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> but not some fresh graduates who can work 80 hours per week and only demand half of the salary Cause garbage in, gets garbage out. With AI models being all t

> but not some fresh graduates who can work 80 hours per week and only demand half of the salary Cause garbage in, gets garbage out. With AI models being all the more rage in the coming years, unexperienced hires will prove many times more costly. (10x garbage with agents). So companies are going to concentrate their worker base even more with experienced folks. They need fewer of them. Yes. But quality matters more than ever. I really feel bad for the new graduates. For no fault of their own, the bar went up so high. Unless they’re a child prodigy doing some coding projects on the side since the age of 10 - no one will hire them. So how will they ever gain the experience they need? Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a reinvention of coding schools - that will now focus on fundamental and industry knowledge - imparted by other veterans, instead of teaching applied skills.

markus_zhang 11mo ago
I agree with you, but I forgot to mention that in the original reply I meant to say that "After the economy turns around, there is no point to hire me, an older guy with maybe a couple of gap years, who worked as a Uber driver for the last two years and can't leetcode". But yeah, new graduates is going to suffer anyway. And I'm scared of the collapse of the existing world order. Maybe we won't see a turn around for many years if it does collapse -- and we are already seeing many cracks on it.
- echelon 11mo ago
  New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree. Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management. If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us. It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI. None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat. Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower. The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment. Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away. Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.
  - tibbar 11mo ago
    This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by a) getting really good at clarifying requirements b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot. This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
    - echelon 11mo ago
      Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees). I'm genuinely curious. I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand. Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output. From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now. We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
        I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development. I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc. Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination. Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder. > We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products. It seems to be working… https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2EZqQ-p1XkybYp21llKCfLsME/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
agentultra 11mo ago
We haven’t passed the stage where we convince policy makers to stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers. I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed but it seems we’re not on the winning side here.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  We gotta gather ourselves and remind companies why they once paid handsomely to not let potential disruptiors run rampant on the market. Long term new teams will form once productivity is valued again and not this giant incestuous GDP-maxmizing scheme.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - oblio 11mo ago
    On the long term, we're all dead. I doubt things will recover to 2018 levels. Too many new software devs coming out each year, too much AI, too little big company growth once everyone already has an internet computer in their hands. The Wild West is over and now the digital economy has entered the boring phase.
- kortilla 11mo ago
  The comparison to greenhouse gases doesn’t make sense. Corps pay a lot for developers right now because they get more value out of them than they cost. As long as that remains true, devs will be fine.
  - pyuser583 11mo ago
    Part of being a developer is innovating as rapidly as possible. We obsolete our own practices in a regular basis. We should be the last occupation to be replaced by machines. Maybe I’m stupid, but I’m stupidly optimistic.
- dtech 11mo ago
travisgriggs 11mo ago
Or, more dystopian take... it won't matter. If software reliability continues to degrade in a normalized fashion, it won't matter. First mover advantages and networking effects will make it impossible for an outfit trafficking increased quality to ever get enough breaths to even compete.
- zbentley 11mo ago
  Depends on your definition of “compete”. Compete for VC funding and continually increasing growth? You’re right. Compete as in stay profitable and have a future? Less clear-cut.

markus_zhang 11mo ago

I agree with you, but I forgot to mention that in the original reply I meant to say that "After the economy turns around, there is no point to hire me, an older guy with maybe a couple of gap years, who worked as a Uber driver for the last two years and can't leetcode". But yeah, new graduates is going to suffer anyway. And I'm scared of the collapse of the existing world order. Maybe we won't see a turn around for many years if it does collapse -- and we are already seeing many cracks on it.

echelon 11mo ago
New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree. Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management. If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us. It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI. None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat. Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower. The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment. Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away. Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.
- tibbar 11mo ago
  This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by a) getting really good at clarifying requirements b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot. This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
  - echelon 11mo ago
    Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees). I'm genuinely curious. I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand. Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output. From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now. We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
      I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development. I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc. Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination. Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder. > We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products. It seems to be working… https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2EZqQ-p1XkybYp21llKCfLsME/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...

agentultra 11mo ago

We haven’t passed the stage where we convince policy makers to stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers. I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed but it seems we’re not on the winning side here.

johnnyanmac 11mo ago
We gotta gather ourselves and remind companies why they once paid handsomely to not let potential disruptiors run rampant on the market. Long term new teams will form once productivity is valued again and not this giant incestuous GDP-maxmizing scheme.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- oblio 11mo ago
  On the long term, we're all dead. I doubt things will recover to 2018 levels. Too many new software devs coming out each year, too much AI, too little big company growth once everyone already has an internet computer in their hands. The Wild West is over and now the digital economy has entered the boring phase.
kortilla 11mo ago
The comparison to greenhouse gases doesn’t make sense. Corps pay a lot for developers right now because they get more value out of them than they cost. As long as that remains true, devs will be fine.
- pyuser583 11mo ago
  Part of being a developer is innovating as rapidly as possible. We obsolete our own practices in a regular basis. We should be the last occupation to be replaced by machines. Maybe I’m stupid, but I’m stupidly optimistic.
dtech 11mo ago

travisgriggs 11mo ago

Or, more dystopian take... it won't matter. If software reliability continues to degrade in a normalized fashion, it won't matter. First mover advantages and networking effects will make it impossible for an outfit trafficking increased quality to ever get enough breaths to even compete.

zbentley 11mo ago
Depends on your definition of “compete”. Compete for VC funding and continually increasing growth? You’re right. Compete as in stay profitable and have a future? Less clear-cut.