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How AI is upending the software development industry
- baal80spam 1y agodupe?
- grunder_advice 1y agoIf nobody hires juniors, then where are the seniors supposed to come from?
- bl0rg 1y agoIn a few years, will we need seniors?
- j45 1y agoIt's not that good, and almost always more complex than the essence a senior person will boil thing down to.
- dietr1ch 1y agoThere's an old and famous quote around computers not having morals, and thus computers requiring people on top of them that can steward systems and be hold accountable. Besides morals, you'll always need people in the interface between the computers and the world. Maybe they won't write too much code, but they'll need to specify and verify behaviours anyway.
- jay_kyburz 1y agowishful thinking. Governments around the world are relying on algorithms to decide who can have welfare or who is cheating on taxes. With the rise of AI it will only get worse.
- jraph 1y agoThese algorithms were designed and verified by humans.
- shinycode 1y agoNon deterministic software will never produce 100% of the time perfect results. So we will need humans with knowledge to verify up to when an other technology will be able to build enough trust to avoid human reviews. With 2000 line very precise prompts, Claude code finishes saying the code is ready for production and there is still anomalies and bugs that it should have catched but didn’t. Good luck trusting 100% of your business on such technologies.
- j45 1y agoThere needs to be new kinds of juniors, with driving/thinking skills included. Not sure if there is a single silver bullet to solve this, but one thing is all juniors could start building things only for fun and solving small problems they understand (ala YC advice), and once solved, allow room to build it better each time.
- GMoromisato 1y agoIt will be like med school. Juniors will pay to get trained (or get scholarships, etc.)
- joshdavham 1y agoWeren’t they already doing this? College/bootcamps is precisely that: paying to get trained.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoIt’s not about skills, it’s about the formality of having X years of professional experience. College and boot camps won’t get you anywhere.
- michaelnovati 1y agoApprenticeships with government incentive are better examples
- joshdavham 1y agoExactly. It actually doesn’t make sense when you think about it - the idea that entry level roles will be cleanly eliminated. Certainly there could be a period with drastically fewer entry level roles, but that logically can not remain the case.
- RivieraKid 1y agoBy the time this becomes a problem, seniors won't be needed either.
- tonfa 1y agoThat seems to be the sentiment from decision makers from what I've seen.
- general1726 1y agoAnd that's going to be before or after customers will be able to exactly specify what they want and will be able to tell you where the error is including stack trace and set of steps which they did before the crash, not just "it is not working"
- xena 1y agoThis is something I've thought about a lot. Have a few thousand words that may resonate with you: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/rolling-ladder-behind-us/
- dang 1y agoA couple hundred comments on those few thousand words: Rolling the ladder up behind us - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328894 - June 2025 (201 comments)
- jiggawatts 1y agoJunior developers are the equivalent of the draftsmen that used to work under architects. Just like how CAD has almost entirely eliminated that line of work, the same thing will happen in software development. Only the “architects” will remain. There is an implicit assumption made by the people concerned about junior devs disappearing that that’s where senior developers come from. The reality is that almost junior developers never gain significantly better skill, no matter how their age or title. I regularly work with people with decades of “experience” that still have no idea how to use a database engine. A real senior developer could write their own database engine from scratch. That’s the difference!
- oceansky 1y agoHow would you verify if a candidate know how to use a database engine? This can actually have a lot of depth
- jiggawatts 1y agoI simply ask the candidate what a B-Tree is and how a database engine would use one. If they don’t know that, then the database engine internals will forever remain a mysterious black box to them. Explaining each of the four letters in ACID is the follow-up question if they pass. These are the equivalent of “why do we put steel rebar into concrete?” If you can’t answer these questions immediately upon graduating then you cannot ever be responsible for anything. You can only be entrusted to copy or “fill in the blanks” where an anctual engineer worked out the design.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y agoI think this can be a bit unfair too. I learned to use database engines because I did a lot of solo work. Also learned a teeny tiny bit in school. But I never touch a DB directly anymore even though I'm a "backend" SWE. How is one to gain such experience in a huge company that pigeon holes folks into such specific roles? I mean I guess they can choose to jump teams or jobs every couple years to gain some breadth, but it seems cruel to force people to hop around to move up the ladder. (Even though I admit this is still the fastest way, but for different reasons!)
- jonas21 1y agoIt's likely that the skills you'd learn as an entry-level engineer today will be mostly irrelevant to being a senior 10 years from now -- just as knowing how to write a program on punch cards is irrelevant to today's engineers. Seniors will have to come from somewhere, but it wouldn't be through this pipeline, even if companies were still hiring at full rate for entry-level work. For some just getting into the field, this could be a great opportunity -- if you can figure out where the puck is heading, you can skate directly there.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoCouldn't disagree more. Learning the basic building blocks of programming (which is stuff that LLMs can do at a high level when dealing with small, self-contained problems) is critical because understanding the low-level details is so important when you're applying systems-level thinking. I've interviewed more that a few "software architects" who couldn't put together a for loop, and these folks were largely just BS artists and PowerPoint generators.
