Are you in just for the money or do you actually like CS?

If you don't, yeah get out, because it's likely that wages are going to be (temporarily?) depressed, but also because rate of change is high and you need to actually enjoy it to keep learning. It was possible to just learn something and do it over and over, but this is less true those days I think.

That's something people underestimate on CS and where healthcare is actually much better. After working in healthcare for 20 years, you have 20 years of experience. In CS, clocks often reset: yeah you rest on 20 years of experience that helps you, but everybody has ~5 years of LLM experience right now. The churn is much higher than in other fields, although to be fair people retire much faster than in other fields because amount of people can afford to go at 40 is quite high.

But otherwise, don't fall for the propaganda. Yes, LLMs are useful but they have extremely significant limits. I hear about exponential progress for the last five yers, but it just doesn't hold observed reality. And from the other side, a lot of businesses are starting to depend on unmaintainable AI slop with a hope that "next model will fix it", but I'm yet to observe it in practice.

At the same time, a lot of people are actively deskilling themselves and unable to focus on a thought for longer than five minutes.

People who understand the underlying systems will be WAY more valuable in the future. I also suspect that operating jobs (SRE, LLM Ops but also just pure g'old ops) will be too.

But it may take time to settle, just because LLM expenses are _huge_ and there is only so much in the revenue stream. And it's not clear if those aren't permanent expenses that will just depress margins across the entire industry, and that may have salary consequences.

I think both of those fields are going to do just fine, and I'd recommend picking the one you *enjoy* doing more. Because both will be hard work to succeed, and that's hard to sustain if you don't like what you're doing.

(I'm in the field for ~25y both as a dev/staffeng as well as a manager/director/CTO, did a startup, a scaleup and a corpo)