I am not really seeing how the first chart can be construed as AI disrupting the junior job market...
The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.
Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.
The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.
I was just about to comment the same. It’s like a hammer in need of a nail. Here’s where ChatGPT released and jobs dovetails so it must be true.
It will also be interesting to see 2019 through 2021. There was a glut of hiring post COVID and companies have to think about every dollar they spend post ZIRP.
Junior level employees are always the worst off during a market downturn, and employers need to justify to shareholders why they are laying off or not hiring, because a shrinking business is worth less than a growing one, so they'll come up with an excuse why they don't actually need employees. Currently, that excuse is AI.
Indeed. Their single most important piece of evidence not providing any strong indication the decline is from LLMs does not bode well for their argument. If it were the case you would expect the slope to become more negative with increasing LLM capability, and it in fact does the opposite.
There are non technical people building and shipping software. That’s fine, but not all software is equal: the software you release and it’s behind an ecommerce platform (or a bank, or a hospital, or the train system) is not like the software behind your custom-made productivity app. I think for the former software we still need people with the title “software engineer”
And as systems become more complex with time, we will need more people with the title “software engineer”
That does make it sound like there are only 2 types of software. The “serious” and the “unserious”. There’s probably a few dozen types rather, it’s much less black and white. At a client we have non-technical people ship “serious” software based on their 20+ years of experience in their respective field that definitely doesn’t need the same approach as a banking or health care application, but it would also be an insult to group that with productivity apps. No juniors or coding knowledge needed; LLMs fill that gap.
I as a senior am still called in to consult and shoot down attempts to actually integrate it into the wider system without triggering a full technical review.
i suspect many licensed civil and other engineers may be looking at the currant situation as the moment when software people stop being able to just call themselves “engineers “ because they can type source code into an editor just like drawing a plausible bridge on paper doesn’t qualify you as being able to actually build one.
I'd like to see a larger date range. The Stanford dataset starts in 2021 (covid, work from home, low interest rates, govt stimulus), which is one of the weirdest economic times in the last 100 years. It would be useful to see how Jrs are doing compared to ~10 years ago.
This is one of the problems with a lot of the data in this area. So many different things were/are happening in the space. Gold rush because tech is profitable including bootcamps, AI and companies planning for AI in the future, interest rates/overhiring, etc. etc.
That said, I find a lot of anecdotal information from many people in the space that tech was flooded by a lot of junior programmers who were basically in it for the money with minimal training and they're having a hard time of it. The same thing happened to webdev during dotcom.
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 independently. It’s a very useful tool, but it’s just not there yet in my day-to-day.
I think they’ll be writing that new tech, and will be able to read the source code, and reason from first principles. I doubt they will need human generated training data.
I think it case of coding it may not be as bad, because new training data (AI generated code) is always empirically validated by tooling and by consumer. It may not be good but it mostly works, otherwise it is discarded or patched, so it has a bottom bar of "it works".
My point is more that they won’t need new training data to extrapolate to new problems, especially if that new problem is just a new syntax or API. Put the whole shebang into the context. Done. Yes, you need super long context for this, or just pretty good search over it, but I think this is likely to become a solved problem.
Agreed if its just a new API using a current language using common patterns, that is mostly just having a big context.
However, the ability to reason generally on novel problems is AGI and we aren't there yet. Eventually in the absence of AGI, we will have to train models on them, and that will require data.
If needed it can synthetically create the datasets. There isn't a need for software engineers to make a dataset when AI could even more easily put one together.
just the other week I asked Fable 5 to diagnose the cause of some intermittent latency spikes on an API that queries an OpenSearch cluster at work. I encouraged it to look at the datadog metrics, splunk, the whole works. I let it loose to look at whatever it wanted.
End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its suggestions and deployed them to prod. Guess what? Didn’t fix the issue. Alas, a human was needed after all.
either everyone’s working on toy problems, or they’re working on very cookie-cutter code. I’m really not sure. I DO remain impressed with Fable 5 but the idea that we’ll all be unemployed in 2 years is hilarious delusion. we’re already at the point where many organizations are scaling back some of their AI spend.
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 basis from the available data?
And while we’re talking about hilarious delusions, perhaps you should look at the current capability curve of AI and weigh it against the constant stream of arguments for why it couldn’t have continued at every point and yet has.
i’m not an anti-AI believer. And our career is changing dramatically no doubt. i just think people overestimate short term gains and underestimate long term gains. (applicable to your comment)
In this case i had no empirics in the loop. The scenario was only reproducible under high api load. I could load test, but management isn’t eager to spend prod-like costs in staging (requires scaling opensearch a lot in stage). What can i say.
Actually I believe these agentic models will teach you the value of software engineering faster. You can vibe entire code bases in days and learn more quickly.
In my experience with all agents, including Fable, is that they work great when there is automated validation. But as soon as it needs to design something, it just keeps adding so much slop.
That’s just the latest position that the goalposts have moved to. They haven’t stopped improving yet, I have no reason to think they’ll stop at the ideation phase. Or any of them, really.
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 some good tooling and 6x the cost), but for a lambda Claude Code user, I can see why it looks that good.
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 will work. And internal improvements in the model architecture. And there's scaling in reasoning time.
wow an actual ai-pilled comment on here for once, I agree with your sentiment. People opining about "rebuilding the ladder" have no idea whats coming for the software industry, and the general populous of white collar work.
"Models can code well now but they cant do high level architecture" is just a logical fallacy. Its literally only true in this particular moment in time. But if they can code well, whose to say they wont architect well? And at that point, what do SWEs do? If anything, SWEs are in the critical path of automation for these AI labs anyway, so theres a very strong incentive to automate us out vs other professions, and it'll happen soon. All these random 1-off datapoints of "Fable 5 can't do X very idiosyncratic thing" are completely missing the point. 6 months ago, even attempting that problem with any "tool" would be totally intractable, and now it _just_ writes a slightly subpar solution. You can do some basic extrapolation here, its not that complicated.
Your best bet is to just chose a different career, or, if you still want to be in the software industry, be more enterprising.
Or people who were remote got called back to the office. Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. An increase in the net number of jobs is not the only possible explanation. The jobs might just be changing their geographic requirements.
Anecdotally, I know one couple who is selling their house to move back to a tech hub for better job opportunities. Another couple working from a rural location recently had one partner lose their big tech job. If the laid-off partner doesn’t get a new job in the next few months, I expect that they will start talking about moving, too.
> Or people who were remote got called back to the office.
That's not the explanation according to this article [1].
> Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one.
It is hard to afford Bay Area rents -- even if you have a job. I can't see someone looking for a job signing a 1-year lease at these rates. Also, unlike the old days, interviews are remote, being physically present in the Bay Area doesn't give you an advantage.
It’s not hard to afford Bay Area rent if one partner is still employed in tech, especially if they are older and have savings or home equity to cash in on.
The article you linked to seems to say only that employers have been unsuccessful at enforcing 100% in-office work. It does not say that people have been successful at keeping their 100% remote jobs in other states and far-off locations.
Overall, we seem to be reaching a compromise where many are forced to live within commuting distance of their office but aren’t necessarily there every day. This compromise is what is pushing up rents from what I am seeing among my network.
