Matt Welsh, a former professor of Computer Science and Google engineer believes that programming jobs, as we know them today, will cease to exist in three years
There are some interesting aspects to this:
a) Matt Welsh has a development and computer science background
b) The talk was presented at the online meetup of ACM chicago and also at the ACM website as a viewpoint on ACM
c) There is a specific timeline proposed for the supposed end of coding jobs (three years)
The author however is setting up a startup to address this problem – which represents a bias to the views
Having considered this background, let’s explore the claims
a) Through chatGPT and GPT, programmers will evolve primarily into teachers of AI programs
b) The roles of product managers and code reviewers will not change much
c) Programming languages have not really evolved over the years
d) Github co-pilot offers a radical new way to code
e) Copilot is a fantastic productivity boost because it saves people from switching contexts.
Why three years?
Because Matt Welsh believes that the only thing limiting co-pilot today is more data and compute
In my view, this analysis is probably accurate especially because github co-pilot is evolving to all aspects of the developer lifecycle including documentation, testing, pull requests, etc.
I think most developers will need to prepare for a radical change in their roles
Image source pixabay
