The world changes. Time marches on, and the very skills you spend your time developing will inevitably expire in their usefulness. Things that were once marvelous talents are now campfire stories or punchlines.
LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause.
If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the ability to master a given technology. This is a university that has no graduation!
Is it though? If it was that universal, we'd employ the best programmers as plumbers, since they have the best ability to master plumbing technology. There are limits, and I think the skill being to master programming technologies is a reasonable limit.
If you're a great programmer, can you can stop using Angular and master React? Yes. Can you stop telling the computer what to do, and master formal proof assistants? Maybe. Can you stop using the computer except as a tool and go master agricultural technology? Probably not. (Which is not to say you can't be a good programmer at an agritech company)
The “this wrecked my industry” sob story is especially rich when the vast majority of tech workers ability to demand premium salaries comes directly from creating software that makes existing jobs obsolete.
Let’s talk about the industries the computer killed: travel agents, musician, the entire film development industry, local newspapers built on classified ads, the encyclopedia industry, phone operators, projectionists, physical media industries, and a few dozen other random industries.
We aren’t special because we are coders. Creativity and engineering thoughtfulness will still exist even with LLMs, it will just take a different form.
Since I love programming, I feel pretty lucky I got to live and work in the only few decades in which it's economically viable to work as a computer programmer. At least "musician" had a longer run, but I guess we had it coming.
What exactly would people retrain into? The future these companies explicitly want is AI taking ALL the jobs, It's not like PMs are going to be any safer, or any other knowledge work. I see little evidence that AI is going to create new jobs other than a breathless assurance that it "always happens"
LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause.
If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the ability to master a given technology. This is a university that has no graduation!