gspanos

I've been wondering about my career and its direction for about a year at least and I felt that's it would be good to share and ask for advice and opinions.

-some background-

I'm a programmer with about ten years of experience. I come from a math background. Never completed my uni studies but I was fortunate enough to build some good foundations that helped a ton in programming.

Programming for me was also my only hobby for most of the last decade. Read many books, tried many tools and languages. Had tons of fun on many late nights home.

Recent two years the excitement dropped off and I've been enjoying non programing stuff a lot. I've organically ended up doing team lead/tech lead stuff for the last five years and I've accustomed to that. My job is primarily reviewing, mentoring, planning and estimating effort.

Due to the recent advancements in AI I've started feeling the heat. It seems to me that much of the tool set that used to make us competent as programmers is fading away. Now, as a team lead/tech lead I feel that I do a good job exactly because I've spent so many hours fiddling with stuff from many different angles. But in the age of AI I have much less confidence in my ability to reasons about those genai system that I think we'll be dealing with in the upcoming years.

I've tried to move to areas of game development and design, graphics programming but I gave up after a while. I did not feel the urge to pursue and do what it takes to jump to another field.

Right now I'm asked to design systems based on AI which, I don't feel equipped to do.

And even though I know that I'm through a burnout for about three years now, I appreciate my job and the craft. I appreciate how it has transformed my life as I've been able to do and own things I never would have if I did not spend so much time studying cs and programming.

This is why I decided to create a self made curriculum of data science, machine learning, deep learning and finally genai in order get myself familiarize with those concepts. This is something that's I evaluate to take at least a year. I think that if I am to continue managing development teams it makes sense. One way or the other, AI integrations seem to rigidify themselves as part of development.

I don't feel like I'm going to definitely lose my job to AI. But I feel like that if I don't expand my knowledge right now, I kind of leave it to chance. I don't know if I'm maybe too pessimistic about this, but my gut call is saying that it's to re evaluate some things and it's time to be proactive again.

Thought I'd share, I expect that many might have somewhat similar thoughts, with all this AI madness going around constantly. Would really like to read your experiences and point of view.