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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

#161

Post by BadCookie »

petilon wrote: post #122
BadCookie wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

> Or people who were remote got called back to the office. That's not the explanation according to this article [1]. > Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. It is hard to afford Bay Area rents -- even if you have a job. I can't see someone looking for a job signing a 1-year lease at these rates. Also, unlike the old days, interviews are remote, being physically pr…

It’s not hard to afford Bay Area rent if one partner is still employed in tech, especially if they are older and have savings or home equity to cash in on.

The article you linked to seems to say only that employers have been unsuccessful at enforcing 100% in-office work. It does not say that people have been successful at keeping their 100% remote jobs in other states and far-off locations.

Overall, we seem to be reaching a compromise where many are forced to live within commuting distance of their office but aren’t necessarily there every day. This compromise is what is pushing up rents from what I am seeing among my network.

In other words, “remote” and “hybrid” are not at all the same but you are using the terms interchangeably. You can’t live in Idaho and commute to SF three days a week without major inconvenience and expense.

Maybe you aren’t aware, but house prices skyrocketed in many locations (like Idaho and Florida) during the pandemic because of an exodus of Californians who were told that they could keep their high-paying jobs and live almost anywhere. The tide has reversed now.

As for interviews, I have read multiple Hacker News comments from people saying that their solution to rampant AI cheating has been to make interviews in-person again. So I’m not convinced that you’re right about that either…

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#162

Post by ttoinou »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #148
ttoinou wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With AI LLM, the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people. And also more senior developers can spin up and manage dozens of juniors via agentic AI

Juniors now need to be more skilled than before

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#163

Post by ttoinou »

sublinear wrote: post #43
ttoinou wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lots of people are now writing much worse code with AI. I'm not sure what you're saying other than "experience is valuable".

If it's prototypes or throwaway scripts, then it's fine and it's still valuable experience

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#164

Post by boshalfoshal »

theamk wrote: post #147
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…

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

And how many people do you need for this? There are many roles where people are literally hired for their programming/engineering skill. Modern LLMs _largely_ commoditize that skillset.

There are not that many novel things to do, and even if there are, you don't need too many people to do them as LLMs give you more and more leverage over execution details.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#165

Post by lurking_swe »

Chance-Device wrote: post #145
lurking_swe wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bas…

i’m not an anti-AI believer. And our career is changing dramatically no doubt. i just think people overestimate short term gains and underestimate long term gains. (applicable to your comment)

In this case i had no empirics in the loop. The scenario was only reproducible under high api load. I could load test, but management isn’t eager to spend prod-like costs in staging (requires scaling opensearch a lot in stage). What can i say.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#166

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

ttoinou wrote: post #162
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With AI LLM, the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people. And also more senior developers can spin up and manage dozens of juniors via agentic AI Juniors now need to be more skilled than before

> the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people

Why? they didn't know how to copy before or something?

> spin up and manage dozens of juniors

Let's not call it a "junior" if one trigger word deep in the filesystem can make it forget it's a programmer and start building Minecraft castles. Your comparison is unfair to anyone with even 1 week of programming experience.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#167

Post by dlcarrier »

bluescarni wrote: post #58

I am not really seeing how the first chart can be construed as AI disrupting the junior job market... The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared. Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can b…

Junior level employees are always the worst off during a market downturn, and employers need to justify to shareholders why they are laying off or not hiring, because a shrinking business is worth less than a growing one, so they'll come up with an excuse why they don't actually need employees. Currently, that excuse is AI.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#168

Post by QuiEgo »

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’m always struck by a bit of wonder at comments like this. It seems everyone’s experience is all over the place. Curious, what types of things are you working on where you see these results?

I’m at 90%+ code AI generated by stats. I work in embedded systems. It still goes off the rails all of the time and needs a heavy hand to guide it. It does not currently feel like it will ever be truly able to operate independently. It’s a very useful tool, but it’s just not there yet in my day-to-day.

Obviously, YMMV.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#169

Post by knollimar »

rvz wrote: post #135
knollimar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you implying something about my spelling on a phone in my free time transfers to my work performance? Silly if so

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#170

Post by ghaff »

coderatlarge wrote: post #111
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.

Very few mechanical engineers for example are licensed.
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