In other words, “remote” and “hybrid” are not at all the same but you are using the terms interchangeably. You can’t live in Idaho and commute to SF three days a week without major inconvenience and expense.
Maybe you aren’t aware, but house prices skyrocketed in many locations (like Idaho and Florida) during the pandemic because of an exodus of Californians who were told that they could keep their high-paying jobs and live almost anywhere. The tide has reversed now.
As for interviews, I have read multiple Hacker News comments from people saying that their solution to rampant AI cheating has been to make interviews in-person again. So I’m not convinced that you’re right about that either…
I don't get why people care about "the death of junior SWEs" and "its a big issue if there are no junior programmers to be the senior SWEs of tomorrow"
Just look at the writing on the wall, there will be no need for senior SWEs of any type within 1-2 years anyway, and shortly after that we won't need Staff SWEs, etc. People here are way too myopic. AI is progressing very fast. We went from hiring juniors in droves 3-4 years ago to basically proclaiming the death of junior SWEs. Who is to say this won't continue up the ladder?
AI will be good enough to replace all SWEs in any capacity - there is no point in "investing" in rebuilding this ladder when you can just invest in more GPUs (in the case of oai/ant/meta/google/etc). or just pay those aforementioned companies more in tokens if you are a smaller outfit. The cost effectiveness of those tokens will only get better over time, until they are competitive in cost : intelligence when compared to any human SWE.
> The jobs disappearing are the ones where the work product is code written to spec. The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.
AI is happy to follow instructions, no matter how stupid, unoptimal or unnecessary those are. To be successful, you need someone to understand the details and make the decisions.
And while that "someone" could be a person that does not go in the details and doesn't understand the code, they would be equivalent of non-technical CEO - sure, those exist, but they have a much harder time creating successful products.
> The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.
And how many people do you need for this? There are many roles where people are literally hired for their programming/engineering skill. Modern LLMs _largely_ commoditize that skillset.
There are not that many novel things to do, and even if there are, you don't need too many people to do them as LLMs give you more and more leverage over execution details.
I am currently work on embedded / low-level / devtools and there are tons of novel things to do. Perhaps the "programming" skills are not needed as much, but demand for "engineering" is as high as ever.
Maybe it's the case in web dev? TFA shows that the number of "web developers" is decreasing strongly.
I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers. Our company was senior-heavy and we're just now diversifying.
80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.
To be fair junior developers almost universally kinda suck and you have to teach them the job. They'll take 10x the time to do a job a senior would, and do it in a way that is much more complicated than it needs to be.
The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
I think this is the thing. Companies have always been forced rather against their immediate interests into the cost of hiring junior engineers. As soon as the idea gained traction that this cost was unnecessary, companies stopped. So: we had the post-COVID tech slump, and then immediately after, by horrible coincidence for prospective junior engineers, LLMs turned out to be good at coding. Result: a missing generation of engineers, and a giant headache in about 15 years time. But which tech exec could possibly care about what happens in 15 years?
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” software development is an internship or an entry-level role, assisted with a lot of self-directed learning that hopefully university made possible for you.
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.
This is the well known weird thing about programming, right? University students learn CS, happen to also pick up some programming trade skills as a side effect, and then get hired as software craftspeople. The coincidentally learned skills are never quite up to date, just close enough.
But nobody wants to set up programming trade schools or apprenticeships so shrug.
> 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", "coding bootcamps" and god knows what else.
Universities should be a place for the gifted to advance science, not be degree mills for large companies too goddamn lazy and penny-pinching!
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.
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.
I also happen to really enjoy computers, systems, etc. I enjoyed most of the jobs I've had, but the reason why I was there doing the job, as opposed to being at home nerding out for my benefit alone, was always the need to pay bills.
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 free or without anyone supervising them.
The question is whether the younger generation has grown up with the motto “money first and at any cost”… Not everyone, of course, but when I see how everything everywhere is reduced just to monetary value, it makes me feel a little down sometimes.
That might be true, but I never met a ME/EE major who wasn’t passionate about their craft. Not once.
Anecdotal in my experience, but that also used to be the case for most CS majors back when I graduated... but that was well before the rise of the FAANGs.
If people are unable to find joy in their paid work even after some time, they should consider doing something else.
For sure, sufficient money is important part of this equation.
But I strongly believe that if you find (your sort of) fun in what you do then you become faster and more efficient at it.
Edit: Cleaning, nursing etc.
Yes there are professions that almost no one wants to do. But that doesn’t mean that these people do it just for money.. this is prejudice that if you don’t like it and don’t have fun that other people are the same. No, they aren’t.
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.)
Some people have a passion for their craft and use that to generate money. There is a difference between people who just are there for the money and people that are there for the money and the implementing their craft.
Such a large part of the job is dumb meetings, politics and trying to work around bad governance. The only reason to put up with all that is money, because one needs to pay the bills.
Remove the need to pay bills and you'll be left with no one applying for a crappy job making money for someone else.
Implementing the craft has nothing to do with putting up with employment and employers, workplace harassment, waking up at unhealthy hours, wasting most of one's time awake doing things for someone else...
That’s every profession. I interviewed someone once that claimed Linux skills on his resume. I asked a couple basic questions and his response was, “well I don’t know that but my dad does”.
I got a degree in mechanical engineering. There's these two technicians under me that for years I thought we just hired off the street and maybe they graduated high school. I have to show them how to use terminal. I have to show them how to fix a Python script.
Imagine my horror when I found out recently both of them have a computer science bachelor's degree from a UC Santa Cruz.
I've been programming for 25 years now because I really like it. But if it didn't pay, I'd do something else, because I really like not being poor even more.
I have no doubt any junior, no matter their background or degree, will break into tech fine like all of us did if they are in for the reasons we got in - being nerds and fascinated by software. You can't fake that.
I do think that's part of it. A lot of people jumped into the roles when they saw it as an alternative to other types of STEM or, heck, any work and was likely to pay a lot more money.
They simply ask Claude or ChatGPT. I've had a few interviews with individuals who were definitely cheating. Strange pauses. Obviously typing and then reading from the screen, giving incredibly verbose answers...
Going back 29 years to the beginning of my career, I'd say maybe 50% of the graduates in my class, probably more, either were not cut out to be engineers or didn't really have any passion for it(or both).
I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?
I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.
I’m at the end of my career and got lucky to share your interests at the beginning of a specialist boom
in your place i’d focus on delivering big wins for end-users via multiple roles ; i personally believe the days of being a specialist in one type of stack (ex: “i’m a ui developer”) are over , in this next stage we’ll say “i build products for young people looking for educational opportunities “ ; ie you’ll beed to cut across use-cases and disciplines in a way that was atypical just a few years ago
Depends on whether you leverage that interest to motivate you to sharpen your skills so that you're better at your job than your peers. If you're interested but don't do anything with that interest, then you are still in the same boat as the uninterested people.
