> When interest rates are high, companies and investors don't take out loans

And yet companies borrowing for AI capex like never before - total amount of debt is staggering. And it’s not only likes of OpenAI/Anthropic, companies which had positive cash flow for many years started to borrow too.

But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.

Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.

There are effectively 2 schools of thought on this.

One states that more junior people will excel. Younger people tend to be more hip to new tech trends, more natively immersed in changing times. And the contemporary AI tools eradicate any knowledge & wisdom gap that the seniors may hold over them. Thus, they'll be faster.

The other school states that the most important thing right now is the wisdom of experience. That the AI tools have made everything *but* the wisdom pretty much an afterthought. Thus, there's no point in having someone who doesn't have deep wisdom.

Which is right? Probably a little bit of both, depending on one's exact needs.

Same here. The absolute star in my team is the youngest. But! I think what's happening is that the distribution in this age group has shifted. Essentially the absolute best (high IQ, super ambitious, great communicator, cracked builder types) are now even better positioned than ever before. But the majority of mass in this age category now suffers, i.e. everyone that's "good" or "very good" but not exceptional/brilliant.

In my experience in the past year, new hires, juniors or mid-level programmers (probably even "seniors") who use AI to contribute quickly have a big issue of now ownership or understanding of the code and of the issues that we might encounter. They contribute very little during meeting because they have trouble understanding the subject matter.

We are a network tooling team, and now we think our next hire will be a young network engineer who probably will generate code that we will have to review carefully, but we have to do that anyway, because we can't really afford having our engineers stuck on a basic knowledge of networking issues.

In any case, thanks to AI everything have a SDK so we won't have to make in-house library to automate everything (thousand of hours making libraries for cisco, forti, zscalers and other lost, but to be honest, good riddance), so the demand for engineers in my situation will decrease.

From my experience.

There is a reason why youngest developers are more productive. They accept everything Agent suggests. They don't understand or care. They rely on your review of the Agent output from prompt they copy-pasted from JIRA. So you spent your time reviewing it instead of your own work.

From study titled "The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers" https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116

>> Without building this solution, and instead just taking what ChatGPT generated, they had skipped crucial steps in the programming problem solving process, and were now lost

When you skip the problem-solving process and take the LLM's first output, you're not building the cognitive framework needed to debug or maintain that code.

> I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest.

It's high variance. A young person can move fast because they lack the accrued assumptions of a senior, but that also means they can quickly move in the wrong direction because they lack the wisdom to identify mistakes before they pile up.

"Use AI" isn't really a skill, getting an implementation is now as easy as google for an answer was for our generation. A senior can trivially learn this. But sniffing out the bullshit and knowing when you're going astray still requires a critical eye that not everybody is going to have.

So it seems reasonable to me that moving more slowly and being more cautious, letting the uncs use their knowledge to keep things from going too far afield, is a really smart idea.

I think the problem is evaluation. They can't tell who the good juniors are with respect to the new skills that they are looking for, so they go for experience instead. It doesn't seem sustainable though for obvious reasons.

> AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.

New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.

Depends on the nature of the work. In highly specialised work the junior would train with a senior while the senior can offload the easier work.

Now the senior can use the AI instead of dealing with a junior.

Plus the biggest danger I’ve seen numerous times is the junior engineer can’t easily tell if the AI is wrong.

They either accept it as correct or spend more time trying to fix AI output with an AI in an area they don’t have the skills for.

How are the youngest more productive than the seniors? As an aside, I have seen that the newest employees are performing better than those hired during Covid. I think the quality of recent hires are just better because no one is hiring, and so many quality candidates are available.

On the contrary, new generations are skipping the fundamentals and using AI instead.

Seniors will become more valuable as that knowledge is lost and AI isn't capable of full replacenent.

I use AI daily and it takes almost no extra brain power to use.

> the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable

Is it Software or another problem domain? What problem are they attacking, what stack/method are they using?

The juniors I have seen don't even try to understand anymore what they are building. They don't understand the product, they don't understand the technology. So everything AI is building for them is nonsense. "Reviewing" it is impossible. Some of them think they are being extra clever having Claude process review comments for them. Even if you hire one, this way they are out the door within the month.

If you find a proper senior dev - it will be like 10 or more of that junior you described.

Because you can’t shortcut experience. And AI multiplies that.

I’ve seen what ai-focused good senior dev can do and it is scary.

I had a job search as well and same. Previous slam dunks that stalled at final interviews with someone who had a higher recommendation.

Fortunately I have some unique skills that allowed me to land a gig.

This isn't new. Every job dating back multiple decades was through my network. I had a resume but it was essentially a formality. The last two long-term ones were through very senior folks at the companies.

Why is this? Is it partly influenced by the fact that LinkedIn etc suck?

Civil engineering will keep shrinking unless pay goes up. I know a very good civil engineer with 10+ years of experience who switched to software development and doubled his salary.

Our field started as a niche for geeks. For a long time, CS paid you the average for engineering work - hardly equivalent to six figures today for most with the exception of seniors. It's still like that on most of the world.

Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills/hard work. Big tech was and still is full of these people.

