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Senior engineers have always owned the application (by knowledge not by law). And that has never been a problem. The real problem is, that without new Juniors there will never be new Seniors, and your company will collapse when your Seniors retire.
I think I see the problem here.
This article is written from the perspective of a corporations's best interests. Large companies have made it abundantly clear that they are sociopathic entities that consider nothing but profit. They will put on a mask and smile and do the absolute minimum to appear to care about you and retain valuable employees but it's all a show. It is within the best interests of individual engineers to do the same.
They don’t even care about profit! It’s well documented that having long-tenured employees saves you money in a ton of ways (the tangibles are: recruiter fees, ramp-up time, higher pay for new hires… and the intangibles are all the hidden work or keep things running smoothly, building relationships between teams or departments, and innovation). But individuals have to quit to get a market-rate job, and the company en…
I think that it was pitched at sales, but maybe could be applied to ENG.
The thinking was - if you have X sized market, you price in Y for your staff and you take Z for the profit - as the price of your staff increase, if the size of the market, or your share of it, does not increase, your profit decreases.
So it makes sense (the article argued) to drop the senior staff, and bring in the lower paid, but almost as good, intermediates - the profit stays the same.
IMHO, What is likely to happen is that eventually businesses will just "hire" agents from a handful of AI providers directly, trained by... guess who..., each time you prompt Codex, Claude or whatever, you are also training these services while paying for them... If Seniors think that their jobs are safe, lmao...
Furthermore, if the source of your value and wealth is that you have an app, what does it mean when anyone can easily build an app?
One day we might see a UI toolkit (so many of our modern problems are because our UI toolkits suck; my hot take) with deep AI integration and then apps will just be some microservices on the backend and the AI UI on the front that responds to natural speech and can adjust its display however the user requests.
> A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like. Except where I live there's a glut of people wanting any job they can find—for a variety of reasons ranging from high levels of immigration to layoffs in the last two years—and willing to accept discount rates because the alternative is being unemployed for another…
Everyone who starts to code after AI has a problem: it's hard to believe you went through the pain and frustration that people often think is required to become a senior engineer. Even if you did, you are in a lemon market with quite a few people who took the shortcut in college. Much better to hire a guy who learned before they could cheat, and then give him the tools to replace the juniors.
If you have people on your team that are valuable enough to demand a 40% compensation increase, then you should have been paying them 40% more without them having to demand it. It never ceases to amaze me that the owner class is so continually shocked that the people who build the value that the owners leverage into growing their fortune might suddenly realize their value. The entitlement is baked deep into the minds…
This is such a childish mindset. How much did you pay your plumber to fix your toilet last time? Why didn't you pay 40% more than that?
If you have people on your team that are valuable enough to demand a 40% compensation increase, then you should have been paying them 40% more without them having to demand it. It never ceases to amaze me that the owner class is so continually shocked that the people who build the value that the owners leverage into growing their fortune might suddenly realize their value. The entitlement is baked deep into the minds…
This is such a childish mindset. How much did you pay your plumber to fix your toilet last time? Why didn't you pay 40% more than that?
> A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like. Except where I live there's a glut of people wanting any job they can find—for a variety of reasons ranging from high levels of immigration to layoffs in the last two years—and willing to accept discount rates because the alternative is being unemployed for another…
> Eventually this turns into a comp conversation. A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,”... ...and the company says "fine, we'll replace you with AI / wanted a layoff anyway".