Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in the loop Yes, the solution is to just burn more tokens.
Would you care to say something substantive, or is that just not a thing you do?
Sorry, I would need to burn more tokens for that.
AI has torched the market for junior programmers
191–200 of 203 posts
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#192Earlier 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 never kept up with current practices and to be honest I don’t really think it’s their job to. Universities aren’t vocational schools. An undergraduate education can, at best, teach you how to learn complex topics independently and give you foundational knowledge you can build upon later whether you’re going into industry, pursuing a PhD, or doing something unrelated. The place for you to learn “practical…
Universities left liberal arts to pursue the STEM funding and also cover vocational schools.
They also universally advertise themselves for many programs that are current.
The "teaching you how to think" part isn't out of line at all, however, applying it in the real world has to be taken relative to what students are explicitly told before registering in university as to the outcomes they will achieve.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#193Earlier 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.
Problem is that programming is as much practice as it is theory. You need years practical programming experience to be good at programming, and universities are really not set up to provide that. One might argue that it might not be a bad idea to have apprenticeships like they do in traditional trade crafts. I'd argue that this is what the junior programmer role is.
Being both a self-taught developer before school (practice) as well as learning in post secondary (theory), the market hires for capability, developing it, and not potential.
Junior programmer roles are not internships or apprenticeships at all. Internships before the students graduate are internships.
Instead, asking an employer to act as the employee's parents, and pay to educate the new graduate so they can disappear in 1-2 years makes an increasingly harder choice.
This is part of the reason that Junior dev positions were not succeeding, prior to AI and the pandemic.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities never kept up with current practices and to be honest I don’t really think it’s their job to. Universities aren’t vocational schools. An undergraduate education can, at best, teach you how to learn complex topics independently and give you foundational knowledge you can build upon later whether you’re going into industry, pursuing a PhD, or doing something unrelated. The place for you to learn “practical…
Universities left liberal arts to pursue the STEM funding and also cover vocational schools. They also universally advertise themselves for many programs that are current. The "teaching you how to think" part isn't out of line at all, however, applying it in the real world has to be taken relative to what students are explicitly told before registering in university as to the outcomes they will achieve.
Sortof. Top research universities are mostly not vocational schools. But they do mostly figure on you picking up, say, Python on your own alongside the algorithms classs (and a ton of basic mechanical stuff).
I was a TA in grad school and did some tutoring and some students just didn't have the math basics they needed. I could help with a few things but couldn't really teach remedial high school math.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not sure how this works for y’all. On my team, they would get blocked to merge on code review until they met quality bar, and if this happened enough they would be having a performance issue that would be dealt with (they would be given multiple chances to course correct - polite talk from team lead, polite talk from manager (doc trail begin), not polite talk from manger, bad perf review / no raise + no RSU year, PiP, fired)
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#196We 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…
Keep in mind that a good chunk of people here are basically AI boosters: they work for AI companies, sell AI courses and training and certifications, own shares or otherwise benefit from AI companies doing well. Oh, also, lots and lots of marketers. Gitlab kind of exposed this a while ago, their marketing division had alerts based on HN keywords, their marketers were literally expected to be on-call to these keywords and even had a sort of lite SLA to respond to those keywords (stuff like Github, they were supposed to insert themselves in the conversation).
To the direct point: I've used AI for a lot of things. It's good, you can definitely build some things faster. It's far from perfect.
Also, if we were sooooo close to AGI, why would Anthropic and OpenAI continue hiring SDEs like mad, which they are? Why would Claude & co have embarassing bugs years after release (the glitchy scrolling bug, their websites being fully synchronous in 2026!!)? Etc.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#197Earlier 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.)
The real test for your theory is what people do when they're not getting paid. I have never in my life heard of a large forum/subreddit/WhatsApp group for cleaning toilets. There are no toilet cleaning meetups.
Some, actually many, jobs are just shitty.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Keep in mind that a good chunk of people here are basically AI boosters: they work for AI companies, sell AI courses and training and certifications, own shares or otherwise benefit from AI companies doing well. Oh, also, lots and lots of marketers. Gitlab kind of exposed this a while ago, their marketing division had alerts based on HN keywords, their marketers were literally expected to be on-call to these keywords…
People just disagree, some people find that thought impossible unless their opponents are being paid, due to how obviously brilliant they are. And, that seems to be the minority position actually, mostly the discussion is the turkeys telling each other how Christmas is a myth.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fi…
IDK. i played with Fable. It's coding abilities are really impressive.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that a good chunk of people here are basically AI boosters: they work for AI companies, sell AI courses and training and certifications, own shares or otherwise benefit from AI companies doing well. Oh, also, lots and lots of marketers. Gitlab kind of exposed this a while ago, their marketing division had alerts based on HN keywords, their marketers were literally expected to be on-call to these keywords…
People just disagree, some people find that thought impossible unless their opponents are being paid, due to how obviously brilliant they are. And, that seems to be the minority position actually, mostly the discussion is the turkeys telling each other how Christmas is a myth.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
The steam engine was invented in 1765 (+/-) but employment crashed in the textile industry starting in 1815, 50 years later.
LLMs were practically invented in 2017, 9 years ago.
Of course, software is software and we live in a faster age, but guess what, human needs and desires are infinite so requirements keep going up.
At this point I have 0 trust in purely agentic coding (i.e. the 0 supervision approach). YouTube randomly stops displaying subtitles, Gemini CLI (before its shutdown) and Claude Code suffer from constant refresh glitches, the Gemini and Claude mobile websites are synchronous, like we're living in the 60s (if I minimize Firefox both Claude and Gemini stop answering and Gemini until about 1 month ago would also lose my prompt - this is the kind of thing people were fired for in the past, etc). If this level of buginess is the best agentic coding can produce with unlimited state of the art mega corp tokens, software itself will collapse faster than the job market.
Claiming that there will be no more SDEs of any kind, worldwide, in max 2 years, is an extreme position.
I'm not even an SDE. If they're turkeys, AI boosters are pheasants :-p
And I know why the legitimate AI boosters do it. They were genuinely impressed by what they saw in agents, especially since many hated programming anyway. They extended the line into the future and assumed complexity was linear. These people looked at LLMs and agents and didn't see what was there, but what could be (frequently from a position of major SciFi consumers through their entire lives, as all techies are).
Optimism is a positive, extreme optimism is a great flaw.