Maximizing your career longevity as a generalist developer: How to thrive in a world where AI writes code.
Long time ago when I started to read the incredible sci-fi book Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, I was impressed by the narrative of a powerful AI which can write new versions of itself code, and turn into a entirely ecosystem of creation, texts, images, movies and even companies were created using the power of the algorithm, I remember that it was scary, but after I close the book I stay relaxed because I know all of it were just fiction, and then I can go to sleep well.
Just two years after it, I'm scared again, but this time it seems to be real, most of you already know that somewhere outside we have AI creating text, images, movies, making business decisions, and the scariest thing: WRITING CODE! Yeah but it's just generated code without context and a bunch of errors you can argue, but I'm afraid to say that it's not only generated code, and if you give enough instructions to it, it can understand context, solve itself errors and improve the old versions of it.
Even if we think that it will take a lot of time to AI replace developers I'll prefer to assume that some portion of developers need to add this new risk to their careers, because we know that technology grow incredibly fast.
You can already read out there that it's emerging a new kind of developer the AI-Assisted Dev and if we think about history of industry evolution we can see that in the most cases where a profession became extinct we have some kind of assist from the machines, we can understand it as a kind of transition.
But my goal here is not to make you scare (at least not only), but also to give you my thoughts about how I believe that being a generalist developer can help you to extend your years of service as a developer, yeah just extend because I believe in the next 10 ~ 15 years our beloved developer role will be extinct or will be totally different from what it is now, obliging us to reinvent ourselves, and that's where we can see the benefits of being a generalist developer:
Future tech requires a generalist approach
Regardless of what kind of coding you are doing now, our industry in a way that we can't ignore. Remember last 5 years when JavaScript was taking over the world? To do anything in the browser, you need to learn it. Now not only it impact the browser but also Back-end applications and mobile applications.
Remember when AI was limited to "Akinator" things? With advancements of Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Data Science, it doesn't look disposable anymore.
Even if your main role is maintaining legacy code base, you owe to your future version to be prepared for the tools that are still to come, as I said different from what are here today. You don't need to have deep knowledge of it, but enough to have a kind of shortcut compared to Specialist developers at that time.
As a generalist you have more options
If we assume that AI will be taking our jobs, at some time we will have less available jobs, so being a generalist increases your chances of having a job.
It's not only true about the future, but also the present, If you know Object-Oriented Programming for example you navigate between jobs of Ruby, Node, Java and PHP without big issues, this is not a rule, but almost all developers that have a good understanding of algorithms can work with almost any language, and if we think about the AI-Assisted Devs we can imagine a world where developers will do the generalist work and AI can help with the specialist decisions, similar to what we have in the Council Board of some companies out there, where board members are composed not only by humans, but also machines, which can help with more specialized decisions.
Specialist species thrive only when conditions are perfect. They serve a very specific purpose within their particular ecosystem and are extremely adept at navigating it. However, should those conditions change — as a result of nature or, more commonly, an outside force — specialist species often become extinct. In contrast, mice can move from spot to spot on the globe, adapt to different cultures, diets and weather systems. And most importantly, stay alive.
— Forbes
I don't want you to be scared about the changes that future have to us, but it's not a question of if technology will replace our jobs but when, which I believe will happen between 5 ~10 years in the future to start happening.
So being a generalist can help us to survive time enough to learn new things when it starts to happen.
The only developer I can remotely think are little threatened in their positions are AI Developers, but as said, we can't predict the future (yet), so keep eyes open.
Some of the inspiration for writing this article come from these sources:
- Some concepts that I visualized come from the book Life 3.0 - Being human in the age of Artificial Intelligence
- Also you can check this high level article from Forbes proclaiming why to be a generalist professional.
- Maybe you already know that in some parts I was referring to ChatGPT, but not exclusively to it, anyway you can check this article from Fernando Doglio which can give you enough information on how AI is challenging developers job.
Do you buy it? Will AI grow enough to replace developer's work in the next 5 ~ 10 years? Do you think that being a generalist developer can extend your competitiveness against future code writing algorithms? Leave your thoughts at the comments.
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