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.
honestly at this point putting out a software-coded job requisition is getting the interview cheaters full stop now.
our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something new, and our interview process is largely centered around getting to know them as a person what they're all about and we seem to do an okay job triangulating "this kid is curious, seems like they'd glue well with everyone here". mildly grill on some technical stuff but mostly just to get a read on where they're at & make assessments on what we're willing to teach. we actually don't do whiteboarding coding exercises or any of those challenges, not really a fan of those and i've never felt like they were a useful litmus test on whether or not someone will be successful in a role. people can hide a lot of insufficiencies/ego/insecurity/toxicity behind coding exercises, polished resumes and mastering interviews. it is of our opinion that the journey to expertise/excellence also involves having a good grasp on who you are as a person & who you want to be, and a solid moral compass you can navigate with. because there will be highs and there will be some very low lows, any journey to excellence sails these seas & we're very interested in people who can be open and honest about where they might be.
at this point we've reasoned out that the normal requisition is just going to get an influx of people who think they're charmers and can rehearse an interview and then pan out to be a nothingburger. we've had a couple of those in the past few years and it's annoying. we don't hire often do but when we do we're just interested in having someone around that we like and seems eager to learn, we've had great luck with this formula and this seems to pluck out people who get lost in a sea of incredible looking resumes, we give them a good learning track and goals and they seem to leapfrog past every goalpost we've put in front of them. as far as juniors go, we like hearing about other weird non-computer problems they've solved in life. when we find the right candidate we kind of just know when we talk with them, they universally are pretty open about their own shortcomings but just demonstrate some sort of very passionate need to build or solve things and find a community where their contributions are valued. we see the mission as needing to build them up as a person first and the nerdy stuff is the fun sidequest they can join us and chase dopamine with. we all enjoy teaching & watching people grow so it works out pretty well and we've transitioned a couple to senior positions in the past 4-5 years. people who, when we first interviewed them years ago, may have not had any business on paper being in this field. people we're proud to have watched pan out to be incredible resources, some of the heaviest hitters our org has seen, and if im being real at this point really great friends.
Would be interesting to see how this affects the service companies.
Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.
The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.
Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.
For the past couple months I've been "managing" Codex to do plenty of grunt work. Granted I'm not one to produce thousands of lines per month(systems engineer, mostly bug fixing and extending a large library which sits on top of proprietary HW), but I think my SOTA model use for the period is under $200. Getting a jr to do the work would have been more frustrating and cost 100x more. Sure, it would have been in society's interests to train a junior dev, I'm not arguing against external benefits to it. But damn, I am now convinced coding is going away as a skill and certainly in 5 years I will never deal with code directly ever again. Oh and I've learned, or relearned, a lot while working with LLMs. I am a better engineer now than I was a few months ago.
The timescale of this analysis is a big issue IMO- Covid hiring was all kinds of whacked out - with FANG companies competing to hire literally entire graduating cs classes.
> On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?
Doubtful.
You'll be expected to produce much more, you aren't likely to see raises commensurate with the increased productivity, and the AI tide is still rising and will likely eventually put downward pressure on your pay at an increasing rate.
Indeed. Things are looking very bleak for software engineering as a specialization. It's been clear for years that Capital has been desperate to crack the software development nut, so to speak. Starting about 15 years ago, the intensity of Capital to destroy software engineering as a lucrative discipline really began in earnest: bootcamps, special certificate programs, the "learn to code" movement, and now AI. For at least 20 years I've heard Capital banging on the door to invade and drive wages down and now they've finally won.
I think it depends on what kind of senior you are. Juniors are by their nature mostly order fillers. Seniors can be anywhere from more complex code order fillers to fairly well developed experts in business logic.
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers. They just don't identify that way, and more importantly it's not their job title, and job titles are what labor statistics count.
This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.
People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.
The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.
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 similar enough to what they have at that workplace, then the interview should feel like you're already working there for both you and them. Having absolutely no professional experience is going to automatically put you at a disadvantage. If you know of any startups, even if they're awful places to work, I'd much rather have a couple years of that on my resume than any internship.
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. That's the way it should be! That's genuine progress. They may not end up in a coding role, but they'd absolutely crush it as a project manager.
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers.
We've always had people developing, in many forms. Scientists of all kinds, usually with Python, finance people with Excel, etc.
I think that yes, they can go a lot farther now. So this will make the bottom of the software curve grow 10-100x.
Now, the real question for developers is: what does this do to the middle and top or the curve? In my experience that's where maintenance comes in and anyone who's not a trained software developer (and even many SDEs) break their necks. "Casuals" will build what their need, but even with AI guiding them, it's still spaghetti.
It's going to be interesting keeping an eye on this, for sure.
Yes, and to be fair, I'm not saying those people that used to be behind the wheel at the "bloodsucking SaaS companies" are out of luck, or necessarily had bad intentions either.
This is just the natural next step towards a more mature kind of consulting. The client needs help scaling up their project or deploying it to the rest of their business. This is massive opportunity for any entrepreneur since the client is coming much better prepared.
> In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different.
Turns out that as admitted, the opposite was true and was predictable. Such that, in late 2024 [0], I predicted that there would be more layoffs in 2025.
> In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight.
Of course they would. Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?
Surely that makes all of this even cheaper? False. Just ask Apple. [1] Or Boeing [2] [3] with their expensive offshoring and their trade secrets either leaked or the quality degraded.
And those drunk on token usage are now limiting it because it is expensive. Ask Meta, Tesla, Amazon and Microsoft why they are not "tokenmaxxing".
The article makes the false assumption that you can only get better at software engineering by a 1:1 interaction when someone better. It doesn't address that AI can take this role. It doesn't address that there doesn't have to be a job market for junior developers for more senior developers to be created. There are other ways like reading or creating your own software to become senior level.
Juniors can't become seniors without doing real work and using their brains to do it. There is no profession, trade, or skill that you can get good at without doing it.
I'm being told by the corporate leadership that the future of software is basically babysitting agents. "You won't write code anymore, everything will be done through agents. Your job is to direct and review." It is deeply, deeply depressing.
People don't have to be employed to do real work. Keep in mind even senior developers take time to ramp up at a job and learn the ropes of the position.
In my experience, I learned software engineering myself. I didn't get much mentorship or a lot of one-on-one attention. There was some interactions with my coworkers, but it was not as amazing as people think it was back then and I came with a lot of personal experience before my first job. The main skill of software is learning and figuring out things by yourself and proactively asking for help.
I'm about to get a junior engineer to work with at my Big Tech company. This used to be normal, it's now slightly extraordinary. I've not worked with a junior engineer in literally years. Even typing this, I think: this must be hyperbole, it's true though.
Wouldn't you be losing out on the fresh ideas and perspectives new entrants into this field brings ?
I had read "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley" a few months ago and most of the disruptions in the industry came from engineers who brought in fresh perspective or had the energy to try something different.
Even if juniors most of their ideas are exactly like you said, they would have more energy and almost no trauma from past experiences to experiment more.
While experience is important, it also creates blind spots as it's quite hard to have every experience about a particular topic unless you have been working on that tool/stack alone for decades.
Used to have an “academy” where we pick people up from first year in uni and get them to learn from zero.
Haven’t had one in ~3 years, no plan to.
Also half the company was downsized.
No hiring in 3 years, cutting tons of people and tons of people leaving, we’re now at a point where in the tech i work in, our most junior person is a senior with about 10 YoE
> Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs.