- rediscovery 1y agoThe only skill set that exists in knowledge work is formal logic. But yeah I'm sure increasing energy input into symbolic systems will not increase their entropy and thus the demand for workers capable of formal logic to keep it in check. Because dumping representations of formal logic on a exponentially increasing repository of compressed data will surely start giving out output with higher informational content than the input. Any time now. Just double the size of the model a few more times and we will start getting lower entropy outcomes for free.
- LtWorf 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioi7DPTHG6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioi7DPTHG6A
- michaelnovati 1y agoMIT & Stanford
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoAI is an entropy engine for everything it touches. It sucks out all the momentum for short term gain. Long term it brings decay. The foundations of entire industries aren't going to be renewed in order to realize short term savings. And once the savings are baked in, the expectation of them makes it nearly impossible to restore the lost investment.
- fjd 1y agohttp://archive.today/JSQ5y http://archive.today/JSQ5y
- crinkly 1y agoMaking loads of money cleaning up shit already here.
- biglost 1y agoIt's my current job, a shit job at least for me
- baxtr 1y ago> Coding bootcamps have been a mainstay in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Now, as AI eliminates the kind of entry-level roles for which they trained people, they’re disappearing. OK, so I think there is a fair chance it will play out like this: the younger generation won't study CS anymore / learn how to code. Instead, they'll all vibe code. This will lead to a massive increase in demand for seniors to clean up the vibe code, which isn't working properly or needs maintenance. This demand increase will be exacerbated by the fact that there will be no new seniors since no one learned how to code... Fun times ahead.
- joshdavham 1y ago> Fun times ahead. Assuming you find cleaning up vibe (legacy) code fun haha
- jay_kyburz 1y agoI think there will be a lot of people just throwing out the codebase and vibe coding it again from scratch.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoThe all-too-typical arc of things like this: Before a big shift: “What could possibly go wrong?” After a big shift and facing unintended consequences: “How were we supposed to know?”
- noosphr 1y agoGoogle and friends hugely over hired during the pandemic and people are extrapolating that a medium term culling is the new normal. Same after the dot com crash and outsourcing. Give it 5 years and hiring will be back to normal. Give it 10 and salaries will be even more stratospheric because the pipeline is bone dry now.
- bbqfog 1y agoPeople were saying this about coding bootcamps just a little while ago! "All of these bootcamp coders don't really know what they're doing and us seniors will have to clean up after them". Same with outsourcing before that. Most people (seniors included) suck at coding. AI is already better than all but the the very best. It will continue to improve.
- bgwalter 1y agoCoding bootcamps were always a scam. The conclusions this article draws are insane, but probably what the industry wants to hear.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoIt’s amusing to me to see the top SV companies falling back to the status symbols of yesteryear for juniors: prestige of your alma mater. Feels like an admission that they have no real way to vet candidates otherwise.
- stego-tech 1y agoCompanies want familiarity (repeatable processes) and “objectivity” (credentials). I always knew their spiel about “disrupting higher education” with bootcamps and free courses was just empty platitudes, and that once the party ended those who placed their faith in those schemes would be promptly abandoned in favor of the traditional Ivy League set.
- oceansky 1y agoAt no point bootcamp devs were as favored as ivy league students. The idea is likely flooding the market with devs, lowering software development costs and increasing software in the market increasing cloud usage.
- stego-tech 1y agoOh, I’m well aware of who favored bootcamp devs and cert collectors: MSPs and outsourcing firms. If I were to put on my tinfoil hat though, I agree with your theory. These people often (in my personal experience) don’t know how to do anything not covered explicitly in the learning or testing material, leading to outsized dependencies on subscription or vendor portfolio products in lieu of independent or collaborative problem solving.
- mikert89 1y agoalot of the success of FAANG is they stopped using this as a primary vetting method, and used leetcode to just filter on raw memorization/problem solving. filtered out so many bad candidates from prestigious schools
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
- mberning 1y agoThe only thing it’s upending is sane engineering practices in my experience. I just reviewed a python flask app which was basically “vibe coded” by a couple people speed running a checklist of features. I open up the auth.py file to find it is integrated with an idp using oauth. Whether the caller has the correct scopes is never checked. I grab client credentials for a completely unrelated app. Hit /admin using my bearer token. Sure enough anybody with a valid set of client credentials could have had full admin access to this app for a year. But hey, at least when I asked how they tested the app they were quickly able to generate thousands of lines of pytest.
