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AI has torched the market for junior programmers

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Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#141

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Fraterkes wrote: post #65
m00x wrote: post #35

I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers. Our company was senior-heavy and we're just now diversifying. 80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money. They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by…

Alright, I’m at the start of my career but do have a genuine burning interest in programming. Am I fucked or not?

Depends on whether you leverage that interest to motivate you to sharpen your skills so that you're better at your job than your peers. If you're interested but don't do anything with that interest, then you are still in the same boat as the uninterested people.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#142

Post by lurking_swe »

Chance-Device wrote: post #79

We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.

just the other week I asked Fable 5 to diagnose the cause of some intermittent latency spikes on an API that queries an OpenSearch cluster at work. I encouraged it to look at the datadog metrics, splunk, the whole works. I let it loose to look at whatever it wanted.

End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its suggestions and deployed them to prod. Guess what? Didn’t fix the issue. Alas, a human was needed after all.

either everyone’s working on toy problems, or they’re working on very cookie-cutter code. I’m really not sure. I DO remain impressed with Fable 5 but the idea that we’ll all be unemployed in 2 years is hilarious delusion. we’re already at the point where many organizations are scaling back some of their AI spend.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#143

Post by boshalfoshal »

Chance-Device wrote: post #79

We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.

wow an actual ai-pilled comment on here for once, I agree with your sentiment. People opining about "rebuilding the ladder" have no idea whats coming for the software industry, and the general populous of white collar work.

"Models can code well now but they cant do high level architecture" is just a logical fallacy. Its literally only true in this particular moment in time. But if they can code well, whose to say they wont architect well? And at that point, what do SWEs do? If anything, SWEs are in the critical path of automation for these AI labs anyway, so theres a very strong incentive to automate us out vs other professions, and it'll happen soon. All these random 1-off datapoints of "Fable 5 can't do X very idiosyncratic thing" are completely missing the point. 6 months ago, even attempting that problem with any "tool" would be totally intractable, and now it _just_ writes a slightly subpar solution. You can do some basic extrapolation here, its not that complicated.

Your best bet is to just chose a different career, or, if you still want to be in the software industry, be more enterprising.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#144

Post by throwaway4233 »

deadbabe wrote: post #109
throwaway4233 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you be losing out on the fresh ideas and perspectives new entrants into this field brings ? I had read "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley" a few months ago and most of the disruptions in the industry came from engineers who brought in fresh perspective or had the energy to try something different.

I’m gonna be blunt: most of their ideas will probably be stuff they read off an LLM anyway and just reworded. All our good ideas come from senior level people drawing from a rich history of experience and bold vision.

Even if juniors most of their ideas are exactly like you said, they would have more energy and almost no trauma from past experiences to experiment more.

While experience is important, it also creates blind spots as it's quite hard to have every experience about a particular topic unless you have been working on that tool/stack alone for decades.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#145

Post by Chance-Device »

lurking_swe wrote: post #142
Chance-Device wrote: post #79

We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.

just the other week I asked Fable 5 to diagnose the cause of some intermittent latency spikes on an API that queries an OpenSearch cluster at work. I encouraged it to look at the datadog metrics, splunk, the whole works. I let it loose to look at whatever it wanted. End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its…

By any chance, is the following true: you had no empirics in the loop. It couldn’t validate any of its theories by experimentation. If the solution requires being able to make actual changes in order to gather more information and it is not allowed to, and this is the only way to solve the problem, by definition it couldn’t do it, nor could you. Or was it something that could be worked out entirely on an a priori basis from the available data?

And while we’re talking about hilarious delusions, perhaps you should look at the current capability curve of AI and weigh it against the constant stream of arguments for why it couldn’t have continued at every point and yet has.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#146

Post by boshalfoshal »

I don't get why people care about "the death of junior SWEs" and "its a big issue if there are no junior programmers to be the senior SWEs of tomorrow"

Just look at the writing on the wall, there will be no need for senior SWEs of any type within 1-2 years anyway, and shortly after that we won't need Staff SWEs, etc. People here are way too myopic. AI is progressing very fast. We went from hiring juniors in droves 3-4 years ago to basically proclaiming the death of junior SWEs. Who is to say this won't continue up the ladder?

AI will be good enough to replace all SWEs in any capacity - there is no point in "investing" in rebuilding this ladder when you can just invest in more GPUs (in the case of oai/ant/meta/google/etc). or just pay those aforementioned companies more in tokens if you are a smaller outfit. The cost effectiveness of those tokens will only get better over time, until they are competitive in cost : intelligence when compared to any human SWE.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#147

Post by theamk »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #146

I don't get why people care about "the death of junior SWEs" and "its a big issue if there are no junior programmers to be the senior SWEs of tomorrow" Just look at the writing on the wall, there will be no need for senior SWEs of any type within 1-2 years anyway, and shortly after that we won't need Staff SWEs, etc. People here are way too myopic. AI is progressing very fast. We went from hiring juniors in droves 3-…

Nah, TFA states it very well:

> The jobs disappearing are the ones where the work product is code written to spec. The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.

AI is happy to follow instructions, no matter how stupid, unoptimal or unnecessary those are. To be successful, you need someone to understand the details and make the decisions.

And while that "someone" could be a person that does not go in the details and doesn't understand the code, they would be equivalent of non-technical CEO - sure, those exist, but they have a much harder time creating successful products.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#148

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

ttoinou wrote: post #26
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #10

> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know. Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist. The job was always "software architect", "software engineer"…

Lots of software engineers were just stack overflow copy pasters. No offense, it’s also a good way to learn, I’ve also done my fair share of stupid programming, but let’s not pretend the value to humankind was huge there

Sure, now when they are LLM copy-pasters things are going to suddenly improve

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#149

Post by mikert89 »

Chance-Device wrote: post #79

We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable within 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.

I think it’s 24 to 36 until businesses really trust an autonomous developer. But I agree otherwise

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#150

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

Chance-Device wrote: post #139
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought training new models on AI generated output leads to model collapse?

My point is more that they won’t need new training data to extrapolate to new problems, especially if that new problem is just a new syntax or API. Put the whole shebang into the context. Done. Yes, you need super long context for this, or just pretty good search over it, but I think this is likely to become a solved problem.

Agreed if its just a new API using a current language using common patterns, that is mostly just having a big context.

However, the ability to reason generally on novel problems is AGI and we aren't there yet. Eventually in the absence of AGI, we will have to train models on them, and that will require data.

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