AI Advancements: Machine Learning Is DONE FOR! (or is it?)

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welcome to code commute it is Sunday January 19th I'm clearly not commuting today uh but it's also a long weekend here in the US so I don't know if I'm doing much commuting tomorrow and I figured i' get some content out I'm going to go to linked in for a question so thanks so much for sending this in a friendly reminder that if you want your questions answered either leave them in the comments or find Dev leader on social media or Nick centino on LinkedIn my profile should be open so you can send me messages like this person did and I will try my best to answer and I keep them Anonymous if you message them and if you leave them in the comments it's not Anonymous to begin with so um this person had asked so they have a question about machine learning positions

they had conviction that machine learning is a well-paid and futureproof choice do you have any advice for someone who's just finishing a master's in Ai and wants to work in the industry I'm asking because I really love coding but money is also a great thing to have I can always code something more interesting in my free time but a career change is a bit more demanding so um we'll go through this I think that it's an interesting question I think that probably a pretty big theme that's going on for sort of the entire tech industry and uh for I just want to give people context if you're new here so I'm a software engineering manager at Microsoft I've been micros at Microsoft for about four and a half going on five years in the summer here and prior to that I worked at a company

called magnet forensics as an engineering manager there for eight years so uh you know 12 and a half years in the industry um I also program every single day as an engineering manager at Magnet forensics I programmed as part of my full-time job so I I'm not just talking about this from an engineering manager's perspective I have experience building software Hands-On so um the thing that I don't have experienced with specifically is machine learning okay so I don't have a position that is in machine learning my role isn't specifically in Ai and llm so as I talk about this stuff I need to uh be clear about my bi is here right and what I what I do and do not have hands-on experience with so uh like with anything that you're consuming on the internet right I am just one person with one perspective

uh if you value hearing my perspective that's great but please don't take what I'm saying as like a rule or um law because certainly I don't want it to come across that way just want to share experiences and my thoughts so the sort of the major takeaway when I read a question like this is that um you know I I I feel that everyone's and not blaming them but I feel like everyone's afraid right I think everyone is seeing uh or at least seeing headlines that like everything is changing so dramatically because of AI and um not to downplay that I think that things are changing dramatically due to AI but I think when people in general are seeing change right like change is coming we're experiencing the change one thing that's happening is that we're associating change with elimination and like almost purely elimination

things change therefore things go away right we have an AI wave that means that it is replacing this it's replacing that with programmers in particular software developers it's hey the AI Can it can output code therefore software developers and programmers will cease to exist because something's doing this we've seen this uh in other fields like uh artists right it's like uh we have ai that can create pictures okay so therefore artists will be eradicated uh AI can compose music okay so artists will like a musical artist will be eliminated um you know like but I don't think that for those fields like that's not actually happening it's just that other people can also create art and create music um so I I think in general what I'm observing esally with questions like this is just fear right and like I said I don't really blame

people because it it seems it seems especially if you're not in the industry already that you see all of this information about the change and without having been in the industry or having experience kind of doing the work that we're expected to be doing in our careers it is it's easy to just assume that right we have this thing that's coming it seems like it can do the job of a human therefore the human job will cease to exist but I think a lot of my perspective on this stuff is that it is not replacing um not purely so for this person saying machine learning and like you know because there's all these advancements in AI like is machine learning now just going to be obsolete but I think like I'm like I'm not an expert in in the AI field and certainly not machine

learning I don't have a masters in machine learning or AI but I think machine learning serves a different purpose than uh like generative AI for example right and I think that those things can exist uh what's the word like in a complimentary fashion like they it's not um Mutual exclusion right we have generative AI therefore machine learning does not need to exist um so personally I think that you know if you were seeing AI as this wave of uh of change coming and this person has a master's in AI in in particular machine learning for me I'm like I I don't know I wouldn't be afraid if anything I would be like I think you picked the right thing um but at the same time for other people that didn't pick that I don't want you to have that fear that like therefore my like

as a software developer therefore my job will not exist because I don't think that it's a um it's like a purely replacing kind of change that's happening I've talked about about this before and I will keep this stance until I see it change in a different direction so I want to be clear that I'm not making the claim it's impossible that as we go forward AI will replace software developers or will replace people that do machine learning right I can't make that claim because I don't have a crystal ball but to me it doesn't seem realistic I see it very much as a um like a performance enhancer right a productivity enhancer it will allow us to do more it will allow people that didn't have those skill sets to be able to do more it will allow the people that have those skill sets

to amplify those skill sets and be more productive um so then I think people hear that and they go well therefore companies don't have to hire as many people and like the argument I made recently when someone kind of made this uh this proposition was like I think that assumes that there is a like a finite amount of work that has to be done and if you've worked in the industry you've probably noticed there is uh an infinite amount of work that has to get done uh my entire software engineering management career has been how do I basically navigate having far too much work for any team to do in a given period of time and if I had a unlimited budget I would absolutely be trying to scale out teams and get them tackling different portions of work to some degree like it obviously

it doesn't scale infinitely but um it's it's never been a situation where I'm like oh man like we don't have enough work to do it's always there is too much work to do and that's at a startup right that started at around like uh when I when I was there it was like seven or eight people up to over 250 people that's at Microsoft which is Big Tech there's always tons and tons of work to do so I from my experiences I've never been in a position where it was like hey just to save money like at steady state we can just get rid of the programmers and get AI if anything it would be like okay like can we enhance the productivity are we able to to bring in a AI technology uh I don't right now believe that it could ever do the