I'm just a hobbyist but I've gotten pretty good at using LLMs and evaluating and refining their outputs. Think there's still space in this industry or is it hopeless?
While you should always remain grounded and know what you don't know, don't ever self-select yourself out of things. (Some things require credentials, but notwithstanding that, there are entirely new jobs and opportunities being created constantly.)
While I would expect someone to know algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and have good taste and pragmatism for both eng design and office politics, that doesn't mean you can't learn those things. You absorb them the deeper you go and the more frequently you encounter them.
There are no real rules of the universe, and you're only here for an infinitesimally short time. As long as you're not hurting anyone, break the rules.
It’s a bad look these days IMO to say you have no real classical training but you picked up an LLM and now you think you know what you’re doing (for a job interview).
In the past, people without formal training had to learn things the hard way and projects were proof enough that they understood the fundamentals, but now there is no way to reasonably distinguish between such people and a heavy LLM augmented user. In our company we will likely place more importance now on full four year CS degrees as a signaling mechanism of candidate quality.
Glad we were never "juniors" either, nor would we ever hire them. Here is the reason:
We just layoff the expensive engineers and offshore all our work to very cheap remote staff engineers (at least 2 in Mumbai), give them the Claude chatbot to do the work of 20 engineers.
So now we have reduced our costs by 90%. No need for juniors at all.
Junior devs will need different skills. One will actually like being near a keyboard, and doing it as much for passion as profession/profit.
The people who are succeeding are learning and playing and building their own experience they can demonstrate.
There's few shortcuts if any that last. It comes out in the wash quicker.
On the senior end there remains a gap and advantage between understanding of human vs understanding of AI on how best to approach or work through things.
> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know.
Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist.
The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.
Those things stopped being full time jobs, but they only became more important to understand how they worked. Knowing more math makes you a better "living computer", but it also makes you a better programmer, in terms of code optimization for hardware constraints, and architect, because you have a better understanding of what is possible.
A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical sense) than a senior manager who's never looked at code, but perhaps not as good at choosing what to code in the first place.
> but they only became more important to understand how they worked
Agreed. At one point, for this reason, they introduced graphic calculators into the classroom, for example, circa 1990, the TI-81. It became more important to understand how they worked than spend the time to do the calculations.
A couple days ago, I wanted to understand how the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining model works so I spent 3 hours making data visualizations using Claude Code. [0] Look at the math notation which to me is very intimidating. Nevertheless, being able to visualize the values as animated cells in a grid synced with computation, I immediately grokked how the information was transformed into something that can be used to train a model from audio data -> image data -> 512 embedding.
Working through these problems in 3 hours using a coding agent will be analogous to working through calculous and linear algebra problems in 1990 with a graphing calculator. It is still 3 hours of wracking a brain.
1, "software engineer" or even "programmer" is not becoming a device is it?
2, those are devices that operate for specific purposes. This is a general purpose autocomplete, and therefore if you support his logic you should also say now with LLMs "writer stopped being a job title", "assistant stopped being a job title", "teacher stopped being a job title", "manager stopped being a job title", ......
3, result of their calculation is deterministic and only depends on their wiring, not original work of humans. Imagine if calculators started to degrade when humans completely stopped doing maths by hand;)
Lots of software engineers were just stack overflow copy pasters. No offense, it’s also a good way to learn, I’ve also done my fair share of stupid programming, but let’s not pretend the value to humankind was huge there
With AI LLM, the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people. And also more senior developers can spin up and manage dozens of juniors via agentic AI
> the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people
Why? they didn't know how to copy before or something?
> spin up and manage dozens of juniors
Let's not call it a "junior" if one trigger word deep in the filesystem can make it forget it's a programmer and start building Minecraft castles. Your comparison is unfair to anyone with even 1 week of programming experience.
I feel it has rather created an opportunity for a junior programmer to deliver 5x faster than before and it has lowered the barriers to be a decent junior developer. Perhaps in today's job market for junior devs what changed are the metrics against which they are judged for. It's not just knowing theory of coding, it's about speed at which you ship and most importantly quality. Ultimately, how good is such a developer to push code with agents. What do you think?
I see the opposite economic problem. Guys in their 50s with a house for 120K and a 2.0 mortgage and no kids in the house or graduated cost less than a young junior with a wife and kids and a house
Yep. I've worked with a couple of juniors that were acting as poorly working proxies for AI. If I have to review the output anyway, it is easier to eliminate the middleman.
I am not really seeing how the first chart can be construed as AI disrupting the junior job market...
The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.
Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.
The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.
I was just about to comment the same. It’s like a hammer in need of a nail. Here’s where ChatGPT released and jobs dovetails so it must be true.
It will also be interesting to see 2019 through 2021. There was a glut of hiring post COVID and companies have to think about every dollar they spend post ZIRP.
Junior level employees are always the worst off during a market downturn, and employers need to justify to shareholders why they are laying off or not hiring, because a shrinking business is worth less than a growing one, so they'll come up with an excuse why they don't actually need employees. Currently, that excuse is AI.
Indeed. Their single most important piece of evidence not providing any strong indication the decline is from LLMs does not bode well for their argument. If it were the case you would expect the slope to become more negative with increasing LLM capability, and it in fact does the opposite.
There are non technical people building and shipping software. That’s fine, but not all software is equal: the software you release and it’s behind an ecommerce platform (or a bank, or a hospital, or the train system) is not like the software behind your custom-made productivity app. I think for the former software we still need people with the title “software engineer”
And as systems become more complex with time, we will need more people with the title “software engineer”
That does make it sound like there are only 2 types of software. The “serious” and the “unserious”. There’s probably a few dozen types rather, it’s much less black and white. At a client we have non-technical people ship “serious” software based on their 20+ years of experience in their respective field that definitely doesn’t need the same approach as a banking or health care application, but it would also be an insult to group that with productivity apps. No juniors or coding knowledge needed; LLMs fill that gap.
I as a senior am still called in to consult and shoot down attempts to actually integrate it into the wider system without triggering a full technical review.
i suspect many licensed civil and other engineers may be looking at the currant situation as the moment when software people stop being able to just call themselves “engineers “ because they can type source code into an editor just like drawing a plausible bridge on paper doesn’t qualify you as being able to actually build one.
Very few mechanical engineers for example are licensed.
I'd like to see a larger date range. The Stanford dataset starts in 2021 (covid, work from home, low interest rates, govt stimulus), which is one of the weirdest economic times in the last 100 years. It would be useful to see how Jrs are doing compared to ~10 years ago.
This is one of the problems with a lot of the data in this area. So many different things were/are happening in the space. Gold rush because tech is profitable including bootcamps, AI and companies planning for AI in the future, interest rates/overhiring, etc. etc.
That said, I find a lot of anecdotal information from many people in the space that tech was flooded by a lot of junior programmers who were basically in it for the money with minimal training and they're having a hard time of it. The same thing happened to webdev during dotcom.
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 independently. It’s a very useful tool, but it’s just not there yet in my day-to-day.
Obviously, YMMV.
How will AIs train on new tech without new data to train on?
On the bright side, maybe that means the end of new javascript frameworks every 6 months :)
I think they’ll be writing that new tech, and will be able to read the source code, and reason from first principles. I doubt they will need human generated training data.
