This is basically me.

I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.

My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).

In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.

I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.

I've spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they're capable.

My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.

Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.

Yep, the real money you make when being able to combine 2 different skills, because the amount of people having studied exactly this combination will always be a very small group. Coding and a learned trade is one of the rarer combinations - most coders (in my experience) acquire management or business skills to climb the corporate ladder.

Think there is a much higher immediate risk for new developers trying to get going in the market. So much management right now is pretty comfortable that new programmers with zero real world experience offers nothing the GenAI can't do under the supervision of a senior developer.

Problem is historically new developers weren't trusted to make any decisions if more senior employees were aware of such scenarios, so a new developer was pretty much verbatim implement guidance from more senior teams just deal with obvious rote tedium associated with getting it to code. Also the senior dev will have to fix all your screw ups when you inevitably botch it a few times. Awfully similar to the role GenAI can do now. So has to be some cultural shift to figure out how onboarding new generation developers looks.

Note I could be wrong about the middle paragraph, it's what the larger organization thinks, but I kind of got going by being 'senior' for lack of a company having options and moved from there. Similarly, I've never had success onboarding a junior that wouldn't take independent ownership. I'd get too frustrated at lack of growth and having to correct the same mistakes and be painfully specific, much like I do with GenAI. A new college hire that had his own vision and ability to take vague guidance and implement his vision, that I could work with, but it has happened once in a great while.

I know an electrician who moved beyond doing it day to day, he was telling me he knows of data center job sites that are paying regular electrician wages + $250/day. I think the data center boom might be bigger and crazier than we even realize somehow.

lol, you're joking

You asked wrong! You forgot "no mistakes"

Did you try turning it off and on and then ask for software again?

Refrigeration?

Three phase PoE anyone?

Also if you become an electrician then you have an excuse to run Ethernet poorly. Gotta love when the electrician runs unshielded cat6 cable through 100ft of conduit containing 480V wires. Talk about POE, you could probably run a toaster off that Ethernet cable.

👴 my first PC in the mid-90s had a 10mbit coaxial network card that my brother and I used for a 2 PC LAN connection, and let me tell ya - you wouldn't want to handle that while the PC was turned on.
Although the zap was less hurtful than an electrical fence.

Looking it up, it was most likely 10BASE5.

Tell me about it. Giving thought to retraining as an electrician given how in demand they are.

*Unless you're in the south.

Everyone and their Dad is in trades of one kind or another, and they hire their kids.

I don't know what I did, but I'm definitely about to get beat for it

I was in IT 20+ years.

I quit 4 years ago and opened an arcade. My only regret is I should have bailed out 10 years ago.

Hmm, you could work on an open-source project for detecting and/or mitigating corporate and government influence campaigns in the fediverse. I think, right now, the fediverse is still too small for it to make sense for those actors to deploy expensive, sophisticated attacks against it, but if the community grows that threat is going to grow with it, probably at least as long as we're alive. I assume you're talking about financial fraud; I don't know how similar detecting "fraud" accounts would be but I imagine there's some overlap.

I think it would be fun to work on a bot / influencer detector. And if it works, it would hopefully make the fediverse more resilient to coordinated influence campaigns designed to destroy or capture it. Which would help to ruin the corporate media hellscape that has been wreaking havoc on the world ever since the inception of feed manipulation.

who are the people that ruined the industry ? who do you blame ?

Oops, requirements were written by ai too

I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I'm 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I'll do after I'm replaced with AI I don't know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I'm more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.

Atleast cows dont need cloud storage

One day... I must still fix the machines. The normies still won't know what the power button or ram stick are, even with help.

Supply managed?

"Cows are way better than people" said the prison guard.

To be fair having been in software for awhile, plenty of people were slinging slop before AI as well.

The difference is back then, we could block the PR, now management demands velocity at all costs.

It will catch up eventually.

So many assholes though. So I bought a lawnmower and a trailer, cutting grass and gardening by myself is really nice