I'm not saying that was a bad thing at all, but it always felt unsustainable. CS salaries will decline and fewer people will want to be software developers, balancing the market. Then it may go back to where it came from with the geeks sticking around. No more coding bros. Maybe that's okay.

When I got my degree, I never expected more than a slightly above average salary. I do this because I love it and can't imagine doing anything else. I was lucky and I'm thankful for the luck I had.

Thanks, it's been tough on him. I'm glad we're able to support him through this, others are not as fortunate.

He's looking into pivots now and taking flight lessons.

Honestly, that is way too much for a junior.

I'd side-eye that list as senior .NET dev full stack.

You're asking one person to do frontend/js/css, backend/databases/Redis/MQ, and Python with all that math behind data-science, but i doubt he can understand and review all of this

dverespey@gmail.com is mine. In my profile as well.

These executives are going to get some short-term performance based payout and move to another company while talking up the "Bold AI transformation" they lead waaaay before any fallout kicks in. Notice how there's less "We moved to Cloud / on-prem" slop on LinkedIn? It's because the same people have a new bandwagon to chase.

>All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.

If everyone's middle bench is a disaster, there's no one that did it right to contrast their poor decision-making. They're hiding the evidence that will help them skip accountability.

It's not what the article or study are about. Theyre about entry level white collar jobs.

I think "junior software engineer" is more like the entry level job that people on HN care about

That sounds about right. There was a well-established funnel from schools directly into entry-level positions. Absent that funnel, it's not clear how getting those entry-level positions was ever especially straightforward outside of a very robust tech hiring environment over the past decade.

I got my first dev job by moving laterally within a company from customer support. Helpdesk aka “Helldesk” was a common pipeline for people. I don’t think those jobs are easy to get either now.

I agree because there was always this "well, you don't have experience...".

Wtf of course i don't, otherwise i would not apply for a junior role!

I feel like I never see anyone else say this. That was about when I got my career started and it was always difficult for me. And now it seems over despite all that work in the begining.

a course cannot align wrongly incentivized entities.

You can't really force someone to work for X years at a place they don't want to. I don't know if what you're describing is an enforceable contract term.

If you're getting fired in 2 weeks, it's likely not because of a single comment.

Some percentage of engineering is actually people and politics. The more power (or alternative options) you have, the more you can speak your mind. But if you need the job then argue your case just to the boss, discreetly.

- knowing what to prompt

- directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails

- verification

- setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models

economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes

Upvoting this for asking the candid question that so many commenters dance around. I can't imagine a 22-year-old confidently walking into an interview (or getting introduced to a team) and assuring everyone that they have the "harness" or "guardrails" to confidently contribute at the level of a 10x engineer.

If we apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to this disruptive technology, I do believe AI will hit a "slope of enlightenment" where an AI-assisted Analyst is properly understood in industries and can take productive roles. Conveniently, this will probably coincide with a lower interest rate where companies have funds for a talent acquisition spree/rapid growth.

With that being said, today's graduates are stuck in an awful market with a lot of charlatans selling crappy online courses and bad ideas.

I imagine the meta will be “build a micro saas product that’s marginally successful” for younger folks. It’s trivial to make a product but you learn a lot seeing what the AI does wrong.

The models are currently not at a place where you can just "type into a prompt box", any more than you could just "type into the IDE". You have to know what and why to type. The models are not at a place where no skill is needed. It may be a different still, but it's still a skill, and it's still a software engineering skill.

I remember when I was in 2nd grade or so (so, around 1982 or so), our teacher read us a passage from a book predicting the future: "and in the future, robots will do all the work so that people don't have to!" Even at 8 years old, I could see the problem with that: who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who has to live where I live?

Full self driving is next. Gig delivery jobs such as Doordasher and Lyft have single digit years remaining.

You’re probably not wrong. I’ve gone from being essentially destitute as a child to what people would call “well-off” and having the context of both experiences is…eye opening.

I have moneyed acquaintances now that I never would have had before. For some of them the mere hint of their income being reduced in any way is enough to send them into spasms. These are people with enough money for their next 3 generations to live off of. Luxuriously.

I just don’t get it.

At that point AI will be significantly more advanced than today.

>"At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again"

I think they will have big problem finding people who will actually train those juniors by then.

2022-30 will be known as the lost generation in tech. I think the situation will improve in 2030s and AI/coding will become hot again. Or may be perhaps as soon as Feds start to open their purse to print money again aka QE.

>"A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing."

Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht

I mean... yes.

Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not all of them, but for most the skills were portable. Several of the carriage-making businesses transitioned to automobiles. Studebaker and Oakland (which became Pontiac), for example. I'm sure the most experienced people lost big, of course, and we shouldn't minimize the damage done to people's livlihoods.

Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage.

It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.

This is unironically the best comparison.

maybe they became taxi drivers. But that too will be gone soon.

Can't beat capitalism + technological innovation.

> I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.

A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.

The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.

If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.

Masters degrees are a way for people to spend longer in the education-costs-more-than-the-value-to-the-educator phase of their career.

> But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.

Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.

Hmm, maybe we should tax these corporations and use the money for free education. Crazy idea but it might work.

are you incharge of making those decisions at work?

maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.