Developer Skills You MUST Have For The AI Age (with recommended resources)

AI has accelerated from 0 to 1,000 in the past year regardless of your opinion on its relevance it's here it's being adopted by businesses and it's not going anywhere does this mean then that your job as a developer is on the way out no it doesn't and in fact all of those types of questions were answered in my last video I'll put a link above to that but in this video specifically I want to talk about how to stay relevant as a developer in the coming years times have changed a little and with that comes the need for us to adapt a little and while learning a technology like HTML was valuable 5 years ago it's not so valuable anymore you have to go deeper and you have to also polish up the skills that keep you a marketable human so here are three developer skills that you must have for this AI age number one the fundamentals years ago when I got started you could land a developer job without really understanding any fundamentals if you could code a web page you could find your way into an interview somewhere no need to know anything about memory or network fundamentals or DSA or any of that upfront you'd have to learn it later but you didn't need to know it UPF front to get into the interview you know JavaScript you can update my website you're hired sounds fishy right all you purists you true Engineers out there it makes you mad how dare they let these untrained unaccredited imposters into my lucrative field well they did and here we are years later pretty good devs Cloud admins it professionals whatever you want to call us just not Engineers right as if we ever Ed that term anyway but with all of the layoffs and the economy downturn we have a lot of devs on the market with way more skills than you or I have that's just the breaks what are you going to do about it complain fuss about it on Twitter there's actually a tweet going around where this lady says that her company is now no longer hiring self-taught devs due to the sheer number of applications they are getting from that crew of Outlaws my answer is who cares you will shoot yourself in the foot as a company with this one probably 50% of devs that I've worked with in the past were self-taught and they weren't new meaning there will always be self-taught devs in the industry but the initial acceptance of self-taught devs seems to be not so much an acceptance anymore it's harder now there's a bigger pool but with hard work it's completely doable just got to put in the hard work and you got to want it and by the way by self-taught I mean no degree as many have commented in my past YouTube videos everybody selftaught I get that but I'm using it in the term of having no degree and now ai is being incorporated into all of these businesses all these businesses are on this race to pull in AI to save them money and make them more productive and to feed them more results from all this data and in turn it's causing consolidations as the human resource manager would call it so while you may be good at your job now if you do get laid off you'll need to reenter that Workforce that pool of devs a much more capable developer and to do this you don't need to go and do 50 more follow-along projects or continue to jump around in the sea of JavaScript Frameworks or get caught in all these particulars and trending lingo that everybody tells you you need to learn you instead need to now more than ever revisit those fundamentals that you never learned in the first place this rise in AI is demanding developers who know what's going on under the hood developers who can solve problems regardless of the technology who can understand the vocabulary of the industry developers who can adapt to this new technology which is just really old technology under the hood but much more faster and Innovative and while you do not need a CS degree these CS concepts are very much needed now like DSA or computational thinking as we move into providing solutions to these AI problems in addition you'll need to be sure you understand the concepts of programming AI helpers like Chad GPT or co-pilot or clawed or whatever Terminator you choose to use they will give you code when you ask for it you on the other hand need to know what to do with it you need to know if it's good code or bad code how it can fit into the project you're working on or better yet where to trash it at in this case language specifically matters less than the fundamentals that underly the language but what outcome do you need to reach to solve your problem we need to be good at that more than we do hey I'm good at JavaScript call me when you need a modal so here's some advice go and pick yourself up some books like grocking algorithms which by the way I'm teaching through weekly in my imposter devs Community which is a place specifically for filling the gaps in your self-taught learning I'll put a link below but this is a great book for DSA and CS principles or a book that one of my past co-workers glitch bite recommended called dive into systems a gentle introduction to computer systems which is by the way what all of this AI stuff runs on be sure you know it more than you know how to center a div or to float something right or to make a button wiggle when you hover over another recommendation is a book that I picked up a couple of years ago but just started reading called the impostor handbook by Rob connory not related to sha which is a CS primer for self-taught devs it's true you don't have to spend $100,000 for this information and then there's sites like zero to Mastery that has a coding interview course that will take you through bigo data structures algorithms and even a bunch of interview questions they also have a course on system design and architecture but what I'm getting at is be sure you spend a little time each week learning what's going on underneath all of