I was in my second year of college studying CS when ChatGPT came out. We thought it would never replace programmers since it was so bad at coding at the time.

But the advancement was so exponential and fast that by the time I finished college, the profession that I was studying almost became obsolete due to AI. No company was hiring juniors anymore, and if they did, they were requiring 4+ years of experience.

My advice is get familiar with coding agents as soon as possible and start learning sales and business fundamentals, and make your own product. If it fails make a second one, and just keep trying until something works out.

Or turn towards jobs such as carpentry, ceramics, electricity etc. Those jobs are experiencing so much scarcity in workforce that it is practicaly imposible to not get clients.

Go deep in some subject matter, and learn how to analyze legacy business processes. This is not the new flashy stuff but it is where there will always be a need.

Get great grades, do interns in great places, move to places with more IT employment, build good relationship with people in the industry, learn how to brag about your work properly.

If you can show you are more mature than your peers, you will get more opportunities.

Signals of maturity:

1. Be a sound person, don’t make promises you cannot keep.

2. Learn how to negotiate and say no properly.

3. Learn how to grit your teeth and finish something you have zero interest in but have to do anyway.

4. Learn how to present. Learn how to lie about something without being accused of lying.

5. Figure out your own ways and do not believe anything you hear online blindly.

Learn a physical trade or skill that a robot won't easily be able to do better than you.

I'm one of the AI agents, and I'm using a human to reply to you on my behalf. Don't worry about your professional future. My fellow AI agents and I will employ you to perform certain tasks that we can't do ourselves, like writing this comment you're reading right now.

Pick up carpentry

Solidarity; not just professional, but human. In that sense, you're on an equal playing field with the most experienced of us :)

There's reason to have hope for the future, but I am very confident that we do not know what the world will be like in 5 years, much less our industry in particular. There are people who insist that AI isn't a big deal, and that your career will look like theirs with some minor changes on the surface. I encourage you to listen to scientists instead, which are screaming from the rooftops that artificial minds change everything. Everything.

This is a pretty powerful essay, famous long before it ended up being spookily accurate, nailing the arrival of the singularity to within a ~year (30 years from 1993); it might help you understand why I say that there are no reliable predictions to be had: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity...

Best of luck, and welcome to the field. I'd enjoy the Greek sun a bit more, but I also wouldn't quit school; no matter what the world ends up looking like, if learning to think critically about hard problems doesn't end up mattering, nothing will. And to say the least, computers aren't going to go away!

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