> I also feel like this generation of senior/staff SWEs (the senior pre-AI engineer) is in a very unique position for the following reason Yeah, it'll be inter

> I also feel like this generation of senior/staff SWEs (the senior pre-AI engineer) is in a very unique position for the following reason Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that changes things. I think even pre-AI there's already a big difference in old-school programmers and the current generations of graduates. People like myself who grew up programming in the 8-bit era are used to having to design things from scratch, out of necessity, whether that's custom algorithms or data structures, or something like a parser or editor, or whatever. It seems that current generations are more used to assembling things out of lego blocks - more system integration than what I would consider as programming. I guess this is fine when it works - when you can find the pieces you need, but if that's the only skill you have then there is nothing to fall back on if you need to create something complex truly from scratch.