“ It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.”
There is the old saying “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM”. Most people, including executives, are just following the accepted wisdom with some slight variations.
I think AI may actually work really well for CAD. Purely text based prompts won't work. But a mix of touch and AR together with voice input could be extremely productive.
" but being a junior dev first is how you become a senior dev."
If AI keeps improving, I am not so sure about that. Smart people may be able to quickly jump to senior skills. And what we view as senior skills at the moment may become useless.
This feels to me like a very naive statement, you don't just learn something magically because it permeates, it's because of experience and number of failures or actually really playing with a system.
If you are always on crutches and need the AI companion all the steps of the way, you basically offload the most important part of the work which is the whole cognitive work.
That "senior skill" is the debugging of complex systems that often interconnects in unusual ways, why? Because this might be a one off this might not be well documented, or even the code might not really point at the issue because it might be a subtle interplay of hardware and software.
Even if you are smart, it doesn't solve the problem that people still have to learn, and institutional knowledge is more important at times, because this might not be documented or easy to figure out, even with the greatest AI companion...
Everywhere I've worked that added "Excellence" to a name did it when they really wanted to say: "This team wasn't working hard enough before , so I told them to be better now".
You prefer elegant, high-level solutions that are intuitive and accessible to other developers. You likely favor functional programming, clear abstractions, and code that reads like prose.
Abstract ↔ Concrete: +4 Abstract
Human ↔ Computer Friendly:+7 Human-Friendly
"If you have a passion for making profit you will never have to choose between the two."
That's why I often envy finance people, business people or people whose only interested in a company is to move up. Their passion aligns with profit. I personally care mostly about technology and not at all about business. So to also benefit from my work I also have to think about business which I don't enjoy.
The problem with passion jobs is that you may get a dose of disillusionment. I worked for 2 years at a startup which had an interesting product and great people. Busted my ass for below market pay but when the company got sold, the deal was structured in a way that rank and file employees got nothing while the founders and top managers walked with multi-millions. Since then I am very cynical about "passion". It often seems to be a tool for exploiting gullible people. Same in a lot of non-profits.
Low rank work for little money while the top guys make good money and fly around the world to meet in luxury hotels.
It seems every generation will have this arrogance for their first ten years on the job. Then the next generation will declare them to be outdated dinosaurs and repeat the same mistakes in slightly changed form.
There is the old saying “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM”. Most people, including executives, are just following the accepted wisdom with some slight variations.