Coding Jobs Are the Canary in the Coal Mine

The nerdy side of me reads the blogs of former colleagues and well-known old-time software developers. More and more of them write that; now that LLMs have taken over their world, they are looking for new jobs (outside of coding) or retiring completely (a few are quitting the Internet altogether). The frustration is palpable – here is my former Mozilla colleague Jono’s sobering reflection on where he is at (and Jono is an excellent, highly creative software developer). These voices come from one industry, but I fear that the changes we are seeing in software development are the harbinger of things to come in many other industries. As LLMs get more capable, they will take over more work and hollow out many more professions. What might be left is a whole bunch of people experiencing an existential crisis and the necessity to decouple our identity from our jobs.