Guido van Rossum: What do do with your computer science career

I regularly receive questions from students in the field of computer science looking for career advice.

Here's an answer I wrote to one of them. It's not comprehensive or anything, but I thought people might find it interesting.

The question about "9-5" vs. "enterpreneur" is a complex one -- not everybody can be a successful entrepreneur (who would do the work? :-) and not everybody has the temperament for it. For me personally it was never an option -- there are vast parts of management and entrepreneurship that I wouldn't enjoy doing, such as hiring (I hate interviewing and am bad at it) and firing (too emotionally draining -- even just giving negative feedback is hard for me). Pitching ideas to investors is another thing that I'd rather do without.

If any of that resonates with you, you may be better off not opting for entrepreneurship -- the kind of 9-5 software development jobs I have had are actually (mostly) very rewarding in the sense that I get to write software that gets used by 100s or 1000s of other developers (or millions in the case of Python), and those other developers in turn use my software to produce product that get uses by 100s of 1000s or, indeed 100s of millions of users. Not every 9-5 job is the same! For me personally, I don't like the product stuff (since usually that means it's products I have no interest in using myself) but "your mileage may vary" (as they say in the US). Just try to do better than an entry-level web development job.

[The question here was about whether AI would make human software developers redundant, not about what I think of the field of AI as a career choice]
Regarding AI, I'm not worried at all. The field is focused on automating boring, repetitive tasks like driving a car or recognizing faces, which humans can learn to do easily but find boring if they have to do it all the time. The field of software engineering is never boring, since as soon as a task is repetitive, you automate it, and you start solving new problems.

from Planet Python
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