Skills young programmers in India need to build in 2025

Lately a few massive trends have become obvious. I believe young programmers should take these into account when determining a plan for upskilling:

• Globalization is being rolled back

  • Tariffs are back. US, China, EU and India are four major geo entities which will all aim for sovereignty in all tech matters: from chips to hardware products to platforms to AI.

• Machine learning is becoming a core building block for software

  • Agents will drive transformation of many old industries. And after deepseek, there is very little reason to build on top of closed, proprietary foundational models.

• Coding AI has given huge leverage to experienced programmers

  • Coding AI is proving highly effective for simple tasks especially when an expert developer is present to review and critique its work. This puts young programmers in a tricky situation because they will have fewer opportunities to acquire expertise on the job. LLMs have killed StackOverflow - which means one cannot find ready answers to new (beyond the LLM cutoff date) tricky problems so you will have to solve a lot more problems independently.

• UX is becoming a core differentiator

  • Internet and smartphones were communication revolution, but AI is a cognitive technology. Every single software interface is now ready to be reimagined.

  • New form-factors (Wearbles, VR/AR/MR, Auto, Ambient computing, communal computing) will become important.

• Hardware is the ultimate platform moat

  • If AI makes software cheaper to build and with a shorter lifecycle, expect more companies to integrate hardware and software. Engineers who cannot build such integrated products, will have less leverage in comparison.

Considering these trends, I think young programmers will be better situated to handle the future if they're more conscious in how they upskill themselves:

• Learn deeply

  • You cannot leverage AI for coding unless you can make good architectural decisions, write detailed instructions to make it avoid pitfalls, and review or critique its output to guide it towards maintainable code. Vibe driven code will turn out to be a huge liability.

• Learn to build real-world projects

  • Do many internships with real companies

  • Aim to get to SDE-3 level - not in terms of designation but actual expertise - as quickly as you can so that you benefit from AI rather than compete with it.

• Acquire domain expertise beyond tech

  • Get into a sector - any sector (eg: banking, agriculture, construction, pharma, logistics, automotive ... ), and try to understand it in depth on how things actually get done here. As tech gets automated, domain experts who can build things will have the ultimate leverage.

• Learn to build innovative AI-native user interfaces

  • Spreadsheets, docs, slides, browser, OS - everything is ready to be reimagined.

• Learn to customize core platforms like Android, Chromium and Linux

  • As tech platforms become geopolitical, all geo blocks will prefer platform stacks built and controlled locally.

• Learn core ML skills

  • PyTorch

  • CUDA

  • Distributed / Parallel programming

  • Building LLMs

• Learn to build hardware products

  • Arduino / ESP32

  • Circuit design

  • Industrial design

Thanks to svs for inputs on this.