If you still don't think software engineering as a high paying job is over, I don't know what to tell you.
It's high paying?
A Research Preview of Codex
221–230 of 487 posts
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…
Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhe…
I recently read an article about the US having a relatively weak occupational training.
To contrast, CH and GER are known to have very robust and regulated apprenticeship programs. Meaning you start working at a much earlier age (16) and go to vocational school at the same time for about 4 years. This path is then supported with all kinds of educational stepping stones later down the line.
There are many software developers who went that route in CH for example, starting with an application development apprenticeship, then getting to technical college in their mid 20's and so on.
I think this model has a lot of advantages. University is for kids who like school and the academic approach to learning. Apprenticeships plus further education or an autodidactic path then casts a much broader net, where you learn practical skills much earlier.
There are several advantages and disadvantages of both paths. In summary I think the academic path provides deeper CS knowledge which can be a force multiplier. The apprenticeship path leads to earlier high productivity and pragmatism.
My opinion is that in combination, both being strongly supported paths, creates more opportunities for people and strengthens the economy as a whole.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. AI have shown to most capable in what we consider creative jobs. Music creation, voice acting, text/story writing, art creation, video creation and more.
If you mean create as in literally, sure. But not in being creative. AI can't solve novel problems yet. The person you're replying to obviously means being creative not literally creating something.
What is the qualifier for this? Didn't one of the models recently create a "novel" algorithm for a math problem? I'm not sure this holds water anymore.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#224Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive. We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas: Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run…
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Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#225Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code? I'm very interested. In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it. These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me i…
A lot of people are deeply invested in these things being better than they really are. From the OpenAI's and Google's spending $100s of billions EACH developing LLMs to VC backed startups promising their "AI agent" can replace entire teams of white collar employees. That's why your experience matches mine and every other developer I personally know but you see comments everywhere making much grander claims.
I agree, but I'd add that it's not just the tech giants who want them to be better than they are, but also non-programmers.
IMO LLMs are actually pretty good at writing small scripts. First, it's much more common for a small script to be in the LLM's training data, and second, it's much easier to find and fix a bug. So the LLM actually does allow a non-programmer to write correct code with minimal effort (for some simple task), and then they are blown away thinking writing software is a solved problem. However, these kinds of people have no idea of the difference between a hundred line script where an error is easily found and isn't a big deal and a million line codebase where an error can be invisible and shut everything down.
Worst of all is when the two sides of tech-giants and non-programmers meet. These two sides may sound like opposites but they really aren't. In particular, there are plenty of non-programmers involved at the C-level and the HR levels of tech companies. These people are particularly vulnerable to being wowed by LLMs seemingly able to do complex tasks that in their minds are the same tasks their employees are doing. As a result, they stop hiring new people and tell their current people to "just use LLMs", leading to the current hiring crisis.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#226Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive. We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas: Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run…
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You need someone thats technical to look at the agent output, senior engineers will be around. Junior engineers are certainly being replaced
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhe…
I recently read an article about the US having a relatively weak occupational training. To contrast, CH and GER are known to have very robust and regulated apprenticeship programs. Meaning you start working at a much earlier age (16) and go to vocational school at the same time for about 4 years. This path is then supported with all kinds of educational stepping stones later down the line. There are many software dev…
I know about this system, but I am not convinced it can work in such a dynamic field as software. When tools change all the time, you need strong fundamentals to stay afloat - which is what universities provide.
Vocational training focusing on immediate fit for the market is great for companies that want to extract maximal immediate value from labour for minimal cost, but longer term is not good for engineers themselves.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the problem. The top level executives are setting up to retire with billions in the bank, while the workers develop their own replacements before they retire with millions in the bank. Senior developers will be mostly obsolete too. I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job. My colleagues mostly ignore juniors, provide no real guidance, couldn't care less. I see t…
> I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job. That's really awesome. I hope my daughter finds a job somewhere that values professional development. I'd hate for her to quit the industry before she sees just how interesting and rewarding it can be. I didn't have many mentors when starting out, but the ones I had were so unbelievably helpful both professionally and personally. If I…
She can try to reach out to possible mentors / people on Linkedin. A bit like cold calling. It works, people (usually) want to help and don't mind sharing their experiences / tips. I know I have helped many random linedin cold messages from recent grads/people in uni
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#229Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive. We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas: Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run…
If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…
I think the bigger problem, that started around 2022 is much lower volume of jobs in software development. Projects were shutdown, funding was retracted, even the big wave of migrations to the cloud died down.
Today startups mostly wrap LLMs as this is what VCs expect. Larger companies have smaller IT budgets than before (adjusted for inflation). This is the real problem that causes the jobs shortage.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You need someone thats technical to look at the agent output, senior engineers will be around. Junior engineers are certainly being replaced
Thanks, Sherlock. Now, tell me, when senior engineers start to retire, who will replace them? Ah, yeah, I can hear you say "LLMs!". And LLMs will rewrite themselves so we won't need seniors anymore writing code. And LLMs will write all the code companies need. So obvious, of course. We won't need a single senior because we won't have them, because they are not hired these days anymore. Perfect plan.