AI has torched the market for junior programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#181

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 9:44 AM UTC

sixtyj wrote: post #85

cosmodisk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm yet to meet anyone even remotely associated with tech ( let's call it all IT) that is good and only cares about money. Debugging code at for 8 hours straight is most people's hell on earth but some people love it and that love doesn't come through paycheck alone.

Everyone perceives the world differently. For example, I like to look for mistakes and I spot them (in a text while editing), but I have a friend who’s hopeless at that. On the other hand, he’s good at seeing projects through to the end, which is something I’m not good at. So it really is good to find people who are a good fit for a specific position - and who, in the worst-case scenario, would do the work even for f…

To be fair, my perfect job is third level teaching, but that wouldn't support me buying a house where I live, so I'm a data scientist (which I also enjoy).

Housing in particular is a driver of people optimizing for cash.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#182

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 9:48 AM UTC

coderatlarge wrote: post #93

jemmyw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in that 20% that actually has an interest in the work then you'll probably be fine.

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.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#183

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 9:52 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #174

sublinear wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Programming plus something else has always been a massive advantage. The corollary of this is that moving industries requires you to learn another domain if you want to be useful.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#184

Post by mschuster91 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 11:33 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #118

mschuster91 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

There's nothing preventing a company from saying "hey, we're paying for your training and expecting 5 years of service in return, and in exchange for this, you get guaranteed 2-5% above inflation".

And if government would have some sort of sense, they would force companies to act like that again.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#185

Post by orwin » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 12:07 PM UTC

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…

I'm in internal tooling for blue and network teams, 70% of my code is generated and I have the same experience as your. The two 'new' hires (1 year into the job, so not so new) however are probably in the same boat as GP, but they just don't see the work we have to put to rewrite their AI-generated issues into something legible and useful, or read their AI-generated PRs filled with duplicated/dead code.

Honestly, the biggest improvement AI have brought me is the complete end of my imposter syndrome. People say comparison is the thief of joy,but in my case, previously invisible devs getting more visibility, suddenly pushing new code every week at the same pace as me but clearly without any understanding any of the underlying issues did wonder to my self esteem. I still consider myself among the worst of my group, but my group evolved from 'all devs I know' to 'the competents', which is very nice.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#186

Post by ghaff » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #184

ghaff wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. There's nothing preventing a company from saying "hey, we're paying for your training and expecting 5 years of service in return, and in exchange for this, you get guaranteed 2-5% above inflation". And if government would have some sort of sense, they wo…

There's a difference between informal expectations and requirements. We don't have indentured servitude in the US although if an employee does quit right after a paid relocation, a company may try to claw back those expenses. (Not sure there's any real legal backing to that or if it would be worth it for the company to try too hard.)

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#187

Post by pixel_popping » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

Chance-Device wrote: post #94

pixel_popping wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you using it or are you just going off benchmarks?

Yeah, saturating 8 Claude Max 20 subscriptions a day, what about you?

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#188

Post by pixel_popping » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #158

PestoDiRucola wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A few reasons: -2.5 years is a pretty short time for a new tech development, even if it fails eventually - usually when a new tech is introduced, the biggest gains happen when the environment is changed to fit it. That takes time: libraries, api's, verification tooling, rl environments, skilling users, etc. - possibility of orders of magnitude hardware cost reduction - Optical. Analog. Rram. Many others. Something wi…

Exactly, I genuinely believe we are far off from future capabilities, as in models will practically "zeroshot" most use cases without mistakes and it's likely we will directly develop in some sort of language made specifically for AI that is then translated into WASM or the likes which will drastically improve accuracy, there is no point using "human languages" when we will not even be checking codebases (not even filetree) anymore.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#189

Post by pixel_popping » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 1:44 PM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #157

Chance-Device wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> in the loop Yes, the solution is to just burn more tokens.

It actually is in most scenarios.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#190

Post by awepofiwaop » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #62

awepofiwaop wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're clearly in it just for the money That's often how jobs work. I happen to like my job, but let's not pretend like everyone is going to make sufficient money following their most passionate interests.

I'm yet to meet anyone even remotely associated with tech ( let's call it all IT) that is good and only cares about money. Debugging code at for 8 hours straight is most people's hell on earth but some people love it and that love doesn't come through paycheck alone.

Based on their actions, virtually all successful high level executives in tech only care about money and they don't care about making good products, etc.