
Ask HN: Dorsey Warns AI to Effect Junior SWE Candidates; Advice for CS Majors? - kashfi
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;22&#x2F;jack-dorsey-ai-will-jeopardize-entry-level-software-engineer-jobs.html<p>What advice would you recommend to soon to be new grads—maybe a year&#x2F;two oit—to help secure a new grad position &#x2F; junior position?<p>On top of being having real human intelligence and a CS degree, what skills&#x2F;expertise would be desirable?
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nostrademons
The very first job that the software engineering profession automated was its
own. Assemblers, compilers, libraries, frameworks, package managers, macros,
shell scripts, scripting languages, IDEs, unit tests, code browsers, and
refactoring tools are all ways that the software engineering profession has
taken mundane work that used to be part of their job description and handed it
over to a computer. A compiler is _literally_ the computer writing code for
you, and they were invented in 1959. Many of these innovations were seen as
forms of AI when they were invented.

My advice for students learning CS is: don't wed yourself to any particular
technology, learn your CS fundamentals, and late-bind your particular tech
stack choices. The idea of writing HTML by hand is pretty quaint today, but it
provided people with $100+/hour jobs in the dot-com bubble. Similarly, it's
entirely possible the software jobs of the future won't be writing mobile apps
or wiring microservices together - but there will still be software jobs
writing whatever tools end up writing the mobile apps.

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kashfi
Many thanks for taking the time to write that response.

