Live data from Hacker News

AI has torched the market for junior programmers

seldo.com

201–203 of 203 posts

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#201
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just disagree, some people find that thought impossible unless their opponents are being paid, due to how obviously brilliant they are. And, that seems to be the minority position actually, mostly the discussion is the turkeys telling each other how Christmas is a myth.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The steam engine was invented in 1765 (+/-) but employment crashed in the textile industry starting in 1815, 50 years later. LLMs were practically invented in 2017, 9 years ago. Of course, software is software and we live in a faster age, but guess what, human needs and desires are infinite so requirements keep going up. At this point I have 0 trust in purely agentic…

> Claiming that there will be no more SDEs of any kind, worldwide, in max 2 years, is an extreme position.

Nobody said that. The claim is that within 24 months the models will have the capability required to replace all of us. I stand by that. How quickly that moves to everyone actually getting replaced is a social and economic question. There may very well be well be a long tail, I’m sure today you can find traditional weavers and barrel makers somewhere, they just happen to be economic novelties.

For the record, I’ll say that by 10 years out the profession is hollowed out enough for it to count as destroyed, and the process has already begun.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#202
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The steam engine was invented in 1765 (+/-) but employment crashed in the textile industry starting in 1815, 50 years later. LLMs were practically invented in 2017, 9 years ago. Of course, software is software and we live in a faster age, but guess what, human needs and desires are infinite so requirements keep going up. At this point I have 0 trust in purely agentic…

> Claiming that there will be no more SDEs of any kind, worldwide, in max 2 years, is an extreme position. Nobody said that. The claim is that within 24 months the models will have the capability required to replace all of us. I stand by that. How quickly that moves to everyone actually getting replaced is a social and economic question. There may very well be well be a long tail, I’m sure today you can find traditio…

Ok... let's say the profession is destroyed. Who maintains all these ever increasing piles of code? Who figures out the requirements, who creates specifications? Who solves issues that are reported by users?

LLMs/turtles all the way down?

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually my feeling on this is that pretty soon unless you’re in the top 1% of performers for a software task it will become difficult to hold a role at a frontier company.

They are hiring far too much and far too quickly for this to be the case, right now at least.

yes it may be valid for large values of “pretty soon”. the market is going to be irrational for as long as it likes :)
Post reply on HN