Should You Still Learn to Code in an A.I. World?

by Sarah Kessler, The New York Times

When Florencio Rendon was laid off from his third construction job in three years, he said, "it was the straw that broke the camel's back."

He was 36, a father of two, and felt time was running out to find a career that would offer higher pay and more stability. "I've always been doing jobs that require physical labor," he remembers thinking. "What if I start using my brain for once?"

An Army veteran, Mr. Rendon explored training programs he could fund using his military benefits. He landed on a coding boot camp.

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Stay Sharp. Keep Learning.

In the arena of cliché job advice, "learn to code" has been replaced by a call for "A.I. skills."

M.I.T., Cornell, Northwestern, Columbia and other universities now lend their names to A.I. certificates. Fullstack Academy, the coding boot camp Mr. Rendon attended, recently started a 26-week A.I. and machine learning boot camp. And companies like Booz Allen and JPMorgan Chase are offering free A.I. courses to employees.

The most popular job titles specific to A.I. include "machine-learning engineer" and "artificial intelligence engineer," according to CompTIA. Some skills listed in these job postings are "deploying and scaling machine-learning models" and "automating large language model training, versioning, monitoring and deployment processes."

You can't learn that quickly without a math or coding background.

Another category of "A.I. skill" feels more elusive. In a recent survey of more than 9,000 executives by Microsoft and LinkedIn, 66 percent said they wouldn't hire someone without A.I. skills, but it's unclear, exactly, what those skills look like.

It doesn't help that the technology is moving quickly: Depending on whom you ask, we may be either a few years or many decades away from A.I. that can basically do anything the human brain can. When I asked Mr. Beane what we should be teaching young people to make them employable, he said: "You have to just stay sharp. You have to keep learning. Until further notice."

Robert Wolcott, a venture investor who teaches business classes at both Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said he tells anxious parents that their children should study whatever they're passionate about, even if it's ancient architecture, but also take a class in statistics, accounting and computing.

"I think you learn to learn," said Mr. Ganesan, the venture capitalist.

Mike Taylor, the chief technology officer of the global tech services company World Wide Technology, provided perhaps the most straightforward list: "problem solving skills," "business acumen and values" and "clear and persuasive communication skills."