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Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#21

I don’t think there’s going to be much change if any in the next 5 years. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see people say LLMs can replace software engineers. Maybe if you’re writing basic CRUD web apps, but most systems have enough complexity that an LLM cannot currently ascertain. Not to say they’re not helpful - ChatGPT is jawdroppingly good at pointing out bugs in code. They’re going to make people more…

Thanks for the perspective. Any predictions on how long before junior roles open up again / what are you seeing at your employer?

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#22

Prompt engineering along with being able to describe problems exceptionally well will become important. Just the other day I needed to write a complex script using a library I knew very little about. I knew "what" I wanted to do and that the library could solve the issue, but did not know enough about the lib to to solve it. I wrote pseudo-code and ChatGPT was able to generate a working script on the first shot. I pr…

My experience has been... if you are competent enough to write a good prompt, you were probably good enough to write the code to being with. LLM copilots simply make that writing faster by 1.5x to 2x

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#23

Prompt engineering along with being able to describe problems exceptionally well will become important. Just the other day I needed to write a complex script using a library I knew very little about. I knew "what" I wanted to do and that the library could solve the issue, but did not know enough about the lib to to solve it. I wrote pseudo-code and ChatGPT was able to generate a working script on the first shot. I pr…

My experience has been... if you are competent enough to write a good prompt, you were probably good enough to write the code to being with. LLM copilots simply make that writing faster by 1.5x to 2x

That’s why they teach you to write pseudo code before code in bootcamps.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#24
Given the amount of times I've seen your question pop up, along with other vaguely related ones concerning the job market writ large, there's a lot of justified fear that this isn't a viable career path at all anymore.

I'm not a junior, or a grad, but I do have a shit resume that in total contains about 5-10 years of varied experience. I've been unemployed for a year, and am considering alternatives, like being a real garbage collector or electrician if I can find a way into those.

I'd note also that most of the responses in this thread are the same that Jon Stewart just lampooned in his recent episode on AI, with most CEOs describing how AI is actually a huge productivity boost and the best thing for humanity since literal fire, or that people will need to retrain to become "prompt engineers" (laughable, and why would you want to do that anyway). Anyone with an optimistic take still has a job, and everyone else doesn't see one coming along any time soon.

That said, there is way too much hype imo, I've found some use for ChatGPT and anticipate that there will be more, but it's mostly boilerplate or explaining things that already have some explanation somewhere. Asking for a solution to some performance problem that nobody's really documented anywhere hasn't proved useful, it'll just imagine something. It's not documenting Apple APIs that Apple themselves haven't bothered with, but it'll generate approximately passable examples of AppKit stuff that have been on the internet forever, and that's a great starting point for solving more interesting problems.

I do feel like most of the impact on the market is due to interest rates and layoffs, and there being a lack of profitability in most software anyway. The nature of the problem however doesn't remedy the fact that it'll be way way more competitive than it already was, and if you hadn't run the interview gauntlet prior to 2023, you sure as hell won't want to run it after 2025.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#25

Both my jobs have indefinitely axed co-op and new grad roles due to Co-pilot. It isn’t just AI, as entry level people have always been poor value, but at this point we basically just want entry level to be a favour for employee’s kids. I’m an overemployed Senior SDE, one at a unicorn and one at a generic company.

Excellent. This will train fewer new grads, pushing demand higher for Seniors in a few years. I look forward to this extra bargaining power

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#26
AI systems are "trained" using what is scraped from the internet. So if the application domain is well documented then there is a chance that AI might produce working code. But you still need competent programmers to assess whether that code is correct. Writing prompts and tests is likely to remain critical.

My prediction is that specialized domain knowledge plus SWE (with smart use of AI) skills are increasingly going to be the better way to gain employment.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exacerbate unless the tools get much better. Really, I don’t think they fully replaced the juniors as only some of the job is code generation. A lot of basic support and edge case handling is falling on the intermediates who often now aren’t producing much of anything due to the support burden. Many of them are dissatisfied.

In that case, feels like the current trend is unsustainable and should reverse once the intermediates eventually revolt? WDYT? Have both your companies explicitly stated that the freeze on entry-level hiring is because of copilot?

It depends. A lot of it is hard to parse out from company specific realities. These particular intermediates are only doing so much support as the product is selling a lot more than anticipated. We may be allocated support engineers to help out. So maybe support engineer becomes the new junior developer job as many of them are fairly technical but have no career track.

The current situation is definitely untenable, but it is not clear whether you need a full fledged developer do a lot of the work they are presently doing.

Keep in mind that this is a fairly large org of thousands, so smaller companies have different needs as full time support engineers may not be worth it. We already have some, they just are not allocated to this team.

As for your second question, one company phrased it something along the lines of "AI allows us to quickly do tasks for which we would otherwise need junior/certain classes of support team members." AI isn't just being used by developers, but all over the org. There is an AI steering group and everything.

Other employer hasn't said anything about it as AI implementation is less far along.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#28

Both my jobs have indefinitely axed co-op and new grad roles due to Co-pilot. It isn’t just AI, as entry level people have always been poor value, but at this point we basically just want entry level to be a favour for employee’s kids. I’m an overemployed Senior SDE, one at a unicorn and one at a generic company.

Excellent. This will train fewer new grads, pushing demand higher for Seniors in a few years. I look forward to this extra bargaining power

Oh, they are setting up for a massive shortage of useful people in a few years unless AI knocks productivity out of the park.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#29

I don’t think there’s going to be much change if any in the next 5 years. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see people say LLMs can replace software engineers. Maybe if you’re writing basic CRUD web apps, but most systems have enough complexity that an LLM cannot currently ascertain. Not to say they’re not helpful - ChatGPT is jawdroppingly good at pointing out bugs in code. They’re going to make people more…

I completely agree with this take.

LLM's have been hyped up to replace developers, but have repeatedly shown that the code at best can do the job.

It will replace the offshore sweatshops that Accenture and IBM have made, where they literally pull people off the streets and give them a couple of hours course so they can meet headcount for contracts. Those people were never productive.

I've seen the outputs that people who have tried to use in my codebase, and the amount of SQL injections and XSS exploits that get churned out because the model doesn't understand context is terrible.

I'm just waiting for the big hack to come along because of too much faith in these systems that have cold indifference in your systems reliability.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

#30
Where I work, things seem to take about 5-10 years longer than anyone plans.

Even if there are companies on the cutting edge of AI, there will always be those that take more time to adopt it. Others will never adopt it in any meaningful way, unless there is something affordable and off the shelf that can actually fulfill the business needs.

I’m going to remain highly skeptical of the promises of AI, until I see them actually come to fruition.

WYSIWYG HTML editors were supposed to be the end of needing web developers, now those are mostly gone, some template based services exist, and there are more web developers than ever.

Low-code was also supposed to be the end of needing developers, as anyone who knew the business requirements could plug some LEGO blocks together. That also seems to be dying, as the logic still needs to exist and that’s where people get lost, not to mention the lack of flexibility and customization than those systems can lead to.

Will AI replacing software engineers be any different? Only time will tell.

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