- victor9000 1y agoWe're entering the age of toddlers on motorcycles when it comes to software engineering.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y agoI logged into my CTOs account with an empty string once. This was before vibe coding.
- rossant 1y agoVibe coding may make an existing problem even worse.
- stego-tech 1y agoIt’s cyclical. Always has been, likely to continue being so until an equilibrium is reached. Leading up to the dotcom bust was a strong demand for technical talent. Talent that graduated in the midst of that bust got hosed, though were able to pick up work again as the economy realized that despite the bubble, technical expertise was still sorely needed. Then came the 2000s, and the demand for technical talent skyrocketed on the back of Web 2.0 and the Digital Transformation of Business. Every college and grift was churning out the thinnest credentialed junior technologists to fill vacancies. Then the global recession happened, and suddenly every business started getting onboard the outsourcing wagon, thus crippling domestic technical roles and long-term IT careers. Except when ZIRP happened, suddenly everybody wanted software developers out of this notion that they could automate their way out of any conceivable problem with code. Now LLMs are here, trained on the past and reducing the need for Juniors in those fields. The glut of C and D “bootcamp” students are superfluous as the business world re-orients around (comparatively) expensive debt and interest rates, and as technological revolutions effectively stagnate outside of a few, narrow fields (Quantum Computing, Cryptography, etc). AI coding tools built on LLMs are likely to decrease the roles of Juniors in orgs except for those high-quality candidates who work predominantly in newer languages or technologies LLMs can’t be effectively trained upon due to a substantially thinner corpus than, say, Javascript or C++. Those of us who lived through prior cycles already see what’s coming next: refusing to hire Juniors ultimately cripples the pipeline of Senior talent, and educational institutions aren’t effectively training Seniors out the gate (since that requires both learned knowledge and lived experience). Seniors will likely appreciate in value in the short term (especially if LLMs prove my doomerism wrong and stick around/remain popular), followed by a business panic as they realize they footgunned themselves in the labor department by failing to hire, mentor, and train Juniors into Seniors. Combined with population growth declines, increasing retirement of older workers, and rising Nationalism clamping down on immigration or outsourcing, and you’ve got a perfect storm of sorts where companies will need talent but will have a lack of supply to pull from. If I were a technologist whose background is bootcamps or vendor certifications, I’d be seriously worried about immediate and short-term prospects. Even if they hallucinate consistently and reward hack frequently, LLMs can supplant the kind of low-quality talent who normally take these roles in larger companies (at least for now). My advice is to start building more complex skill sets instead of relying on drills and rote memorization; contributing to FOSS isn’t enough when you’re competing against LLMs and thousands of randos for commit recognition, you’re going to have to make your own projects that solve problems or demonstrate your specific capabilities. A and B-tier talent will have a rough few years as well, but they’re likely to soldier onward relatively unscathed unless I’m wrong and LLMs somehow lead to the Singularity. If you can’t get into that sort of quality, you shouldn’t pin your career hopes on a bootcamp or certification alone.
- mrtksn 1y agoThis expectation about AI taking away the software jobs is utterly ridiculous for me. What AI Will take away if eventually delivers on the promises is the existence of software development as business. Don't forget that a software company is bunch of software engineers in coordination, if those software engineers can be placed with a graphics card or AI service provider they just go ahead and start your own software company and just use this services to undercut the software companies that no longer need software engineers. If AI is actually able to code like a real software engineer then people that are not software engineers and were laid off from software companies should just get an AI subscription and take away the business from the company that they were fired from. Maybe it's not that graduates are not able to get jobs because AI is replacing them but because the focus of the capital at this time is no longer on speculating over software projects, therefore on the companies that are actually making money are able to actually hire. Today if you want to work in a company that exist thanks to speculative capital and pays huge salaries like in the day when software was eating the world than you need to be in AI.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago"“This is the story of one graduate out of over 4,000,” the company said, adding that 70.1% of those enrolled in its full-time program secured in-field employment within a year of graduation." Sounds like it's the story of 1200 graduates, actually.
- nuancebydefault 1y agoCoding bootcamps might teach you how to design algorithms and how to code them but developing software is so much more than that. Often you get very vague requirements from the customer and there are many phases of refinement after that, often in a loop. The customer often does not know what they need, though they have a problem to solve. Those skills you don't fully develop at school or university, let alone a half year of bootcamp. I believe you have to have a developer's or engineering mindset in some way, early on in life, to be good at it. My point being, if you choose a career swap, or suddenly realise you were studying something you are not passionate about, you still have a very big leap to make.