imo, The OP has bad ai-assisted takes on almost every single "critical question". This makes me doubt if he has breadth of experience in the craft. For example.
> Narrow specialists risk finding their niche automated or obsolete
Exactly the opposite. Those with expertise will oversee the tool. Those without expertise will take orders from it.
> Universities may struggle to keep up with an industry that changes every few months
Those who know the theory of the craft will oversee the machine. Those who dont will take orders from it. Universities will continue to teach the theory of the discipline.
TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life. This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will…
And yet the current administration, like every other administration since the mid 90s, still sets labor immigration policy on the testimony of the tech industry that there is still a critical shortage of tech labor so the doors must be remain open for the 30th year of the temporary program that's only going to be in place until the tech companies have time to train domestic talent. If you have a problem with this, you're a racist Nazi who should be excluded from society. Left, right, up, down, they all agree on this, as does the vast majority of posters here. Their defense for this is that little down arrow since they have no other legitimate defense for the 30th something year of the temporary program to give them time to train the talent they claim doesn't exist in the United States.
All well-documented knowledge fields will be gone if software goes. Then the undocumented ones will become documented, and they too will go. The best advice to junior devs is get a hands on job before robotic articulating sausages are perfected and humans become irrelevant blobs of watery meat.
I think the GPT3 or 4 minute mile moment for robotics will be when we see a robotic hand with the dexterity of a 6 year old. Once that happens it will quickly be over.
TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life. This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will…
Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
I felt a lot safer when I was a young grad than now that I have kids to support and I can't just up and move to wherever the best job opportunity is or live off lentils to save money or whatever.
There must be "dozens of us" with this fear right now. I'm kinda surprised there isn't a rapid growing place for us to discuss this... (Youtube, X account, Discord place..)
> The bottom line: Junior developer hiring could collapse as AI automates entry-level tasks If AI automated entry-level tasks from today, that just means "entry-level" means something different now. It doesn't mean entry-level ceases to exist. Entey-level as we know it, but not entry-level in general.
One indicator is intern hiring. I have seen the intern budgets getting slashed by 60-70% (4 interns in 2025 vs 14 interns in 2024).
You just sound very angry your career isn't fun to you. I'm sorry.
I never worked “for fun”. My job for 30 years is just a means to support my addiction to food and shelter. I don’t hate my job especially my last 3 since 2020 when I started working remotely. But it is just something I do.
Yes, that's the answer that sounds utterly miserable. Spending 30 years toiling for a third of your day at something you don't like.
There must be "dozens of us" with this fear right now. I'm kinda surprised there isn't a rapid growing place for us to discuss this... (Youtube, X account, Discord place..)
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May I suggest that it may be your attitude about that piece of paper that is holding you back rather than the paper itself?
On the junior developer question: A humble way for devs to look at this, is that in the new LLM era we are all juniors now . A new entrant with a good attitude, curiosity and interest in learning the traditional "meta" of coding (version control, specs, testing etc) and a cutting-edge, first-rate grasp of using LLMs to assist their craft (as recommended in the article) will likely be more useful in a couple of years…
Sorry but no. Software engineering is too high dimensional such that there is no rulebook for doing it the way there is for building a bridge. You need to develop taste, much like high level Go players do. This is even more critical as LLMs start to spit out code at an ever higher rate allowing entropy to accumulate much faster and letting unskilled people paint themselves into corners. I think of it a bit like ebike…
I don't think that conflicts with what I said but perhaps counters with something I didn't; your ebike analogy implies a recklessness that the junior with the attributes I mentioned will be averse to. Conversely the senior with the full grasp of LLMs and the "taste" and judgement will naturally be ahead.
But the comparison I made was between the junior with a good attitude and expert grasp on LLMs, and the stick-in-the-mud/disinterested "senior". Those are where the senior and junior roles will be more ambiguous in demarcation as time moves forward.