I thought training new models on AI generated output leads to model collapse?
I think it case of coding it may not be as bad, because new training data (AI generated code) is always empirically validated by tooling and by consumer. It may not be good but it mostly works, otherwise it is discarded or patched, so it has a bottom bar of "it works".
My point is more that they won’t need new training data to extrapolate to new problems, especially if that new problem is just a new syntax or API. Put the whole shebang into the context. Done. Yes, you need super long context for this, or just pretty good search over it, but I think this is likely to become a solved problem.
Agreed if its just a new API using a current language using common patterns, that is mostly just having a big context.
However, the ability to reason generally on novel problems is AGI and we aren't there yet. Eventually in the absence of AGI, we will have to train models on them, and that will require data.
If needed it can synthetically create the datasets. There isn't a need for software engineers to make a dataset when AI could even more easily put one together.
Do you understand reinforcement learning environments? This already a solved problem
just the other week I asked Fable 5 to diagnose the cause of some intermittent latency spikes on an API that queries an OpenSearch cluster at work. I encouraged it to look at the datadog metrics, splunk, the whole works. I let it loose to look at whatever it wanted.
End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its suggestions and deployed them to prod. Guess what? Didn’t fix the issue. Alas, a human was needed after all.
either everyone’s working on toy problems, or they’re working on very cookie-cutter code. I’m really not sure. I DO remain impressed with Fable 5 but the idea that we’ll all be unemployed in 2 years is hilarious delusion. we’re already at the point where many organizations are scaling back some of their AI spend.
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 basis from the available data?
And while we’re talking about hilarious delusions, perhaps you should look at the current capability curve of AI and weigh it against the constant stream of arguments for why it couldn’t have continued at every point and yet has.
i’m not an anti-AI believer. And our career is changing dramatically no doubt. i just think people overestimate short term gains and underestimate long term gains. (applicable to your comment)
In this case i had no empirics in the loop. The scenario was only reproducible under high api load. I could load test, but management isn’t eager to spend prod-like costs in staging (requires scaling opensearch a lot in stage). What can i say.
> 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?
Actually I believe these agentic models will teach you the value of software engineering faster. You can vibe entire code bases in days and learn more quickly.
In my experience with all agents, including Fable, is that they work great when there is automated validation. But as soon as it needs to design something, it just keeps adding so much slop.
That’s just the latest position that the goalposts have moved to. They haven’t stopped improving yet, I have no reason to think they’ll stop at the ideation phase. Or any of them, really.
I think it’s 24 to 36 until businesses really trust an autonomous developer. But I agree otherwise
Probably, might take even longer. That’s the “social inertia” part. I think it’s less trust and more status quo bias.
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 some good tooling and 6x the cost), but for a lambda Claude Code user, I can see why it looks that good.
Are you using it or are you just going off benchmarks?
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 will work. And internal improvements in the model architecture. And there's scaling in reasoning time.
wow an actual ai-pilled comment on here for once, I agree with your sentiment. People opining about "rebuilding the ladder" have no idea whats coming for the software industry, and the general populous of white collar work.
"Models can code well now but they cant do high level architecture" is just a logical fallacy. Its literally only true in this particular moment in time. But if they can code well, whose to say they wont architect well? And at that point, what do SWEs do? If anything, SWEs are in the critical path of automation for these AI labs anyway, so theres a very strong incentive to automate us out vs other professions, and it'll happen soon. All these random 1-off datapoints of "Fable 5 can't do X very idiosyncratic thing" are completely missing the point. 6 months ago, even attempting that problem with any "tool" would be totally intractable, and now it _just_ writes a slightly subpar solution. You can do some basic extrapolation here, its not that complicated.
Your best bet is to just chose a different career, or, if you still want to be in the software industry, be more enterprising.
In silicon valley, apartment rents are up 20% relative to one year ago. People are getting hired, clearly. Not sure who.
Or people who were remote got called back to the office. Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. An increase in the net number of jobs is not the only possible explanation. The jobs might just be changing their geographic requirements.
Anecdotally, I know one couple who is selling their house to move back to a tech hub for better job opportunities. Another couple working from a rural location recently had one partner lose their big tech job. If the laid-off partner doesn’t get a new job in the next few months, I expect that they will start talking about moving, too.
> Or people who were remote got called back to the office.
That's not the explanation according to this article [1].
> Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one.
It is hard to afford Bay Area rents -- even if you have a job. I can't see someone looking for a job signing a 1-year lease at these rates. Also, unlike the old days, interviews are remote, being physically present in the Bay Area doesn't give you an advantage.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-stab...
It’s not hard to afford Bay Area rent if one partner is still employed in tech, especially if they are older and have savings or home equity to cash in on.
The article you linked to seems to say only that employers have been unsuccessful at enforcing 100% in-office work. It does not say that people have been successful at keeping their 100% remote jobs in other states and far-off locations.
Overall, we seem to be reaching a compromise where many are forced to live within commuting distance of their office but aren’t necessarily there every day. This compromise is what is pushing up rents from what I am seeing among my network.
In other words, “remote” and “hybrid” are not at all the same but you are using the terms interchangeably. You can’t live in Idaho and commute to SF three days a week without major inconvenience and expense.
Maybe you aren’t aware, but house prices skyrocketed in many locations (like Idaho and Florida) during the pandemic because of an exodus of Californians who were told that they could keep their high-paying jobs and live almost anywhere. The tide has reversed now.
As for interviews, I have read multiple Hacker News comments from people saying that their solution to rampant AI cheating has been to make interviews in-person again. So I’m not convinced that you’re right about that either…
Startups need more than just junior software developers, and AI opened many new opportunities for startups.
What kinds of people are they hiring? 1 BR that used to be $2750 last year is now $3400, clearly they are getting paid a lot.
No idea. I'm not from the US.
I don't get why people care about "the death of junior SWEs" and "its a big issue if there are no junior programmers to be the senior SWEs of tomorrow"
Just look at the writing on the wall, there will be no need for senior SWEs of any type within 1-2 years anyway, and shortly after that we won't need Staff SWEs, etc. People here are way too myopic. AI is progressing very fast. We went from hiring juniors in droves 3-4 years ago to basically proclaiming the death of junior SWEs. Who is to say this won't continue up the ladder?
AI will be good enough to replace all SWEs in any capacity - there is no point in "investing" in rebuilding this ladder when you can just invest in more GPUs (in the case of oai/ant/meta/google/etc). or just pay those aforementioned companies more in tokens if you are a smaller outfit. The cost effectiveness of those tokens will only get better over time, until they are competitive in cost : intelligence when compared to any human SWE.
Nah, TFA states it very well:
> The jobs disappearing are the ones where the work product is code written to spec. The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.
AI is happy to follow instructions, no matter how stupid, unoptimal or unnecessary those are. To be successful, you need someone to understand the details and make the decisions.
And while that "someone" could be a person that does not go in the details and doesn't understand the code, they would be equivalent of non-technical CEO - sure, those exist, but they have a much harder time creating successful products.
> The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.
And how many people do you need for this? There are many roles where people are literally hired for their programming/engineering skill. Modern LLMs _largely_ commoditize that skillset.