those abstracted tools that you use daily this will take you far in the future all right number two but before we get to number two 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includes stakeholders and customers teams and leaders and sales and it calls for good communication and the dispensing of information between people AI it isn't there we can take its data and we can communicate it to other people or to a whiteboard or to a commercial things like that and before you state the obvious I can hear you already yes soft skills they've always been important that's why we should never discredit self-taught devs who come from other non-technical fields but have great soft skills versus CS grads who have all the technical knowledge but the personality of Devon himself or itself if you've been that coder that just does what he or she is told off in the corner and avoids speaking at standups and never gets called on for opinions your day is over unless you Shore up this skill you must develop your communicative skills your vocal problem solving in efforts at honing in on these soft skills learn social skills adaptability get better at collaboration these are all things that really can't be automated and I have two recommendations for you here first I've said this so much in the past code out loud work in AWS Out Loud meaning talk out loud as to what you're doing technically while you're doing it like oh now I'm creating this Lambda function and this Lambda function has a Handler that's going to be triggered and oh I need to go create this policy that does such and such and get the these words into your vocabulary when you draw out a plan for your application talk about it out loud and then second read this book how to have confidence and Power in dealing with people by Les Giblin this is the How to Win Friends and Influence People book people didn't know about for soft skills written in 1956 This Book Is Timeless I have it on Kindle I read it a while back I need to read it again but there are all kind of golden nuggets and actionable items in it so go and read that and then finally number three is AI common knowledge and the embracing of where we're at some of us are anti- AI Innovation and I think this is shooting yourself in the foot you don't have to like it you don't have to think it's going to be significant you may find it boring and something you really don't have any interest in but you can't just ignore it completely it's going to be in the business discussions and you're going to be called on to give your take on it and you need to show that you understand it at least from a surface level so number three is to get a good surface level understanding of where we're at with AI some of this foundational technology and other things you may be asked to do as a developer but there's a problem where do you even begin in this vast field do you need to become a math and a statistics wiiz to understand this stuff what sector do you focus on is there a way to get just a general understanding of the big picture well you don't have to go deep many of us don't want to be in machine learning or data science and the truth is it's a hard field to get into as you'll have a lot of ground to make up and the data Science World it doesn't really have any low barriers to entry you got to know your stuff but here's what I would recommend in the vein of staying relevant in this age and this will be the last resource that I'll recommend and this is not sponsored I do not have any affiliate connection with them but it's a site that I've been paying $12 a month for for like a year now and I'm loving it and it's the old usted packed publishing I've had a membership there for at least a year now and while some books are garbage the majority are not and with this membership I get access to all books in video courses so when I need to learn a concept or I need questions answered I literally just find a a book here and search online for the section that I need so in this regard I would learn things like this in just maybe 30 minutes a week maybe an hour a week things like this the difference between the general term Ai and its subsets like machine learning deep learning things like that I would also learn about generative AI what it is how it works what is a vector database maybe connect to open AI the API and build something I have a course in the Imposter devs Community where I build an interview bot with it you could use that you could learn a lot from it we're also going through book where we're learning about the business side of AI and what's being used today but I would also get familiar with terms like language models in natural language processing again how they work not becoming an expert I would also pay attention on what's actually being used out there today and to do that there's a good number of AI newsletters out there that will keep you up to speed on all of the new and relevant information available but the key here is just to stay relevant by broadening your general knowledge so you have a programming knowledge specific program knowledge General programming knowledge whatever but broadening that into the AI world as it continues to evolve and with that being said that's it for me today what skills do you think are needed in the coming years be sure to leave a comment below and let me know if you found this video helpful give it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribe to the channel consider doing so and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Travis Media

Views: 31,967

Keywords: artificial intelligence, developer ai skills, ai skills for developers, artificial intelligence explained, machine learning, deep learning, devinai, devin ai, chatgpt, travis media, what is generative ai, computer science fundamentals, imposter devs

Id: 0XFU-cPjYh0

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024