That’s not something I ever thought I’d say. I use to think I’d be writing programs into my old age. Which at this point isn’t that far off. Maybe it’s already here, but in my mind old age is always at least 10 years past my current age. I really enjoyed writing programs. The challenge of it. I could always come up with some project to work on. But for the last several years I really have had a hard coming up with projects.
AI plays a huge factor regarding the title of this post. Today it seems you can just ask AI to write your program. I’m making assumptions based on what I’ve read. In the past I had to write programs to do my projects.
Mind you, I personally haven’t asked AI to write me a program. But I’ve seen it done on video.
At one point I felt I got into computers, a little too late. Because only a few years later small Intel based computers started replacing mini and mainframe computers. I felt I’m missing all these new opportunities. In retrospect, I feel I entered the computer field at great time. I have all this historical background working with mini (DEC PDP-11) and mainframe (IBM 360/370). I had access to computers the general public never did. I did things the hard way. Typed programs onto cards, looked at results on paper listings. No Google or YouTube videos with countless examples.
Back then, I was a computer programmer, and proud of it. Today people are software engineers. Later I became a Systems programmer which allowed me to become even more anti-social.
Today almost everyone has access to a computer with most of the abilities that big business have.
Regardless of AI, a huge factor to a loner like me, is how social computing has become. Everything revolves around the team and collaboration. This is largely because of the Internet. I don’t think l my personality, would fit into the field today. Back in my day I could just shut the door and work on a program until it was done. There was very little interaction with others. Many companies were like a world unto themselves.