Is ChatGPT Going to Snatch Your Developer Job?
DevEvolution EP 2 - And what you can do about it?
Hello 👋 and welcome to a new edition of the DevEvolution newsletter.
Every week (near the weekend), I send you an email like this with actionable advice on a topic that can help you grow in your software engineering career.
The topic for today is extremely important - Is ChatGPT going to snatch your developer job?
Sorry if you find the title a little too aggressive. But I feel this is an extremely important question troubling the developer community.
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AI is coming for your jobs 🔥
That’s the common perception on the street.
If you open any social media platform such as Twitter these days, you’d find lots of users expressing their fear of AI tools taking over their jobs.
To make matters worse, there is also a lot of general frustration as explained by a 3D artist, who lost his love for the job due to the rise of tools like Midjourney.
Sounds pretty dystopian, doesn’t it? 😐
Needless to say, developers are also worried.
Tools like ChatGPT, Bard, and GitHub Copilot X are promising levels of automation not seen so far.
For example, the recently released GPT-4 demo showed how it can code a complete website just by looking at a hand-drawn sketch.
Very impressive, indeed!
So, is it game over for developers? 🤔
Should we all pack up our stuff and go farming in a remote location where no chatbots can chase us through the fields?
Well, you could certainly consider doing so if that’s your passion.
But I wouldn’t do it just because of a largely misplaced fear of AI taking over jobs.
🤖 The Current AI Situation
As impressive as the GPT-4 demo looked, let’s be honest about one thing.
It has been quite a while since we needed developers to build rudimentary websites like the one shown in the GPT-4 demo.
🚀 There is an enormous difference between generating a 100-line HTML document and building a production-ready application that is supposed to handle millions of users.
If someone says that developer jobs are gone just by looking at this demo, then they clearly have no understanding of how a software system is actually built.
A large-scale production application has a lot of moving parts and components, including complex edge cases and specific business scenarios.
👉 Things don’t work like an assembly line 🏭 where developers are tied to their workstations hammering out line after line of code.
👉 A typical application requires human collaboration on a far greater scale than people understand. There are countless discussions, meetings, design sessions, and moment-to-moment interactions before you get to see a real product.
👉 Each step is iterative and feeds into the overall cycle of development.
Even if the AI tool is able to write code with a good amount of accuracy, it will still not be 100% accurate.
Solely using an AI system to build software would be equivalent to a developer writing code for a month without talking to anyone or trying to run the code only after it was 100% complete.
I can only imagine the nightmare of debugging such a piece of code.
As an aside, it’s not like we don’t already have code snippets spread all over the internet.
By their very nature, these snippets are generic pieces that you can fit into your application. However, it requires very specific knowledge to utilize these pieces to build something useful.
Every code base is unique and we are a very long way away from major tech companies firing their software engineers to hire a bunch of prompt engineers.
🥊 Augmentation vs Replacement
Of course, I’m not trying to suggest that ground-breaking tools like ChatGPT won’t have any impact on the developer ecosystem.
Whether you like it or not, these tools are going to become an integral part of developer workflow and tooling. 🧰
Some organizations will sit on the fence about not letting their developers use these tools for quite some time.
The same thing happened when Google Search became a thing.
In my first job out of college, we were allowed to access Google only between 5 PM to 6 PM, and that too with a bunch of restrictions. However, now you’d be considered a dinosaur 🦕 for not utilizing websites like Google & StackOverflow to find answers.
Sooner or later (and I expect sooner), you would be expected to leverage AI tools to perform your job.
Of course, you’d also be expected to be more productive. The idea would be to fix more bugs and implement more features.
Ultimately, this wouldn’t be a bad thing.
More features shipped 🚢 can potentially lead to more profits for the organization and more investment into newer projects.
Barring any major economic catastrophes unrelated to AI, tech companies may grow even faster in the coming decade.
🏂 What you must do?
Though I am optimistic about the role of AI, I’m not completely carefree.
Tools like ChatGPT may not take away jobs directly, but they can create other disparities.
The below tweet summed up my views in a few words.
AI tools definitely have the potential to make a lot of programmer skills really cheap.
This is because AI tools make it a lot cheaper to access a huge amount of information and knowledge.💰
👉 Just to be clear, the same thing happened when Google search made it unimaginably easy to get lots of information faster when compared to reading books.
What this means is that the barrier to entry 🚧 will go down significantly and more people can claim to be programmers when they are simply copying and pasting code from ChatGPT or other similar tools.
To counter this, you must scale up your knowledge and understanding faster than the AI can erode its value. Try to become a high-value developer rather than someone who just translates requirements to code.
Ever since the dawn of the printing press, reading and processing information became a great skill to have. Reading and processing are now virtually a superpower because there is so much information out there.
Even if you don’t enjoy it, I suggest you cultivate a habit of reading about your subject.
Moreover, try to read differing views and build your own concept about any topic.
That’s the only thing that can help you stay ahead of the answers provided by the AI.
🍫 Think Positive
My reason for writing this post was to address developers who are in the process of building their software engineering careers but are getting worried about the sudden rise of AI.
The feeling of “there’s no point” can literally push you back a lot if you don’t get over it and take action now.
Of course, whatever I have said in this post might be totally wrong.
It’s not like I have a way to look into the future. For all I know, mankind might be wiped out tomorrow due to an asteroid.
However, one thing’s certain.
AI will definitely have a great impact on how we work.
I started programming way back in 2005 and things have changed so much since then.
But, what has been constant during all these years?
👉 The need for developers to be adaptable and evolve with the changing technology landscape.
That’s not going to change any time soon.
If you are truly passionate about programming and software development, my appeal is to NOT give up and realize that 5 years down the line, developers are even more in demand.
⚽ Over to you
Are you worried about ChatGPT and other AI tools?
Have you started using it in your workplace or for personal projects?
Do you think AI tools will be valuable for developers?
Share your views and thoughts in the comments section below.
And that’s it for today!
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Wishing you a great long weekend ahead! ☀️
See you later.