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Comment by stray | Hacker News Reader

I think you're just seeing the results of years of over-hiring, followed by a slight downturn. When money is cheap, companies over-hire. And when money is expensive, companies fire/layoff/whatever.

In this variation of musical chairs, you need to be seated before the music stops.

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Possibly but I've been at it for 20 years - this is the first time I've experienced a drought like this.

34 years for me -- and this looks a lot like 2000 to me.

Even longer for me. This pales in comparison to the dot com bubble. The reality is that our industry has gone through these sorts of events a few times, and such events will happen again in the future.

Many people saying programming won't exist as a profession within a year or two which is what makes me wonder if I should pivot.

Anyone saying that programming as a profession won't exist after a year or two are simply wrong. Period. There's literally no reason to think that would be true, and tons of reasons to think it isn't. Especially on such a short time scale.

The most dramatic possible outcome in the next couple of years (and one I think is probable) is that programming will change, as it always does. Not that it will stop being a thing.

The programming profession I originally got into does not really exist anymore, but all these years later I am still making a good living doing loosely related work which is still called "programming", despite the fact that most of the programming I used to do is now automated. Even if new LLM-based tools automate most of the work I currently do - and I think it unlikely that will happen on such a short timescale (ten years, maybe, certainly not one) - there will still be plenty of work to do: someone will always need to boss the machine around, using some formal language or other, and we will probably continue calling that person a "programmer".

Somewhat encouraging to read

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