job of just replacing someone it doesn't make any sense I talked about this in the The Mark Zucker B uh Vlog that I did and I'm going to make a followup on that I don't know which order I'm going to release them in so this one might be out uh after technically but um it's not it's not like a replacement kind of thing so to this person's question um you know I think they can they can code which is great and they say they have um ask because I really love coding awesome I think that's first of all it's not like hey I can do it but I hate it but like I love to do it awesome I I think that having that as a skill set and especially an interest regardless of how much Ai and stuff is around I think that's a

really good base to have um especially because I think there's some people that uh if you contrast this person's position where they're going for masters in Ai and love to code I think there's a lot of people that were like I just want to make money I don't even know if I like to code but I'm going to go to school or whatever to be able to code and like they might not even like it but they're like hey I'm doing it oh now there's AI oh crap like did I just screw up and and kind of pick the wrong direction if you love to do it I think that that's a great spot to be in so um I think that this person is in a in an awesome spot right they're able to write software like they enjoy it they really love coding

and they have a master's in AI specifically for machine learning um so I think that they're going to be very well set up but there's another element that when I was thinking about this question that I wanted to talk about and that's like I think that people have uh a perception that in when we talk about like working in the industry like working as a professional in our careers that if you picked a path that was like you know machine learning in this case that now all of a sudden you are absolutely anchored to only very hypers specific positions it's just not true um in reality so uh I I think that this is a little bit misleading for many people that just because you picked a path in school like that's the only Direction you can go and I'll give you an example so

I went to school for computer engineering not not uh computer science not software engineering I went for computer engineering and specifically because when I was trying to select where I wanted to go for school um I knew that I liked programming already knew it love to program don't have to sell me on it going to be doing programming it's some some part of what's going on even if it's not professionally because I love to code but I said I want to make sure that I'm exposed to hardware and I think some of what my father had kind of told me was hey like and knowing like thinking about this now I've said this in a previous Vlog entry but like he he owned a company when I was much younger when I was a kid and it was Hardware based so he was saying hey

the monies and Hardware like okay yeah that's that's what you did makes sense um so I had this in my mind if I already like software I should do Computer Engineering and have exposure to Hardware now my entire University degree was almost exclusively about hardware and like low-level components of computers and from the perspective of like like 20 years ago so so it was it felt kind of stupid like here's how a processor works like the first processor and it's like that's nice but like how far have we come um and then not having any exposure to anything new like didn't feel good but um point is I had a lot of my exposure in school to things that weren't specifically software my entire career has been purely softare I've not touched aside from one internship that was embedded programming not touched anything to do

with hardware at all and I'm sharing this because it's yes it's one example but it's one example at least to show you that like I've I think I've had a successful career so far I hope it keeps going and I hope I can continue to have success but I went to school for something that's not exactly the same as what I'm doing in fact when I started working when like full-time after my uh internships I became an engineering manager within a few months of the startup so not only do I not work with Hardware but a lot of my responsibilities I mean I was programming but a lot of my responsibilities are around people management and I had zero training zero schooling for any of that but that's been my career for 12 plus years so what I would like to point out and the

reason I'm kind of explaining this kind kind of uh these these examples is that my personal opinion when we go to school for learning about things yes it's exposing us to The Domain that we're interested in but I think there's some like foundational things and you might have a different experience at school but I think there's some foundational things that we get exposed to when we go to college University or even you could argue at a boot camp I just think that it takes a little bit longer to to form this that's why I said your experience might be different but for me going to University like the valuable stuff that I learned about like low-level Computing minimal um in terms of how long I was there and what I extracted very very minimal um but I learned like some very highlevel like things that

are interesting for for computers but I I think the the biggest thing that I learned was like how to be analytical which I I mean that's a very general skill has nothing to specifically do with computers but how to do analysis um I learned this is going to sound kind of meta but I learned how I learn which was not here's some slides I hope you read them I learned that I have to learn uh very differently um and that's because when I was in high school I didn't have to try and I could just succeed but in University I absolutely had to make sure I was practicing so I learned that I'm a very Hands-On person um so you know and there's more examples like this my point is that going through postsecondary education for me was a a way to to understand and

practice like these things that I didn't understand about myself how much of that was specific for software engineering or computer engineering like a little bit um the other thing for me was that I went to what was called like a co-op program so I had internships um so that for me is something I wouldn't change for anything else now all of that said the reason I again the reason I'm bringing this up is because this person's asking like hey you know am I screwed here like doing my masters in AI specifically for machine learning am I screwed and what I'm trying to say is like no like I hope that by going through this you learn more about yourself I hope you learned more about how you can kind of navigate a field like AI there's probably uh high level things about machine learning that

you've uh taken away from going through this and like you're also not specifically anchored to like you must work a machine learning position in your career especially given that you love coding so the sort of gist of this I'll wrap this up is that I I think that there's a lot of value in finding something that you love to do so great that this person loves to code and I think that machine learning is not specifically replaced by AI advancements I think they're complimentary um and I think that if anything for this person like I think that you've uh you know picked a path that is perhaps like uh going to do even better because it's a in a sort of comparable space um but if you were not this person and you didn't go into machine learning or AI specific uh Fields I don't

I still do this day will not look at AI as a replacing kind of thing I look at as a as an augmentation and my opinion on that may change over the next year two five years we'll see uh but I honestly don't have a a Time Horizon in my mind where I'm like oh I think we're we're in danger of not having jobs because of AI so that's my perspective on it I know there's going to be people in the comments cuz I already had on the the one video there's already people that were going nuts about um their perspective which is great you can make your own Vlog entries and talk on YouTube if you want but uh this is my channel so thanks for watching that's my perspective and I hope that helps I think that uh you know for this person

uh to say directly I think that you're on a great trajectory I think you'll do awesome um you know don't uh don't let the fear get you so take care and I'll see you next time