The tech industry changes so fast every year, and it can be really difficult for developers to keep up with those changes. AI is on everybody’s mind right now, and that can be scary for programmers… but fear not… in this video, Trisha Gee gives her advice on how to stay up to date with changes in the industry, and stay relevant in the face of artificial intelligence.
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So many great tips here Trisha, and +1 for TDD. I also remember using JFC/Swing for the first time, late 90s I think. By far your best tip IMO is to get out and meet people, talk, debate, even heated discussions – but no fighting! It's the best way to broaden your mind and learn.
I found this useful and uplifting. There is real content here that is helpful, even if not to everyone. I don't think it's click bait like some suggest. I liked that you touched on technology scape changing over time. I had done a lot of flash + flex development some time ago, but adapted to the changing landscape with js and react, etc. same story with SOA to microservices and kubernetes… It is best to step back and be pragmatic about what you are learning next, because each subject comes loaded with concepts and details that takes time.
gesturing is an important part of the communication process, making the video more "live".
But the current video setup cuts Trisha's gestures 🙁
The negative people in the comments are probably the ones who got into the tech industry for the pay check rather than because they love learning and creating. The pay is a nice bonus but if that's your whole motivation and you don't want to have to learn new things (even in your free time), then it sounds like you made a bad career decision and it's not justifiable for you to criticize ones like Trisha here who actually enjoy what they do.
For the benefit of people who worry about this stuff, you work in Technology, daily learning should be part of your day, no company cares about your feelings or mental health or any of that crap. You are responsible for being skilled, do not expect your company to do it for you, just do your best to upskill and work productively, This whole, no one wants to measure your productivity thing will not last long and if it does, the bloat will get too much and you could be laid off sooner or later. Learning is not painful and can be fun, Otherwise, other people will be promoted over you, earn more than you and you will still be wondering why.
Great presentation by Trisha Gee! She's a great speaker and communicator.
Fun fact: if you use JetBrains IDE-s, you actually use Swing as these are based on it.
Survival advice: Learn as much and as diverse things as you can. It develops reusable patterns in your mind. Whatever comes in the future, you will still have bigger chance of success with these than without the patterns. Learn math, physics, philosophy. These will raise your level of abstraction and helps to get a good sense of how the world/universe works. AI will know all of this but AI needs a hightech civilization to operate while people lived in ancient times too. Just a cyber-attack or electrical outage will make AI disappear and you'll stuck in the situation with whatever you have in your mind.
Stackoverflow has become pretty irrelevant. They've been rejecting realistic questions for years. They only allow simple, FAQ type questions and even then they reject some of those.
But isn't it obvious that AI, or rather the speed of its development, poses a very real threat to jobs including software developers. For example, our favourite Mark Zuckerberg is planning big layoffs in the nearest future. And this is a real pressure and fear that has a very negative impact on us (well, at least on me).
Getting into AI as a developer of models/new approaches is unrealistically difficult because of the large threshold in the form of maths. The average intelligent person can only attempt to enter AI as an integrator of AI solutions.
We are desperately short of time…
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PS: perhaps the 'working' strategy is to learn the math part for a couple of years (do we have that much time?) then pick a very narrow area/speciality in AI (NLP, ML, vision, reinforcement) and immerse yourself in it.
I was a farm labourer, there were 12 of us. We did not have a tractor on the farm so I paid no attention to tractors unlike my mate Jim who went off and did a tractor driving course in his spare time. One day the farm manager arrived with a tractor. Who can drive one of these? Jim stepped forward and became the tractor driver. The rest of us were let go. Such is life.
Dave have you done a gender change operation
Hey fellow developers. Just think of AI as simply a new tool to help you do something better and faster that's all.