There are not that many novel things to do, and even if there are, you don't need too many people to do them as LLMs give you more and more leverage over execution details.
> There are not that many novel things to do,
I am currently work on embedded / low-level / devtools and there are tons of novel things to do. Perhaps the "programming" skills are not needed as much, but demand for "engineering" is as high as ever.
Maybe it's the case in web dev? TFA shows that the number of "web developers" is decreasing strongly.
I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers. Our company was senior-heavy and we're just now diversifying.
80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.
To be fair junior developers almost universally kinda suck and you have to teach them the job. They'll take 10x the time to do a job a senior would, and do it in a way that is much more complicated than it needs to be.
The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
I think this is the thing. Companies have always been forced rather against their immediate interests into the cost of hiring junior engineers. As soon as the idea gained traction that this cost was unnecessary, companies stopped. So: we had the post-COVID tech slump, and then immediately after, by horrible coincidence for prospective junior engineers, LLMs turned out to be good at coding. Result: a missing generation of engineers, and a giant headache in about 15 years time. But which tech exec could possibly care about what happens in 15 years?
testing is the new coding
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” software development is an internship or an entry-level role, assisted with a lot of self-directed learning that hopefully university made possible for you.
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.
This is the well known weird thing about programming, right? University students learn CS, happen to also pick up some programming trade skills as a side effect, and then get hired as software craftspeople. The coincidentally learned skills are never quite up to date, just close enough.
But nobody wants to set up programming trade schools or apprenticeships so shrug.
Programming trade schools were (are they still?) quite popular for a long time - see lambda school et al.
They weren’t a panacea either.
I have to imagine those are the people being hit hardest at the moment.
> 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", "coding bootcamps" and god knows what else.
Universities should be a place for the gifted to advance science, not be degree mills for large companies too goddamn lazy and penny-pinching!
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.
[dead]
> 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.
> is good and only cares about money
I do the job for money. Period.
I also happen to really enjoy computers, systems, etc. I enjoyed most of the jobs I've had, but the reason why I was there doing the job, as opposed to being at home nerding out for my benefit alone, was always the need to pay bills.
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 free or without anyone supervising them.
The question is whether the younger generation has grown up with the motto “money first and at any cost”… Not everyone, of course, but when I see how everything everywhere is reduced just to monetary value, it makes me feel a little down sometimes.
That might be true, but I never met a ME/EE major who wasn’t passionate about their craft. Not once.
Anecdotal in my experience, but that also used to be the case for most CS majors back when I graduated... but that was well before the rise of the FAANGs.
If people are unable to find joy in their paid work even after some time, they should consider doing something else.
For sure, sufficient money is important part of this equation.
But I strongly believe that if you find (your sort of) fun in what you do then you become faster and more efficient at it.
Edit: Cleaning, nursing etc. Yes there are professions that almost no one wants to do. But that doesn’t mean that these people do it just for money.. this is prejudice that if you don’t like it and don’t have fun that other people are the same. No, they aren’t.
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.)
> they're clearly in it just for the money
It's a job, working for someone else. What other reason is there?
Some people have a passion for their craft and use that to generate money. There is a difference between people who just are there for the money and people that are there for the money and the implementing their craft.
Such a large part of the job is dumb meetings, politics and trying to work around bad governance. The only reason to put up with all that is money, because one needs to pay the bills.
Remove the need to pay bills and you'll be left with no one applying for a crappy job making money for someone else.
Implementing the craft has nothing to do with putting up with employment and employers, workplace harassment, waking up at unhealthy hours, wasting most of one's time awake doing things for someone else...
i don’t condone cheating but i also don’t blame anyone who follows a generally benign career path for its financial benefits.
I wouldn't blame them either, but I sure as hell wouldn't hire them.
Why? If they do good work and meet or exceed expectations, who cares why they're doing it?
The problem is they do good enogub work or don't care about the quality when they should push back.
Or they will refuse to self invest, which makes them a worse long term investment for a company.
> The problem is they do good enogub work or don't care about the quality when they should push back.
With that sort of carelessness in the quality of your sentence, I probably would not hire you.
Seniors and above lead by example.
Are you implying something about my spelling on a phone in my free time transfers to my work performance? Silly if so
I’ve seen passionate artisans waste way more time than focused, disciplined, mercenaries; i think it’s a situational choice
That’s every profession. I interviewed someone once that claimed Linux skills on his resume. I asked a couple basic questions and his response was, “well I don’t know that but my dad does”.
Great, when is he applying?
I got a degree in mechanical engineering. There's these two technicians under me that for years I thought we just hired off the street and maybe they graduated high school. I have to show them how to use terminal. I have to show them how to fix a Python script.
Imagine my horror when I found out recently both of them have a computer science bachelor's degree from a UC Santa Cruz.
I've been programming for 25 years now because I really like it. But if it didn't pay, I'd do something else, because I really like not being poor even more.
I have no doubt any junior, no matter their background or degree, will break into tech fine like all of us did if they are in for the reasons we got in - being nerds and fascinated by software. You can't fake that.
I do think that's part of it. A lot of people jumped into the roles when they saw it as an alternative to other types of STEM or, heck, any work and was likely to pay a lot more money.
> They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
I'm curious what they do to cheat during interview?
They simply ask Claude or ChatGPT. I've had a few interviews with individuals who were definitely cheating. Strange pauses. Obviously typing and then reading from the screen, giving incredibly verbose answers...
Going back 29 years to the beginning of my career, I'd say maybe 50% of the graduates in my class, probably more, either were not cut out to be engineers or didn't really have any passion for it(or both).
I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?
I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.
Alright, I’m at the start of my career but do have a genuine burning interest in programming. Am I fucked or not?
I’m at the end of my career and got lucky to share your interests at the beginning of a specialist boom
in your place i’d focus on delivering big wins for end-users via multiple roles ; i personally believe the days of being a specialist in one type of stack (ex: “i’m a ui developer”) are over , in this next stage we’ll say “i build products for young people looking for educational opportunities “ ; ie you’ll beed to cut across use-cases and disciplines in a way that was atypical just a few years ago
Depends on whether you leverage that interest to motivate you to sharpen your skills so that you're better at your job than your peers. If you're interested but don't do anything with that interest, then you are still in the same boat as the uninterested people.
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 glaringly cheat during interviews
How so? I am curious what cheating you are experiencing and how you detect it.
