"software engineers will spend less time on routine coding—and more on interacting with customers" Ahh, what could possibly go wrong!
Sounds like we're finally doing agile.
IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
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Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#42They hire juniors, give them Claude Code and some specs and save a mid/senior devs salary. I believe coding is over for SWE's by end of 2027, but will take time to diffuse though the economy hence still need some cheap labour for a few years, given the H1-B ban this is one way without offshoring.
Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#43Bold move. Not because it's wrong, but because it risks initiating the collapse of the AI bubble and the whole "AI is gonna replace all skilled work, any day now, just give us another billion". Seems like IBM can no longer wait for that day.
I mean it’s IBM. On average, 70% of their decisions are bad ones. Not sure I’d pay a single bit of attention to what they do.
Agree, They could have owned the home computer market, but were out-manvoured by a couple of young programmers. They are hardly the company you want to look to for guidance on the future.
Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is that bad? You write better code when you actually understand the business domain and the requirement. It's much easier to understand it when you get it direct from the source than filtered down through dozens of product managers and JIRA tickets.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s spot on imo. Engineers who don’t want to understand the domain and the customers won’t be as effective in an engineering organization as those who do. It always baffles me when someone wants to only think about the code as if it exists in a vacuum. (Although for junior engineers it’s a bit more acceptable than for senior engineers).
We're assuming we all somehow have perfect customers with technical knowledge who know exactly what they want and can express it as such, while gracefully accepting pushback over constraints brought up.
Anyone who's worked in a "bikeshed sensitive" stack of programming knows how quickly things railroad off when such customers get direct access to an engineer. Think being a fullstack dev but you constantly get requests over button colors while you're trying to get the database setup.
Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#45I realized the AI replacing developers hype was all hype after watching this.
Why Replacing Developers with AI is Going Horribly Wrong https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WfjGZCuxl-U&pp=ygUvV2h5IHJlcGx...
A bunch of big companies took big bets on this hype and got burned badly.
Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#46The title is a bit misleading. Reading the article, the argument seems to be that entry-level applicants (are expected to) have the highest AI literacy, so they want them to drive AI adoption.
I hope they have a good 10 years experience in that "literacy".
Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s spot on imo. Engineers who don’t want to understand the domain and the customers won’t be as effective in an engineering organization as those who do. It always baffles me when someone wants to only think about the code as if it exists in a vacuum. (Although for junior engineers it’s a bit more acceptable than for senior engineers).
We're assuming we all somehow have perfect customers with technical knowledge who know exactly what they want and can express it as such, while gracefully accepting pushback over constraints brought up. Anyone who's worked in a "bikeshed sensitive" stack of programming knows how quickly things railroad off when such customers get direct access to an engineer. Think being a fullstack dev but you constantly get request…
Dealing with the occasional pushy customers is way easier than dealing with pushy PMs or designers. Which happen to be the majority.
Customers bikeshed WAY less than those two categories.
Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#48The title is a bit misleading. Reading the article, the argument seems to be that entry-level applicants (are expected to) have the highest AI literacy, so they want them to drive AI adoption.
I hope they have a good 10 years experience in that "literacy".
I just run sub agents in parallel. Yesterday I used Codex for the first time yesterday. I spun up 350,640 agents and got 10 years of experience in 15 minutes.
Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#49Interesting given the current age discrimination lawsuit: https://www.cohenmilstein.com/case-study/ibm-age-discriminat...
Another one? What is it with IBM, they must really save lots of money in a way no one else has figured out by firing people at 50yo. This is like the 3rd or 4th one i've heard from them.
It’s not very hard. Take a guy making $200k and 30% benefit overhead and replace with two offshore people at $50k total comp.
Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption
#50The title is a bit misleading. Reading the article, the argument seems to be that entry-level applicants (are expected to) have the highest AI literacy, so they want them to drive AI adoption.
Sounds like the first step of a galactic scale fuck up