Advice for beginner programmers
00:00:00.000 | It's possible for society to lose a competence it still needs because it's chasing the future.
00:00:06.600 | We have so much critical infrastructure, for example, that still runs on COBOL,
00:00:09.540 | that about five humans around the world really understand truly, deeply. I don't think any of
00:00:14.480 | the programmers who wrote that COBOL code back in the 70s had any damn idea that in 2025,
00:00:19.700 | checks were still being cut off the business logic that they had encoded back then. But that
00:00:24.080 | just brings me to the conclusion on the question for what should a young programmer do? You're not
00:00:28.220 | going to be able to predict the future. No one's going to be able to predict the future. If you
00:00:31.380 | like programming, you should learn programming. Now, is that going to be a career forever? I don't
00:00:35.320 | know. But what's going to be a career forever? Who knows? Like a second ago, we thought that it was
00:00:40.640 | the blue collar labor that was going to be extracted first. It was the robots that were going to take
00:00:45.020 | over. Then Gen AI comes out and then all the artists suddenly look like, holy shit, is this
00:00:50.060 | going to do all animation now? It's going to do all music now? They get real scared. And now I see the
00:00:54.440 | latest Tesla robot going like, oh, maybe we're back now to blue collar being in trouble because
00:00:59.300 | if it can dance like that, it can probably fix that toilet. So no one knows anything. And you have to
00:01:05.680 | then position yourself for the future in such a way that it doesn't matter that you pick a profession or
00:01:11.820 | path where if it turns out that you have to retool and reskill, you're not going to regret the path
00:01:17.280 | you took. That's a general life principle for me. I want to be content with all outcomes. If no one
00:01:23.500 | wants this, I will have had another opportunity to write beautiful Ruby code, to explore greenfield
00:01:29.420 | domain, to learn something new, to build a system I want, even if no one else wants it. What a blessing.
00:01:35.400 | What a privilege. If a bunch of people want it, that's great. We can pay some salaries. We can keep
00:01:42.120 | the business running. And if it's a blow away success, wonderful. I get to impact a bunch of people.
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