Exactly my thought. It's the same psychopathic cohort when quant finance was hot. Graduate to a 500k job? Too hard to refuse.
honestly at this point putting out a software-coded job requisition is getting the interview cheaters full stop now.
our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something new, and our interview process is largely centered around getting to know them as a person what they're all about and we seem to do an okay job triangulating "this kid is curious, seems like they'd glue well with everyone here". mildly grill on some technical stuff but mostly just to get a read on where they're at & make assessments on what we're willing to teach. we actually don't do whiteboarding coding exercises or any of those challenges, not really a fan of those and i've never felt like they were a useful litmus test on whether or not someone will be successful in a role. people can hide a lot of insufficiencies/ego/insecurity/toxicity behind coding exercises, polished resumes and mastering interviews. it is of our opinion that the journey to expertise/excellence also involves having a good grasp on who you are as a person & who you want to be, and a solid moral compass you can navigate with. because there will be highs and there will be some very low lows, any journey to excellence sails these seas & we're very interested in people who can be open and honest about where they might be.
at this point we've reasoned out that the normal requisition is just going to get an influx of people who think they're charmers and can rehearse an interview and then pan out to be a nothingburger. we've had a couple of those in the past few years and it's annoying. we don't hire often do but when we do we're just interested in having someone around that we like and seems eager to learn, we've had great luck with this formula and this seems to pluck out people who get lost in a sea of incredible looking resumes, we give them a good learning track and goals and they seem to leapfrog past every goalpost we've put in front of them. as far as juniors go, we like hearing about other weird non-computer problems they've solved in life. when we find the right candidate we kind of just know when we talk with them, they universally are pretty open about their own shortcomings but just demonstrate some sort of very passionate need to build or solve things and find a community where their contributions are valued. we see the mission as needing to build them up as a person first and the nerdy stuff is the fun sidequest they can join us and chase dopamine with. we all enjoy teaching & watching people grow so it works out pretty well and we've transitioned a couple to senior positions in the past 4-5 years. people who, when we first interviewed them years ago, may have not had any business on paper being in this field. people we're proud to have watched pan out to be incredible resources, some of the heaviest hitters our org has seen, and if im being real at this point really great friends.
Would be interesting to see how this affects the service companies.
Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.
The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.
Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.
For the past couple months I've been "managing" Codex to do plenty of grunt work. Granted I'm not one to produce thousands of lines per month(systems engineer, mostly bug fixing and extending a large library which sits on top of proprietary HW), but I think my SOTA model use for the period is under $200. Getting a jr to do the work would have been more frustrating and cost 100x more. Sure, it would have been in society's interests to train a junior dev, I'm not arguing against external benefits to it. But damn, I am now convinced coding is going away as a skill and certainly in 5 years I will never deal with code directly ever again. Oh and I've learned, or relearned, a lot while working with LLMs. I am a better engineer now than I was a few months ago.
The timescale of this analysis is a big issue IMO- Covid hiring was all kinds of whacked out - with FANG companies competing to hire literally entire graduating cs classes.
On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?
> On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?
Doubtful.
You'll be expected to produce much more, you aren't likely to see raises commensurate with the increased productivity, and the AI tide is still rising and will likely eventually put downward pressure on your pay at an increasing rate.
Indeed. Things are looking very bleak for software engineering as a specialization. It's been clear for years that Capital has been desperate to crack the software development nut, so to speak. Starting about 15 years ago, the intensity of Capital to destroy software engineering as a lucrative discipline really began in earnest: bootcamps, special certificate programs, the "learn to code" movement, and now AI. For at least 20 years I've heard Capital banging on the door to invade and drive wages down and now they've finally won.
Unless AI capabilities keep increasing and AI starts usurping more senior roles.
I think it depends on what kind of senior you are. Juniors are by their nature mostly order fillers. Seniors can be anywhere from more complex code order fillers to fairly well developed experts in business logic.
No, because ageism.
can't have both can we?
wanter: 20years of experince with 1-year old github repo
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> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers. They just don't identify that way, and more importantly it's not their job title, and job titles are what labor statistics count.
This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.
People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.
The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.
> If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny.
I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired?
By "project" do you mean "product"?
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 similar enough to what they have at that workplace, then the interview should feel like you're already working there for both you and them. Having absolutely no professional experience is going to automatically put you at a disadvantage. If you know of any startups, even if they're awful places to work, I'd much rather have a couple years of that on my resume than any internship.
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. That's the way it should be! That's genuine progress. They may not end up in a coding role, but they'd absolutely crush it as a project manager.
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers.
We've always had people developing, in many forms. Scientists of all kinds, usually with Python, finance people with Excel, etc.
I think that yes, they can go a lot farther now. So this will make the bottom of the software curve grow 10-100x.
Now, the real question for developers is: what does this do to the middle and top or the curve? In my experience that's where maintenance comes in and anyone who's not a trained software developer (and even many SDEs) break their necks. "Casuals" will build what their need, but even with AI guiding them, it's still spaghetti.
It's going to be interesting keeping an eye on this, for sure.
Yes, and to be fair, I'm not saying those people that used to be behind the wheel at the "bloodsucking SaaS companies" are out of luck, or necessarily had bad intentions either.
This is just the natural next step towards a more mature kind of consulting. The client needs help scaling up their project or deploying it to the rest of their business. This is massive opportunity for any entrepreneur since the client is coming much better prepared.
> In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different.
Turns out that as admitted, the opposite was true and was predictable. Such that, in late 2024 [0], I predicted that there would be more layoffs in 2025.
> In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight.
Of course they would. Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?
Surely that makes all of this even cheaper? False. Just ask Apple. [1] Or Boeing [2] [3] with their expensive offshoring and their trade secrets either leaked or the quality degraded.
And those drunk on token usage are now limiting it because it is expensive. Ask Meta, Tesla, Amazon and Microsoft why they are not "tokenmaxxing".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/06/12/boeing-...
[3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513787/boeing-and-the...
The article makes the false assumption that you can only get better at software engineering by a 1:1 interaction when someone better. It doesn't address that AI can take this role. It doesn't address that there doesn't have to be a job market for junior developers for more senior developers to be created. There are other ways like reading or creating your own software to become senior level.
Juniors can't become seniors without doing real work and using their brains to do it. There is no profession, trade, or skill that you can get good at without doing it.
I'm being told by the corporate leadership that the future of software is basically babysitting agents. "You won't write code anymore, everything will be done through agents. Your job is to direct and review." It is deeply, deeply depressing.
People don't have to be employed to do real work. Keep in mind even senior developers take time to ramp up at a job and learn the ropes of the position.
In my experience, I learned software engineering myself. I didn't get much mentorship or a lot of one-on-one attention. There was some interactions with my coworkers, but it was not as amazing as people think it was back then and I came with a lot of personal experience before my first job. The main skill of software is learning and figuring out things by yourself and proactively asking for help.
Anecdotally we haven’t hired junior engineers in over a year and do not plan to.
I'm about to get a junior engineer to work with at my Big Tech company. This used to be normal, it's now slightly extraordinary. I've not worked with a junior engineer in literally years. Even typing this, I think: this must be hyperbole, it's true though.
Us either, at least any team I work with (reasonably large public software company worth several hundred billion dollars)
Anecdotally I hired a junior and it was a net loss
Wouldn't you be losing out on the fresh ideas and perspectives new entrants into this field brings ? I had read "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley" a few months ago and most of the disruptions in the industry came from engineers who brought in fresh perspective or had the energy to try something different.
I’m gonna be blunt: most of their ideas will probably be stuff they read off an LLM anyway and just reworded.
All our good ideas come from senior level people drawing from a rich history of experience and bold vision.
Even if juniors most of their ideas are exactly like you said, they would have more energy and almost no trauma from past experiences to experiment more.
While experience is important, it also creates blind spots as it's quite hard to have every experience about a particular topic unless you have been working on that tool/stack alone for decades.