I think people should learn AI. It’s not terrible to learn just a bit pushy. All the libraries are created in Python like, anaconda, tensorflow and keras. When you understand these libraries and how to use them even with some simple basic math you will get comfortable with it. I’m sure that AI is not going away. It’s a twist on how we all program and how we will program in the future. It’s a wheel that has been created so you don’t have to create it again. Before AI we had to search Google, youtube, and arrogant software engineers on stack-overflow for answers. So, stack is probably done. No more needing to beg arrogant SE guys for assistance with many types of languages and stuff. But you should be warned that if you have a problem to solve and you ask chat GPT or some AI chat model; it can sometimes lead you down a rabbit hole or wild goose chase to endless hours of nothing, only to find out that the answer was simple and far from the AI chat results. So the need for SEs should be up for a while until this all gets figured out. Meanwhile there is a new reality here to stay and we all have a chance and privilege to grow with it. You are gonna be a part of something unimaginable that you will help to create in no time. Imagine creating homes that move in harmony with the flow of an earthquake but won’t cave in because of AI and all its real-time calculations. Imagine safety drones that follow your children as they go to play or school. Imagine upper and underground cities that communicate with one another. A lot of disease and many if not all types of cancer will be gone. Citizens and law enforcement will be safe because wink, wink your on camera from all angles and danger could be halted at anytime. Senior citizens age will be prolonged by eventually 20 to 50 plus years and they will also have consistent companions robotic and physical. Go to the Apple Store and try one of those head gears. It’s crazy what this AI future is going to bring. Things that you don’t know have been invented and are not out at the moment because of legal red tape and it’s simply not the time to release it to the public. Trust me, things are happening. While people complain about AI others and high advanced scientists are working 24/7 because they too are amazed and mind blown about what is and has occurred. You have no idea. 😎
Nailed it. I'm always shocked to see these sort of questions, but all it means is that a lot of people who want to be influencers on youtube are jumping on Jensen's hype train and spreading nonsense. "Keep calm, learn things when they seem worthwhile to you" is exactly the message younger developers need.
Wow, not a lot of love for this video in the comments! I don’t really need the advice that Trisha presents but I think it’s good advice well presented.
At Work we are very tool centric and product centric. Officially there is not much time to learn and train basics and new things because of schedules. Unofficially you have to take the time (sometimes time at work without telling someone or your free time). I see this as continuous conflict.
Your knowledge of swing is not necessarily wasted. Im currently working on a game in java and you still need the gfx basics (awt and swing). I'm combining it with SVG for a tile based GUI.
The answer is: it does not matter
When AI reaches the level of AGI it won't matter whether you learned to use AI tools or ignored them. The idea that you will be prompting the AGI makes no sense, it will be done by AI agent who will be prompting another AI agent and so on. If AI is better than you in math, coding, science, writing etc. you can be sure that it is going to better than you in prompting too. This is already shown to a certain extent by some people on X. If you, for example, copy reasoning steps generated by reasoning models like o1 or R1 and paste it as prompt to weaker models like 4o, you will get better results compared to results based on human prompt. So AI models like o1 are already better at writing prompts than humans. So all this talk about leveraging AI tools to stay relevant might give you additional year of relevance, nothing more. Everything that you do at that point, AI agents will also be able to do it. And in combination with tech like "Computer Use" that means basically anything on a computer can be done by agents.
Big Tech pump & dump, version 2025.01:
Step 1: flood the market with cheap LLM code generators promising to replace software developers
Step 2: start ratcheting up the price as entry-level developers become more scarce in the market
Step 3: PROFIT! eventually all the experienced developers will retire, leaving you and your broligarchs with 100% market capture.
My experience of AI is mixed. It can be very useful, memory jogger for syntax, clues how to architect with an unfamiliar stack, boilerplate. But I've spent hours with it on certain problems and got nowhere, it still can't help in the large. It's poor at picking test scenarios, it doesn't really do TDD. It can't replace domain experts. There's a long way to go before it'll be my coding pair pal.
Absolute garbage ambulance chasing content.
If AI could replace your job, then you weren't doing one in the first place. Writing a prompt precise enough for ChatGPT to write code that actually correctly does what you want for anything more advanced than FizzBuzz is just programming with a pointless step in between and often far more time consuming than just writing it yourself in the first place.
Blindly copying code spat out by a generator is exactly as effective as just blindly copying from a Stack Overflow post (which is essentially what it's doing anyway).
To be honest, the rapid improvement of AI will only eliminate the need for most developers. These AI tools can only continue to improve, it will get to the point where voice can make changes and send to production. It may not be soon, but that is the direction everthing seems to be going not only for developers but also for other industries.
Look for a product that can fetch you huge money for your retirement fast, that is my advice for anyone. The only people a bit safe are system designers and architects.
I am talking about 10 to 15 years coming, or maybe AI is just all hype, at this point I don't know.
Stay relevant by making YouTube videos on clickbaity topics .
Enough of click-bait headlines… unsubscribing…