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Learning by doing

AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. Eventually much of what programmers do today may be as obsolete (for everyone but embedded system programmers) as the old skill of debugging with an oscilloscope. Master programmer and prescient tech observer Steve Yegge observes that it is not junior and mid-level programmers who will be replaced but those who cling to the past rather than embracing the new programming tools and paradigms. Those who acquire or invent the new skills will be in high demand. Junior developers who master the tools of AI will be able to outperform senior programmers who don’t. Yegge calls it “The Death of the Stubborn Developer.”

My ideas are shaped not only by my own past 40+ years of experience in the computer industry and the observations of developers like Yegge but also by the work of economic historian James Bessen, who studied how the first Industrial Revolution played out in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts during the early 1800s. As skilled crafters were replaced by machines operated by “unskilled” labor, human wages were indeed depressed. But Bessen noticed something peculiar by comparing the wage records of workers in the new industrial mills with those of the former home-based crafters. It took just about as long for an apprentice craftsman to reach the full wages of a skilled journeyman as it did for one of the new entry-level unskilled factory workers to reach full pay and productivity. The workers in both regimes were actually skilled workers. But they had different kinds of skills