Time to Grow

In the early '90s, my grandmother, who was an accountant back then, would wake up at 4 AM to work on account reconciliation. It was a long process where she'd write down with a pencil on a big piece of paper all the recorded transactions and then compare them with the receipts and invoices., then she'd use a desk calculator to sum everything up and the numbers would match. She'd sometimes make a mistake which meant going over the whole sheet and then do partial calculations to narrow down the line item that caused the issue.

A couple of years later, we bought a family PC. Instead of spending a day or more on the reconciliation, she'd spend an hour or two inputting data into an Excel spreadsheet and the computer would automatically sum everything. I remember offering to input the data she'd dictate as I was typing much faster and we'd be done in half an hour. If there was an issue with a line item, we'd find it in minutes instead of hours. Of course, sometimes we'd run into the idiosyncrasies built into Excel and that would drive us nuts, but those were rare and happened less and less often once we had more experience with the program.

I distinctly remember how magical it felt the first time I saw the autosum feature from Excel and it's surprisingly close to what I feel today when I generate code via LLMs!

In the last couple of months, I've spent probably too many hours trying to figure out what will happen with me, as a programmer, and the IT industry as a whole, in the years to come, worrying that I'll lose my job and then won't be able to provide for my family and I think I understood two things:

1. We are going through a global recession and it's likely to hit as just as hard as the subprime mortgage crisis. There will be a market contraction, just like there is one during every crisis, and that shall cause many people to lose their jobs.
2. LLMs will represent yet another technological leap that will make us be more efficient, just like the email, Excel, AutoCAD, Google and many others already did. It might completely replace some aspects of our job, but we should consider this an opportunity to grow in other areas.

Since there are trillion-dollar companies doing their best to replace humans with a subcription to an LLM-powered plan, there is a good chance I might be wrong. On the other hand, I don't remember my grandmother ever complaining that she had to learn Excel or that she'd rather go to the old way of doing balances and reconciliations.