrospect, I could have designed the poll better.
In my defense, the default poll framework is restrictive, and I've never used it before.
But I do understand name/value pairs, restricted to Boolean values. Next one will be better.

No conclusions yet, but feel free to vote if you are comfortable with sharing.