Thinking about my next move - Should I go into AI?

Question

age: 55

experience: 30 year of on/off programming. 7 years of managing SWEs

After joining Taro, I am motivated to reset my career and not live in depression any more. Also, I think, due to side effects of Taro, my sleep has improved a lot and I am not consuming cheap dopamine any more.

My next tasks are

fix my resume and get it to near-perfect.
apply at Microsoft
while I wait for interview from MS, start programming in Angular / Typescript, .net services c# etc. This will at least help in healthy dopamine and mind set. and help me for future non-FAANG-interviews.
if I get interview call from MS, start studying DSA, else continue to do side project in Angular / C# / .net

But I was thinking, at this stage, given AI popularity, should I pivot and start learning AI because even if I get real good at side projects and programming, is it a better career move to be good at programming at this stage of my life? AI is going to get better and better and just being a good programmer is not going to cut it even in near-future?

Thanks for reading.

Accepted Answer

In general, I don't recommend chasing trends for the sake of it. Admittedly AI is a trend with far more staying power IMHO compared to something like VR, but I don't believe in this dystopian future some engineers have where everyone is going to become an MLE and everyone who is not an MLE gets left behind in the dust.

Here's my basic "algorithm" when it comes to new trends and career direction:

Do you genuinely like what you're currently doing? - If so, just ignore the trend and keep doing that. For me, I still really, really love Android and mobile as a whole and deeply believe it has legs in the tech industry. So I'm going to keep doing that (though I will integrate AI as a front-end application consumer, which I just did with TaroGPT).
Do you not like what you're currently doing? - You can explore the trend, and if you're really passionate about it, you can consider a career pivot. If you don't, then keep exploring until you find something you love.

Summing it all up, the best career move is always to do something you're truly passionate about. The tricky part is divorcing your feelings when working on a new, trendy thing because you need to figure out if you actually like it or whether your brain simply wants to like it because it's the hot thing right now.

Here's some other resources about this:

Thinking about my next move - Should I go into AI?

Discussion