That's the risk of participating in a completely new industry... You don't know how long it's going to last; it has no track record. It reminds me of my own career as a software developer. I self-taught myself coding since I was 14 in 2004. I'm from a relatively small town and nobody in my family had a tech background or even knew anyone with a tech background. So it was quite a stretch/unlikely for me to become a developer. I would spent my lunch breaks in the school library; sometimes coding by myself on library computers. My dad thought I was wasting my time. Back then, the only people making any money in tech in my town were developing websites for local businesses and it wasn't very profitable. My dad wanted me to be a lawyer.
I feel like I did many things right; I got into web development early (while most of the jobs were still for programming for desktop PCs), I was an early adopter of Node.js, I went to university and did a course on AI/Machine learning. I launched a popular open source project. But somehow it never worked out for me financially; I was never accepted into any fast-growing company, my popular project was big among startups but didn't gain enough traction in the corporate sphere (where it could have been monetized). Now AI is threatening the entire profession.
I think my dad was right, I should have been a lawyer and done software development as a hobby.
The only silver lining that I cling onto is that my main interest has been software architecture and higher level systems/infrastructure thinking. So far, AI hasn't shown itself to be able to effectively solve higher level software architecture/design problems. It's great at answering questions, but not at asking (the right) questions which is what software architecture is about.
I feel like I did many things right; I got into web development early (while most of the jobs were still for programming for desktop PCs), I was an early adopter of Node.js, I went to university and did a course on AI/Machine learning. I launched a popular open source project. But somehow it never worked out for me financially; I was never accepted into any fast-growing company, my popular project was big among startups but didn't gain enough traction in the corporate sphere (where it could have been monetized). Now AI is threatening the entire profession.
I think my dad was right, I should have been a lawyer and done software development as a hobby.
The only silver lining that I cling onto is that my main interest has been software architecture and higher level systems/infrastructure thinking. So far, AI hasn't shown itself to be able to effectively solve higher level software architecture/design problems. It's great at answering questions, but not at asking (the right) questions which is what software architecture is about.