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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

#171

Post by theamk »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #164
theamk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

> There are not that many novel things to do,

I am currently work on embedded / low-level / devtools and there are tons of novel things to do. Perhaps the "programming" skills are not needed as much, but demand for "engineering" is as high as ever.

Maybe it's the case in web dev? TFA shows that the number of "web developers" is decreasing strongly.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#172

Post by aytigra »

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?

I think it case of coding it may not be as bad, because new training data (AI generated code) is always empirically validated by tooling and by consumer. It may not be good but it mostly works, otherwise it is discarded or patched, so it has a bottom bar of "it works".

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#173

Post by weatherlite »

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?

My honest take is forget that burning interest in programming, it likely won't matter that much in a few years. There may be a need for technically strong people who understand whatever the domain the company works on well I say focus on that. Knowing all kinds of deep python/c++ trivia is a decaying skill imo.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#174

Post by matheusmoreira »

sublinear wrote: post #160
matheusmoreira wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired? By "project" do you mean "product"?

The job descriptions still say: "experience building according to best practices and working with a team". The meaning of that never changed. What changed is tolerance of failing to meet that standard. That's how layoffs after overhiring happened. The bar was not raised, but moved back to where it was prior to the mid-2010s. Anyway, it also depends on who is doing the interviews. If your "hobby" projects are built si…

> What I was really saying is that someone who has been a teacher for a while and then learned to code with AI is now far more likely to get hired at an education software company than someone fresh out of college with a degree in CS.

Huh. That's my situation... Sort of. Been programming since I was a kid but went into another field. That gave me hope, thank you.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#175

Post by dingaling »

sixtyj wrote: post #105
sdevonoes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wheres the joy in cleaning public toilets? Should all of those workers leave?

It is a prejudice. You have to ask them. Ask nurses why they do what they do. Ask house cleaning stuff why they do it. For sure, a lot of people stay in their jobs because they don’t have any opportunity. But if you go deep enough you find out that a lot of them found some sort of fun while doing their cleaning-public-toilet-sort-of-job. (I have done my research so I know what I am talking about.)

Finding fun moments to make a job tolerable is very, very far away from doing a job because they enjoy it.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#176

Post by cognitiveinline »

trueno wrote: post #80
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…

honestly at this point putting out a software-coded job requisition is getting the interview cheaters full stop now. our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something ne…

Everyone non-remote is moving onsite interviews fast.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#177

Post by ttoinou »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #166
ttoinou wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if your junior is contacted by a three letter agency ? He will be legally forced in the USA to follow their direction and not your instruction.

LLM are so powerful exactly because they can interpret unstructured inputs in so many ways, prompt injection is a feature not a bug

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#178

Post by Chance-Device »

QuiEgo wrote: post #168
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 independen…

Well, I’ll start by saying look at what you’ve just said: you’re in embedded devices, one of the more niche software roles. 90% of your code is written by AI. You’re saying that you need to correct it sometimes. You’ve watched as AI goes from chatbots that literally cannot hold a conversation with a human being to LLMs that can do your job with supervision in less than five years.

Maybe your point is just what the difference is to me. It’s competence. On hard problems Fable can just iterate by itself like nothing before. You give it a task, it can plan it, formulate and falsify hypotheses, and do more complex reasoning than anything before it. The main difference is simply that it gets more right and can go deeper on everything. Yes, you do still need to course correct it, but it’s just on the next level.

It’s like what everyone experienced when Opus 4.5 came out last year, and the penny finally dropped that AI coding had arrived. If these sorts of jumps happen even one or two more times then it’s all over. It might even be over now and it’s just too expensive to run, but that will change over time.

If you can, you should try it and see for yourself.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#179

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

ttoinou wrote: post #177
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What if your junior is contacted by a three letter agency ? He will be legally forced in the USA to follow their direction and not your instruction. LLM are so powerful exactly because they can interpret unstructured inputs in so many ways, prompt injection is a feature not a bug

Why do you think an LLM is following only your instructions? Unless maybe you are in a tiny minority running locally

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#180

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

thisisit wrote: post #102
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…

I was just about to comment the same. It’s like a hammer in need of a nail. Here’s where ChatGPT released and jobs dovetails so it must be true. It will also be interesting to see 2019 through 2021. There was a glut of hiring post COVID and companies have to think about every dollar they spend post ZIRP.

Honestly, we need maybe ten or more years of data to see any real patterns.

And I typically work as a data scientist, but my role has involved more and more software engineering over time, so that might be driving some of the changes also.

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