41–50 of 74 posts
If nobody hires juniors, then where are the seniors supposed to come from?
This is something I've thought about a lot. Have a few thousand words that may resonate with you: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/
Rolling the ladder up behind us - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328894 - June 2025 (201 comments)
It’s amusing to me to see the top SV companies falling back to the status symbols of yesteryear for juniors: prestige of your alma mater. Feels like an admission that they have no real way to vet candidates otherwise.
I've always felt like coding bootcamps were pretty much doomed to fail. I don't know why so many in the industry tried to denigrate the profession in the first place by pretending that a ~20 week bootcamp would suffice. It's like if the New York Philharmonic said "We're going to expand beyond the old stuffy prestige names of Julliard and Curtis, and instead start looking for non-traditional students who took a semester long 'Learn the Cello in 12 weeks' course."
But even then, the biggest problem with coding boot camps wasn't competition from AI, it was offshore competition. People in the US spent a ton to be trained in basic skills like front end web development when there are millions of people around the world willing to do that, at a similar or higher level of skill, for $20/hr or less.
I don't mean to denigrate people who took non-traditional routes to software development. On the contrary, some of the best programmers (and, especially, dev managers) I've ever worked with don't have CS degrees. Speaking of cello, for some reason an inordinate number of top programmers I've worked with have music degrees. But all of these folks just had a certain way of thinking - very detail oriented, extremely logical, extremely self-motivated, that is just not common among people at large. It's not surprising companies try to find talent where the pool is full rather than doing needle-in-a-haystack searches.
> Coding bootcamps have been a mainstay in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Now, as AI eliminates the kind of entry-level roles for which they trained people, they’re disappearing. OK, so I think there is a fair chance it will play out like this: the younger generation won't study CS anymore / learn how to code. Instead, they'll all vibe code. This will lead to a massive increase in demand for seniors to clean…
People were saying this about coding bootcamps just a little while ago! "All of these bootcamp coders don't really know what they're doing and us seniors will have to clean up after them". Same with outsourcing before that. Most people (seniors included) suck at coding. AI is already better than all but the the very best. It will continue to improve.
I'm not sure how bringing up outsourcing helps what you're saying, because tech salaries went ballistic shortly after outsourcing became popular.
If nobody hires juniors, then where are the seniors supposed to come from?
Junior developers are the equivalent of the draftsmen that used to work under architects. Just like how CAD has almost entirely eliminated that line of work, the same thing will happen in software development. Only the “architects” will remain. There is an implicit assumption made by the people concerned about junior devs disappearing that that’s where senior developers come from . The reality is that almost junior d…
Don't forget that a software company is bunch of software engineers in coordination, if those software engineers can be placed with a graphics card or AI service provider they just go ahead and start your own software company and just use this services to undercut the software companies that no longer need software engineers.
If AI is actually able to code like a real software engineer then people that are not software engineers and were laid off from software companies should just get an AI subscription and take away the business from the company that they were fired from.
Maybe it's not that graduates are not able to get jobs because AI is replacing them but because the focus of the capital at this time is no longer on speculating over software projects, therefore on the companies that are actually making money are able to actually hire. Today if you want to work in a company that exist thanks to speculative capital and pays huge salaries like in the day when software was eating the world than you need to be in AI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies want familiarity (repeatable processes) and “objectivity” (credentials). I always knew their spiel about “disrupting higher education” with bootcamps and free courses was just empty platitudes, and that once the party ended those who placed their faith in those schemes would be promptly abandoned in favor of the traditional Ivy League set.
At no point bootcamp devs were as favored as ivy league students. The idea is likely flooding the market with devs, lowering software development costs and increasing software in the market increasing cloud usage.
If I were to put on my tinfoil hat though, I agree with your theory. These people often (in my personal experience) don’t know how to do anything not covered explicitly in the learning or testing material, leading to outsized dependencies on subscription or vendor portfolio products in lieu of independent or collaborative problem solving.
> Coding bootcamps have been a mainstay in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Now, as AI eliminates the kind of entry-level roles for which they trained people, they’re disappearing. OK, so I think there is a fair chance it will play out like this: the younger generation won't study CS anymore / learn how to code. Instead, they'll all vibe code. This will lead to a massive increase in demand for seniors to clean…
On a serious note, can't wait to see what salaries I command as a senior dev in a few years...when junior dev pipeline dried up and other older seniors left the industry.
It’s amusing to me to see the top SV companies falling back to the status symbols of yesteryear for juniors: prestige of your alma mater. Feels like an admission that they have no real way to vet candidates otherwise.
A different take, and I'm not sure if this is controversial or not. The "prestige of your alma mater" is not just some empty signal. Of course it's not cut and dry, but yes, you tend to find much higher quality software developers graduating from the top of their class with a CS degree from MIT or Stanford than you do graduating from Codesmith. I'm honestly a little baffled this is even a semi-controversial take to b…
Also, there are unforeseen consequences. Take venture capital, its actually relatively easy for a harvard grad to raise money, the reason being:
- everyone is trying to get an early piece of a company from the next bill gates/mark zuckerberg
- they fund every harvard grad since returns on a win like that are 10,000X.
-> consequence is almost all early stage capital gets allocated to ivy grads
-> most companies owned by ivy grads
-> caste system
the hope is that ai eliminates this vetting process by giving leverage to everyone
Sounds like it's the story of 1200 graduates, actually.
If nobody hires juniors, then where are the seniors supposed to come from?
It's likely that the skills you'd learn as an entry-level engineer today will be mostly irrelevant to being a senior 10 years from now -- just as knowing how to write a program on punch cards is irrelevant to today's engineers. Seniors will have to come from somewhere, but it wouldn't be through this pipeline, even if companies were still hiring at full rate for entry-level work. For some just getting into the field,…
I've interviewed more that a few "software architects" who couldn't put together a for loop, and these folks were largely just BS artists and PowerPoint generators.