Solid analysis. But you’re a bit off on leaning to code.

You’re right about college. For 15 years I’ve been advising to skip the comp sci degree. I’ve participated in hundreds of interviews, and we never look at education. We simply look at your work, or have you do some work while we watch.

Anyone with the aptitude can learn to code from the Internet, or worst case, a six month boot camp.

But coding jobs aren’t going away. For 20 years they’ve been telling us domestic demand will collapse due to offshoring or H1B. Meanwhile my compensation just kept going up and up. The ready explanation: turns out that co-location or culture matters more than we thought. But that’s not the reason. Here’s why:

The demand for software is, practically speaking, infinite. Software is still eating the world.

At my last job we rejected 90% of requests. The payoff had to be something like 10x. The reason was constrained supply of coders. It’s common wisdom that a minority of the coders in any shop produce most of the output, and a minority at the other end is a drag on output. There just aren’t enough skilled coders to be had. Not domestically. Not globally. Coding has been largely work-from-anywhere for a long time now. I was working on a global remote team in 2010.

But what about AI? Isn’t that a new kind of threat? It’s new, but it’s the same kind of threat: supply expansion.

Some shops are going hard on AI for coding. Others are slow because of privacy concerns. I’m indie now, so I get to decide, and I’ve gone all in.

AI immediately increased my output 3-5x. My AI agent is basically a junior developer that I direct and supervise. It writes all the code, and I review and approve it.

But AI today needs a seasoned senior coder like me. It’s nowhere near ready to work under a non-coder. I could be wrong, but I doubt it ever will be. Not soon anyway.

But won’t a 5X productivity gain decimate jobs? No, because as I said, demand is practically infinite. Realignment takes time, but it will happen.

So what about the current hiring slump?

AI is certainly creating a major short run disruption … and a very interesting dilemma. It’s is pushing down demand for junior devs (really driving home the advice to skip college). But this is not sustainable. How will we get senior coders to supervise AI without them first being junior coders? I honestly don’t know the solution, but I do know that it will be solved.

So by all means, learn to code. Just don’t pay a lot for it.