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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

#131

Post by ghaff »

BoxFour wrote: post #100
bee_rider wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the well known weird thing about programming, right? University students learn CS, happen to also pick up some programming trade skills as a side effect, and then get hired as software craftspeople. The coincidentally learned skills are never quite up to date, just close enough. But nobody wants to set up programming trade schools or apprenticeships so shrug.

Programming trade schools were (are they still?) quite popular for a long time - see lambda school et al. They weren’t a panacea either.

I have to imagine those are the people being hit hardest at the moment.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#132

Post by Chance-Device »

whazor wrote: post #123
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.

Actually I believe these agentic models will teach you the value of software engineering faster. You can vibe entire code bases in days and learn more quickly. In my experience with all agents, including Fable, is that they work great when there is automated validation. But as soon as it needs to design something, it just keeps adding so much slop.

That’s just the latest position that the goalposts have moved to. They haven’t stopped improving yet, I have no reason to think they’ll stop at the ideation phase. Or any of them, really.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#133

Post by rvz »

echelon wrote: post #81
rvz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad we were never "juniors" either, nor would we ever hire them. Here is the reason: We just layoff the expensive engineers and offshore all our work to very cheap remote staff engineers (at least 2 in Mumbai), give them the Claude chatbot to do the work of 20 engineers. So now we have reduced our costs by 90%. No need for juniors at all.

What's with these attitudes? The world is changing rapidly. There's a very large chance you and nobody else here will have a software job.

You are not going far enough given that the world is changing faster than you can hire seniors.

So why wait? Why not go further by spinning up hundreds of Claude agents without the need to hire any engineers? You just manage them.

Or even at least offshore that job to a very cheap staff engineer with more cost savings?

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#134

Post by PestoDiRucola »

pixel_popping wrote: post #92
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.

Fable 5 will be genuinely weak compared to what's coming, I mean, we need to remember this is kinda the beginning still, we will genuinely reach a point where all benchmarks will score 99.9%. Think Opus 10, GPT-10... :) Also Fable 5 isn't "that impressive" as a lot of people have that kind of intelligence since 6 months+ by using combo of models and loops (I scored better on HLE than gpt-5.5 xhigh last January with s…

What makes you think that models will improve with the same pace that they have been improving in the past few years?

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#135

Post by rvz »

knollimar wrote: post #121
Loughla wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If they do good work and meet or exceed expectations, who cares why they're doing it?

The problem is they do good enogub work or don't care about the quality when they should push back. Or they will refuse to self invest, which makes them a worse long term investment for a company.

> The problem is they do good enogub work or don't care about the quality when they should push back.

With that sort of carelessness in the quality of your sentence, I probably would not hire you.

Seniors and above lead by example.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#136

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

Chance-Device wrote: post #130
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will AIs train on new tech without new data to train on? On the bright side, maybe that means the end of new javascript frameworks every 6 months :)

I think they’ll be writing that new tech, and will be able to read the source code, and reason from first principles. I doubt they will need human generated training data.

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

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#137

Post by geor9e »

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…

I got a degree in mechanical engineering. There's these two technicians under me that for years I thought we just hired off the street and maybe they graduated high school. I have to show them how to use terminal. I have to show them how to fix a Python script.

Imagine my horror when I found out recently both of them have a computer science bachelor's degree from a UC Santa Cruz.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#139

Post by Chance-Device »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #136
Chance-Device wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’ll be writing that new tech, and will be able to read the source code, and reason from first principles. I doubt they will need human generated training data.

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.
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