Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.

So obviously each college is different. And your experience is not mine.

But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.

What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.

You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.

Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.

The trick is not to start in software and have something to fall back in to.

In my case that’s mathematics in academia so I’m going to be starving to death.

I know some people whose work was already almost completely eliminated by AI (language translation) and they're not doing great. Reality is there's no-one out there looking out for you except yourself and very close family/friends.

Just like everyone else. I have a feeling your definition of “livable” is not in line with the reality that most people face. You share more in common with a stay-at-home mom going back to school to become a phlebotomist than you think. It’s just pride gets in the way

well, I suppose the same way that other people whose jobs were lost due to automation over the years were supposed to retrain for good jobs? I doubt they had the money or years to go back to college to get a livable job either.

The same way clerical and manufacturing workers retrained when their jobs were replaced by computers/the Internet and robots. That is to say, most won’t.

No - because as a software developer adapting IS the job.

I would like to know the answer to this, too.

Not really sure what I should be doing on the side since AI seems to be automating a lot of work that I do as an analytics engineer. Maybe in 10 years all I'm doing is feeding in markdowns and project specs to an LLM and reading test outputs. At what point are you just a technician?

Lately I've been just thinking of hitting ALT+F4 on life for good, as a big FU to the megacorps (not that they would care, but it would give me the satisfaction at least)

Pretty much none of us are doing jobs that existed in colonial America.

The internet has made it easier than ever to learn new skills. You don't need college unless you're targeting a career that requires, or expects, a degree.

You retrain the same way that we told workers when we decimated the garment and manufacturing industries. You'll get the same amount of government support too.

In my experience, AI has given far more leverage to software engineers than anyone else, because they have a feel for what computers can do, what's easy, what's hard, what's performant, or poorly specified, etc. Therefore I think retraining is mostly about being willing to experiment with AI-assisted workflows and not being too tied to old ways of doing things. As long as you are focused on the problems you are solving, I think you'll do okay.

What I'm more concerned about are the younger generation where all the learning tasks have been automated. I have faith that the strong, naturally curious engineering types will still learn to do great engineering, and honestly without some of the mental blocks and calcified assumptions that us greybeards have. But how do they get in the foot in the door and the reps needed to develop senior-level judgment is another question.

In some sense we need the current mania to die down and the long-term maintenance implications of heavy AI assistance to become more apparent. Basically I think we need the AI bubble to pop and then 1-2 years for things to stabilize, and then we'll recalibrate on hiring expectations and best practices for AI usage. The current AI maximalist and doomer views I think are both basically driven by capitalist incentives and wishful thinking from investors and a reality check is going to come in some form (whether technically, socially or politically).

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Many of us on this site have worked directly on projects where the efficiency gains ultimately reduced or eliminated positions. If you want to exit the development field, I think the answer is probably the same as for the people whose jobs we helped eliminate.