Re: Whoops! The Atlantic Makes Trump Look EPIC In Cover Intended as a Smear

On 10/30/2024 4:54 PM, Scott Lurndal wrote:

Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> writes:

On 10/30/2024 4:39 AM, D wrote:

 

>
This raises questions about the future job of programmers. Do you
believe that the field will be split into simple code-monkeys where
salaries with the help of AI, will decrease more and more over time, and
the "elite" who actually are the ones who develop new algorithms, tools
and AI that serve to reduce the salaries of the code-monkeys?

>
I have no idea and I am in the business of writing and selling software.
  Programming is an odd profession, very few programmers actually have a
programming degree.  My degree is in Mechanical Engineering, one of my
programmers has a PhD in Chemical Engineering, and my other programmer
has a double degree in Chemistry and Physics.

 Pretty much every programmer I've worked with over the last forty five years
has had a degree in computer science or computer engineering.  There
have been some without degrees that learned on the job (e.g. started
in product support and moved to programming, but those are the exception,
not the rule).

Really? When I started in the early 80s, CS majors were very rare.
The team I worked with at a major Wall Street bank all had college
degrees in other subjects (Biochemistry for me).
That's not to say we were all self taught out of Creative Computing
magazine. I had been working at Columbia, and had free tuition - I
took most of the undergrad, and some grad CS courses before I switched
careers.
When my team at my first programming job acquired our first CS grad,
he Made Sure That We ALL Knew He Had a CS Degree. He lasted less than
a year.
pt