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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

#111

Post by coderatlarge »

sdevonoes wrote: post #77

There are non technical people building and shipping software. That’s fine, but not all software is equal: the software you release and it’s behind an ecommerce platform (or a bank, or a hospital, or the train system) is not like the software behind your custom-made productivity app. I think for the former software we still need people with the title “software engineer” And as systems become more complex with time, w…

i suspect many licensed civil and other engineers may be looking at the currant situation as the moment when software people stop being able to just call themselves “engineers “ because they can type source code into an editor just like drawing a plausible bridge on paper doesn’t qualify you as being able to actually build one.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#112

Post by dataviz1000 »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #56
dataviz1000 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to reason about what is happening.

Those things stopped being full time jobs, but they only became more important to understand how they worked. Knowing more math makes you a better "living computer", but it also makes you a better programmer, in terms of code optimization for hardware constraints, and architect, because you have a better understanding of what is possible. A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical s…

> but they only became more important to understand how they worked

Agreed. At one point, for this reason, they introduced graphic calculators into the classroom, for example, circa 1990, the TI-81. It became more important to understand how they worked than spend the time to do the calculations.

A couple days ago, I wanted to understand how the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining model works so I spent 3 hours making data visualizations using Claude Code. [0] Look at the math notation which to me is very intimidating. Nevertheless, being able to visualize the values as animated cells in a grid synced with computation, I immediately grokked how the information was transformed into something that can be used to train a model from audio data -> image data -> 512 embedding.

Working through these problems in 3 hours using a coding agent will be analogous to working through calculous and linear algebra problems in 1990 with a graphing calculator. It is still 3 hours of wracking a brain.

[0] https://adamsohn.com/clap/

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#113

Post by lioeters »

m00x wrote: post #46
fmbb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you staying ahead?

By what he's saying he clearly isn't.

He's still on the idealistic believer stage of the hype cycle, when the world has moved on to the disillusionment stage of the rollercoaster.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#114

Post by chung8123 »

cassianoleal wrote: post #74
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…

> they're clearly in it just for the money It's a job, working for someone else. What other reason is there?

Some people have a passion for their craft and use that to generate money. There is a difference between people who just are there for the money and people that are there for the money and the implementing their craft.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#115

Post by sys_64738 »

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…

> They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.

I'm curious what they do to cheat during interview?

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#116

Post by lioeters »

vatsachak wrote: post #20
georgemcbay wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads like an ad for Anthropic, written by Claude itself.

I've just learned to impress VCs what can I say

Damn it, all the AI hype bros have dulled my sarcasm detector. Well played.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#117

Post by BadCookie »

petilon wrote: post #60

In silicon valley, apartment rents are up 20% relative to one year ago. People are getting hired, clearly. Not sure who.

Or people who were remote got called back to the office. Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. An increase in the net number of jobs is not the only possible explanation. The jobs might just be changing their geographic requirements.

Anecdotally, I know one couple who is selling their house to move back to a tech hub for better job opportunities. Another couple working from a rural location recently had one partner lose their big tech job. If the laid-off partner doesn’t get a new job in the next few months, I expect that they will start talking about moving, too.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#118

Post by ghaff »

mschuster91 wrote: post #84
j45 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years. Too many if not most can't even change a single sentence in their curriculum in 1-2 years. It doesn't mean University isn't worth it, it's worth less if you aren't self-directed learner building things.

> Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years. Maybe, just maybe, companies should invest into training again instead of outsourcing training to universities and saddle the prospects with the cost in the form of student debt? FFS we used to tell our children "if a job requires you to pay for entry, you're getting scammed" - and yet, we've all accepted it with "academia",…

The problem is we've ended up in this place where most companies don't do a lot of training and employees often don't stick around for more than a couple of years. You can finger point about the chicken and the egg but it's more or less where we've ended up in a lot of cases.

Extensive training made a lot more sense where people stuck around for 15-30 years but I expect a lot of people here would find that ludicrous.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#119

Post by deadbabe »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #98
echelon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop the moral grandstanding. This is a legitimate observation. We're also not hiring juniors. Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs.

> Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs. I'm just a hobbyist but I've gotten pretty good at using LLMs and evaluating and refining their outputs. Think there's still space in this industry or is it hopeless?

It’s a bad look these days IMO to say you have no real classical training but you picked up an LLM and now you think you know what you’re doing (for a job interview).

In the past, people without formal training had to learn things the hard way and projects were proof enough that they understood the fundamentals, but now there is no way to reasonably distinguish between such people and a heavy LLM augmented user. In our company we will likely place more importance now on full four year CS degrees as a signaling mechanism of candidate quality.

Keep it a hobby and build stuff you like.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#120

Post by petilon »

petra wrote: post #107
petilon wrote: post #60

In silicon valley, apartment rents are up 20% relative to one year ago. People are getting hired, clearly. Not sure who.

Startups need more than just junior software developers, and AI opened many new opportunities for startups.

What kinds of people are they hiring? 1 BR that used to be $2750 last year is now $3400, clearly they are getting paid a lot.
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