HACKER Q&A
📣 AverageDude

Transition away from CS job as main source of income


I am a dev with 10 years of experience. I don't have much savings because I lived in a country with low wages up until 2020.

With the AI apocalypse staring at horizon, I am wondering if it's possible to transition to some other income source. My plan is to develop a secondary set of skills to which I should be able to fall on when I lose my job in next 3-5 years.

Anybody tried something like that?

I tried getting weekend only job at local Caravan body shop company but they didn't give me chance because I did not have any experience with the mechanical tools and stuff, I offered to take no pay and learn with them but they felt that I will slow them down. What else HN think I should try? In which skill building should I invest my time and money?

  👤 john_the_writer Accepted Answer ✓
Go back, and offer to bring them coffee and run errands. Offer to do something techy for them, then study like crazy.

That's how I landed my first job as a programmer. Took 6 months but I was cutting VB code to automate some things in the office.

But really. I wouldn't worry about AI taking your job just yet. Writing code was never really the hard part of programming. It's translating the vision to code. It's seeing the edge cases. AI's a long way away from learning that.

👤 tobinfekkes
Don't be overreacting so soon.

AI is not eliminating all our jobs tomorrow. If anything, it's merely allowing people to do things they never would have paid for in the first place.

👤 dylanhassinger
if you're that worried, study machine learning

and start a garden

👤 re-thc
Where is the AI apocalypse? I'd be more worried about AI taking over other jobs that can be easily automated and there are a lot more of those than developer roles.