Same. I don't think it will happen for as long as my company exists.
Same here.
+1
Used to have an “academy” where we pick people up from first year in uni and get them to learn from zero.
Haven’t had one in ~3 years, no plan to.
Also half the company was downsized.
No hiring in 3 years, cutting tons of people and tons of people leaving, we’re now at a point where in the tech i work in, our most junior person is a senior with about 10 YoE
Here we are, and it's big tech. Had quite a few interviews scheduled over the last few weeks, literally more than in the last 2 years.
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Stop the moral grandstanding. This is a legitimate observation.
We're also not hiring juniors. Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs.
> Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs.
I'm just a hobbyist but I've gotten pretty good at using LLMs and evaluating and refining their outputs. Think there's still space in this industry or is it hopeless?
While you should always remain grounded and know what you don't know, don't ever self-select yourself out of things. (Some things require credentials, but notwithstanding that, there are entirely new jobs and opportunities being created constantly.)
While I would expect someone to know algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, and have good taste and pragmatism for both eng design and office politics, that doesn't mean you can't learn those things. You absorb them the deeper you go and the more frequently you encounter them.
There are no real rules of the universe, and you're only here for an infinitesimally short time. As long as you're not hurting anyone, break the rules.
It’s a bad look these days IMO to say you have no real classical training but you picked up an LLM and now you think you know what you’re doing (for a job interview).
In the past, people without formal training had to learn things the hard way and projects were proof enough that they understood the fundamentals, but now there is no way to reasonably distinguish between such people and a heavy LLM augmented user. In our company we will likely place more importance now on full four year CS degrees as a signaling mechanism of candidate quality.
Keep it a hobby and build stuff you like.
Glad we were never "juniors" either, nor would we ever hire them. Here is the reason:
We just layoff the expensive engineers and offshore all our work to very cheap remote staff engineers (at least 2 in Mumbai), give them the Claude chatbot to do the work of 20 engineers.
So now we have reduced our costs by 90%. No need for juniors at all.
What's with these attitudes?
The world is changing rapidly. There's a very large chance you and nobody else here will have a software job.
You are not going far enough given that the world is changing faster than you can hire seniors.
So why wait? Why not go further by spinning up hundreds of Claude agents without the need to hire any engineers? You just manage them.
Or even at least offshore that job to a very cheap staff engineer with more cost savings?
Junior devs will need different skills. One will actually like being near a keyboard, and doing it as much for passion as profession/profit.
The people who are succeeding are learning and playing and building their own experience they can demonstrate.
There's few shortcuts if any that last. It comes out in the wash quicker.
On the senior end there remains a gap and advantage between understanding of human vs understanding of AI on how best to approach or work through things.
> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know.
Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist.
The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.
> the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know
The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to reason about what is happening.
Those things stopped being full time jobs, but they only became more important to understand how they worked. Knowing more math makes you a better "living computer", but it also makes you a better programmer, in terms of code optimization for hardware constraints, and architect, because you have a better understanding of what is possible.
A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical sense) than a senior manager who's never looked at code, but perhaps not as good at choosing what to code in the first place.
> but they only became more important to understand how they worked
Agreed. At one point, for this reason, they introduced graphic calculators into the classroom, for example, circa 1990, the TI-81. It became more important to understand how they worked than spend the time to do the calculations.
A couple days ago, I wanted to understand how the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining model works so I spent 3 hours making data visualizations using Claude Code. [0] Look at the math notation which to me is very intimidating. Nevertheless, being able to visualize the values as animated cells in a grid synced with computation, I immediately grokked how the information was transformed into something that can be used to train a model from audio data -> image data -> 512 embedding.
Working through these problems in 3 hours using a coding agent will be analogous to working through calculous and linear algebra problems in 1990 with a graphing calculator. It is still 3 hours of wracking a brain.
[0] https://adamsohn.com/clap/
I don't see it.
1, "software engineer" or even "programmer" is not becoming a device is it?
2, those are devices that operate for specific purposes. This is a general purpose autocomplete, and therefore if you support his logic you should also say now with LLMs "writer stopped being a job title", "assistant stopped being a job title", "teacher stopped being a job title", "manager stopped being a job title", ......
3, result of their calculation is deterministic and only depends on their wiring, not original work of humans. Imagine if calculators started to degrade when humans completely stopped doing maths by hand;)
Lots of software engineers were just stack overflow copy pasters. No offense, it’s also a good way to learn, I’ve also done my fair share of stupid programming, but let’s not pretend the value to humankind was huge there
Sure, now when they are LLM copy-pasters things are going to suddenly improve
With AI LLM, the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people. And also more senior developers can spin up and manage dozens of juniors via agentic AI
Juniors now need to be more skilled than before
> the power of smart copy pasting is now also in the hands of non-geeky people
Why? they didn't know how to copy before or something?
> spin up and manage dozens of juniors
Let's not call it a "junior" if one trigger word deep in the filesystem can make it forget it's a programmer and start building Minecraft castles. Your comparison is unfair to anyone with even 1 week of programming experience.
Lots of people are now writing much worse code with AI. I'm not sure what you're saying other than "experience is valuable".
If it's prototypes or throwaway scripts, then it's fine and it's still valuable experience
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Did you write these 2 sentences with AI too?
Nah I've actually gotten really good at sounding like an AI to bait lol
> It's not replacement, it's democratization.
At this point every statement that contains "democratization", coming from a tech person, is almost guaranteed to reduce our rights in the long run.
This reads like an ad for Anthropic, written by Claude itself.
I've just learned to impress VCs what can I say
You might be the ultimate hackernews
Damn it, all the AI hype bros have dulled my sarcasm detector. Well played.
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I suspect that the last white collar workers have been trained outside of regulated fields.
If it can be taught, an AI can do it. The only work left is either manual or inherently new.
Ai can't even take a McDonald's order as well as a low paid human yet
> If it can be taught, an AI can do it.
Absolutely not the case now. Maybe it will be in future, but that's basically impossible to predict.
you sound like a CEO.
Not at all. I’m a run of the mill dev who would like to stay ahead of the AI wave.
How are you staying ahead?
By what he's saying he clearly isn't.
He's still on the idealistic believer stage of the hype cycle, when the world has moved on to the disillusionment stage of the rollercoaster.
I feel it has rather created an opportunity for a junior programmer to deliver 5x faster than before and it has lowered the barriers to be a decent junior developer. Perhaps in today's job market for junior devs what changed are the metrics against which they are judged for. It's not just knowing theory of coding, it's about speed at which you ship and most importantly quality. Ultimately, how good is such a developer to push code with agents. What do you think?
I see the opposite economic problem. Guys in their 50s with a house for 120K and a 2.0 mortgage and no kids in the house or graduated cost less than a young junior with a wife and kids and a house
100% would echo that - but I'd say it's a wide problem across job markets not just for junior programmers
The problem is that someone has to oversee the junior and the multiplier on productivity also applies to the overseer.
So you could have the senior oversee the junior or just have them oversee Claude.
Yep. I've worked with a couple of juniors that were acting as poorly working proxies for AI. If I have to review the output anyway, it is easier to eliminate the middleman.
Difficult truth, but that’s the truth we need to accept