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No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

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Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#21

Post by ilaksh »

Good point to a degree, but it applies to all work, not just software engineering, and even before they get into the workforce. Young people are not going to have any depth of skills or knowledge if they literally just act as a go-between for AI to do everything.

Maybe they become experts in wiring up AI and robotics?

But 5 years out, we might be into a new compute-in-memory paradigm. And we may have exceeded the complexity of the human brain with models greater than 100 trillion parameters.

We already see performance that is superhuman in task specific ways with 1-10 trillion parameters models.

In under 5 years, most small and many medium business will be handled directly by AI agents. You won't even necessarily know what kind of software they are running. For small-medium business, it may have very little or no code and just be a semi-structured database that is neutrally rendered into any needed form on-the-fly.

Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#22

Post by suzzer99 »

taormina wrote: post #11
kjkjadksj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a lot of super seniors on the doorstep of retirement, but no seniors.

How long do you think careers last?

Seriously. I've been programming almost 30 years and I feel like I could easily have another 10 in me. I'm sure many reading this will assume my skills are deteriorating at an atrocious rate. But I'm still the lead developer on a team that leans on me heavily to figure out the hard stuff. So I can't be too far gone.

Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#23

Post by suzzer99 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #20
taormina wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you think careers last?

People are looking towards retirement by the time they are 50 usually

I'm 57 and have no desire to retire. I know plenty of other programmers in their 50s who aren't itching to retire.

Programming, at least for me, isn't like some factory job where you can't wait to get out at your 30 years or whatever. I've always enjoyed what I do and found it rewarding.

Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#24

Post by ilaksh »

losvedir wrote: post #17

Oh, this is talking about the junior to senior pipeline. I thought it was going to be about improvements in AI capabilities. I think it's reasonable in 5 years that most of what I do as a senior dev (yes, even turning vague notions into concrete deliverables, giving high level ideas of tradeoffs, and so on) will also be automated away. Does anyone have interesting blog posts on what that means? Ideas about what the n…

In less than five years it will be clear that unaugmented humans are a bottleneck.

So many jobs as such may be limited to humans with high bandwidth BCI connected to AI, that effectively gives them an AI exobrain. But even then the AI would need to do most of the work or the human would just slow things down.

Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#25

Post by righthand »

I was just discussing this yesterday. The only time when Mythical Man Month isn’t a problem is when C-suite/management needs to burn their budget up and projects are behind. Usually you’ll end with teams with too many juniors. The leads are only focused on the harder problems and dont have capacity to properly onboard juniors. So management hires contractors from Europe/Asia. The juniors offload their work and unknowns to contractors who are often also very unskilled.

This has been going on for a long time in tech. Now with LLMs you have a bunch of juniors who are unskilled and a bunch of management trying to fill the skilled spots with unskilled+LLM workers. The seniors are starting to become plagued with people who are excellent at being unskilled in the work place. They maintain shrewd hiring practices until the projects are behind enough and we arrive at the original need to hire contractors.

“Mythical Man Month” is just something people say to indicate status. No one is using it’s lessons in actuality otherwise we’d have to acknowledge over half the work force in software are a bunch of frauds delegating their work and decision making to others.

Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#26

Post by suzzer99 »

ilaksh wrote: post #21

Good point to a degree, but it applies to all work, not just software engineering, and even before they get into the workforce. Young people are not going to have any depth of skills or knowledge if they literally just act as a go-between for AI to do everything. Maybe they become experts in wiring up AI and robotics? But 5 years out, we might be into a new compute-in-memory paradigm. And we may have exceeded the com…

I feel like this is very possible eventually, but under 5 years seems unrealistic to me. The compute power is already running into limits. And a few more major problems need to be solved before agents can have that kind of autonomy to create software from scratch and run entire businesses.

Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#28

Post by beej71 »

It seems like throughout human history, every piece of technology has had a complete chain of human knowledge for how it worked. No one person knows how to build an EV starting from dirt, but someone knows each step in isolation.

With LLMs, some people are claiming that the time for understanding code is over, and that leaves a gap in the chain of knowledge. I can't think of a time when such a gap has been adventageous, and can certainly think of times when it has come with risk or loss. Many of us have seen this manifest at small scale when the one person with obscure system knowledge leaves a company without adequate prior knowledge transfer.

At large scale, well, I think it will be a great time to be a dev who knows how to hand-code.

Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#29

Post by ilaksh »

suzzer99 wrote: post #26
ilaksh wrote: post #21

Good point to a degree, but it applies to all work, not just software engineering, and even before they get into the workforce. Young people are not going to have any depth of skills or knowledge if they literally just act as a go-between for AI to do everything. Maybe they become experts in wiring up AI and robotics? But 5 years out, we might be into a new compute-in-memory paradigm. And we may have exceeded the com…

I feel like this is very possible eventually, but under 5 years seems unrealistic to me. The compute power is already running into limits. And a few more major problems need to be solved before agents can have that kind of autonomy to create software from scratch and run entire businesses.

Given the intense pressure to find more efficiency, 5 years is probably enough to see deployment of radical new compute-in-memory paradigms such as nitrides-based ferroelectric devices that have a few orders of magnitude more efficiency.

I think the biggest problem is jagged intelligence which I would bet would be solved largely with bigger models, which comes back to rapidly evolving hardware paradigms.

Re: No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031

#30

Post by 6stringmerc »

I was a CS major in early 2000s before switching. English. However my tech abilities are what got me the career path - MS Word is powerful, few people learn how to write well, much less with business acumen.

This is now in your neighborhood; it was in mine 5 years ago but NOT blamed on AI. RFP response specialists are a “cost center” of human capital. It’s also a great entry level role to move into a VP role after 3-5 years. Learning the business, warts and all, to help win more.

The Baby Boomer generation cut the path completely. They pocketed the savings or passed it on to investors. Now it’s nearly impossible to get a decent gig in the field - 10 years minimum experience, salary about $80,000 USD maybe, except in Defense.

Go look at how many software “solutions” there are in the RFP space. Software has claimed to be able to do the job, or let one person do the work of three, for a decade now.

I’m not sympathetic to the tools created by this industry now actively realizing “the leopards are eating my face?!” type of situation. Even Senior Devs now will start to face age discrimination or wage suppression. This was written without any AI by the way. I’ve never touched a clanker, my hands are clean.

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