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How are you future-proofing yourself in your career?

  • 4 October 2023
  • 2 replies
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Whether you’re a tester, software developer, or elsewhere in the tech industry, we all know that technology (and AI in particular) have seen a big jump over the past couple years. Many have understandably had concerns with retaining relevant skills as we move further and further into uncharted territory. 


What steps have you taken to help ensure your place in your line of work is secure? Are the fears of artificial replacement overblown? Is there anything you think we should prepare for? 

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A
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What steps have you taken to help ensure your place in your line of work is secure?

  • Workplace-wise, there is a QA R&D department constantly looking for new ideas & gaining insights into them, what might be useful, what might work for the company etc.
  • Individual-wise, it’s extremely important IMO to keep up to speed in general. Nowadays there are always new libraries, tools, programming languages or existing language updates & patterns coming out. Keeping on track with news, vendor sites, forums, newsletters, Email subscriptions & the like can really help. It’s not enough anymore (again IMO & I’ve been burnt by this personally) just to keep up to date with a current company’s tech stack but to build knowledge & experience on a wide range in the industry (try multiple tools, write in many programming languages etc.) 

 

Are the fears of artificial replacement overblown?

Hugely! I personally hate the term AI as there’s little to no intelligence. It’s ML machine learning. Sure, more impressive than a ton of IF statement choices nowadays but still each implementation is highly structured for a limited use case: shape recognition, text scanning etc. there are no wide implementations mimicking a brain or capable of performing all the tasks of a human in most fields. Look at the continual failure of self-driving cars - we are a hundred years away from such “AI” capability. 

 

Is there anything you think we should prepare for? 

For future proofing, absolutely - continually explore, trial & keep up to date. This goes the same for all IT fields. 

s.matlock
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Are the fears of artificial replacement overblown?

Hugely! I personally hate the term AI as there’s little to no intelligence. It’s ML machine learning. Sure, more impressive than a ton of IF statement choices nowadays but still each implementation is highly structured for a limited use case: shape recognition, text scanning etc. there are no wide implementations mimicking a brain or capable of performing all the tasks of a human in most fields. Look at the continual failure of self-driving cars - we are a hundred years away from such “AI” capability. 

That’s an interesting take, because I hadn’t really considered how often people conflate the two. I heard someone suggest recently that the new AI explosion we’ve seen in the last couple years might just be a sigmoid curve, where we won’t necessarily see exponential growth, but rather sit here at this level of technology for awhile before another big jump. 

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