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Comment by scarface74

3 years ago

> The first thing that is outdated, the advice is basically don't be a programmer be an expert in something the company needs. The thing is in the modern world the company often needs programmers more than it needs the other expertise, hence the big salaries we earn getting hired to solve problems

I was a boring old “enterprise programmer” from 1996-2016. I belatedly started moving into more “architect” type roles where I was brought in to lead by example and while I was still hands on, I was hired to solve more strategic issues and lead initiatives.

Fast forward to today and now I’m a “cloud architect” working in the consulting department at $BigTech.

Right now I’m working on a “DevOps” project that required a few relatively trivial Python scripts as part of the design. Most of my time has been spent “consulting”.

ChatGPT was able to spit out every Python script that I needed correctly and all I had to do was tell it - this is the input I want and this is the output I need.

It got me 100% there with code that didn’t require the AWS SDK (boto3). It does have some understanding of the boto library. But it isn’t perfect.

Yes I know how to program. But I only started making real money when I could talk to “the business” and know what to program.

This more or less describes my career trajectory up to the point of belated moving into architecture roles. It’s encouraging to hear that such a winding career path can eventually make its way $BigTech. Cheers