Is it too late to become a software engineer? (OpenAI o1 reaction)

is AI about to steal your Tech job is it too late to become a software engineer are we the last survivors of your dying species of software Engineers open AI just dropped their most powerful model yet 01 and this AI is no joke it outperforms 89% of human coders in competitive programming the other 11% they don't have a lot of time left it has PhD level reasoning and it can solve complex math problems and high level science tests I'm a senior software engineer I've been working in tech for the past 5 years and over the next few minutes I'm going to tell you impact that I believe this will have on your career over the next few years the difference between 01 and all the previous AI models is that this model spends more time thinking before answering so it creates a long internal chain of thoughts before giving the answer to the user and if you look at the benchmarks it's a huge jump compared to GPT 40 it destroys it in math it destroys it in coding competitions and it shows PhD level reasoning that are higher than that of an expert Human by the way whenever you see things like this what this means is essentially what it did is they took a series of PhD like experts basically they took a series of challenges and they compared how well the AI does compared to those specific humans on those specific challenges and what they say is essentially on those specific challenges the AI performed better than those phds that they selected the rate of development of AI isn't linear it's exponential those models keep getting better and better sub I remember when I first tried gpt3 so this was before CH GPT came out they had the gpt3 model available through API this was around two to maximum 3 years ago and the model was impressive but it could just do like basic chatting conversations or autoc completions like completions of text or classifications of text but it couldn't do anything near what we see today comparing that model to what we have today is like comparing a flip phone to a smartphone now we can have ai write complete applications write tests for you debug for you help you reason and make decisions and a lot more and that's in just two years of development so the real question is should you give up your dreams to become a software engineer now were you born too late to get those six figure Tech salaries well o1 excels at coding challenges but the real world of software development is different it's like imagine being great at Monopoly and then wanting to go to New York to buy some real estate there it's completely different right the same way as at work we don't spend all of our time solving elal challenges you do this to prepare for interviews but you don't do this at work once you're inside of a company you're solving new problems under a specific set of constraints and inside of a very specific codebase where there is a lot of context there's a lot of knowledge there is historical decisions that were made there is business requirements to take into account there's natural resources to take into account and multiple other factors for an AI to operate well inside of that environment it he needs to have context on all of those things before you can attempt to replace a software engineer I mean look at Deon it came out 6 months ago everyone was talking about it that this is the first AI software engineer that this is the beginning of the end for software Engineers essentially it's been 6 months not a single software engineer has been replaced because of AI you need to look at this objectively every new AI update that comes there's a global Panic that we're two to three months away from being replaced but it's not the case the industry doesn't move as fast like companies they don't move fast they have processes established they have a lot of people inside they have regulations they have maintenance issues they have security concerns they need a reliable way to maintain their software like what if a bug appears what if production crashes who's going to solve it are those AI agents reliable enough to solve all those issues I don't think so as great as AI is right now the problem that it has is that it's not reliable enough yet to replace an actual human that's just the reality of the market AI right now is a powerful enhancer but what does that mean for your career because if Engineers are becoming more productive they can deliver more they're more competitive does that mean that less Engineers are needed for a company they're going to hire less well for the foreseeable future what I believe is that over the next 5 years inshah there's actually going to be more Engineers will be needed the reason why I think this is purely economics just look at the market this year alone just the first half of this year there's already been $35 billion invested into AI startups and what do you think when you see a market market and you see billions of dollarss invested in it is it the sign of a Dying Market or is it the sign of a growing Market because all those investors if they invest money they expect to see a return right like a 10x a 20x return so if they invest $35 billion they expect that over the next few years it's going to make them maybe $350 billion what do software te charers do whenever they receive money what is their biggest expense it's software Engineers they're going to use the money that they raise to hire software Engineers to grow faster because they need to scale their product they need to develop more features they need to grow so purely looking at this you can see a trend that over the next few years those companies at least those that raised they're going to be in demand for engineers AI will create new opportunities that we didn't even think of every new Revolution comes with opportunities in the job market I mean look here even even if you take the the worst case scenario right where AI is going to replace everybody for this to happen every single company in the world needs to implement AI Solutions right this is going to take several years maybe decade in total in this amount of time you need Engineers to implement those AI systems you need Engineers to work with them you need Engineers to maintain them and engers to grow them so this means that this is new positions that are going to be hired by those companies and all this extra money that is being made that is being reinvested into companies help them grow faster is going to result in more Engineers being hired and even if the end line is the most negative that you can imagine so the worst case scenario it leads to at least few years to a decade maybe more of software Engineers being actively hired and contributing and those individual Engineers are going to be making a lot of money because the six figure salaries they're still there the C Engineers makeing $100,000 a year 200 300,000 and more so is it too late to become a software engineer no it's not I believe that we're actually in a golden window it's a golden decade maybe two where a huge amount of changes are going to come a big amount of opportunities it's not going to be easy but if you know where to look there's huge opportunities and if you're currently looking for a job and you feel lost I've created a free class where I reveal my complete strategy to find jobs in the current market you can send up below if you're interested I also have a complete guide here on YouTube you can check it out here I'll see you there C benders asalam alikum