4 ms·

The problem becomes your retirement. Sure, you've earned "expert" status, but all the junior developers won't be hired, so they'll never learn from junior mista

by greedo 8mo ago

The problem becomes your retirement. Sure, you've earned "expert" status, but all the junior developers won't be hired, so they'll never learn from junior mistakes. They'll blindly trust agents and not know deeper techniques.

charcircuit 8mo ago
You can get experience without an actual job.
- igor47 8mo ago
  Can I rephrase this as "you can get experience without any experience"? Certainly, there's stuff you can learn that's adjacent to doing the thing; that's what happens when juniors graduate with CS degrees. But the lack of doing the thing is what makes them juniors.
  - charcircuit 8mo ago
    >that's what happens when juniors graduate with CS degrees A CS degree is going to give you much less experience than building projects and businesses yourself.
    - al_borland 8mo ago
      How much time will someone realistically dedicate to this if they need to have a separate day job? How good will they get without mentors? How much complexity will they really need to manage without the bureaucracy of an organization? Are senior software engineers of the future going to be waiting tables along side actors for the first 10+ years of their adult life, working on side projects on nights and weekends, hoping to one day jump straight to a senior position in a large company? The questions I instinctively ask myself when looking at a new problem, having worked in an enterprise environment for 20 years, are much different than what I’d be asking having just worked on personal projects. Most of the technology I’ve had access to isn’t something a solo hobbyist dev will ever touch. Most of the questions I’m asking are influenced by having that access, along with some of the personalities I’ve had to deal with. How will people get that kind of experience? There is also the big issue of people not knowing what to build. When a person gets a job, they no long need to come up with their own ideas. Or they generate ideas based on the needs of the environment they’re in. In the context of my job, I have no shortage of ideas. For solo projects, I often draw a blank. The world doesn’t need a hundred more todo apps.
      - charcircuit 8mo ago
        >How much time will someone realistically dedicate to this if they need to have a separate day job? Typically parents subsidize the living of their children while they are still learning. >Most of the technology I’ve had access to isn’t something a solo hobbyist dev will ever touch That's already true today. Most developers are react developers. If hired for something else they will have to pick that up on the job. When you have niche tech stacks you already will need to compromise on the kind of experience people have. With AI having exact experience in the technology is not that necessary since AI can handle most of it.
        al_borland 8mo ago
        Parents can only subsidize children if they are doing well themselves, most aren’t. That “learning” phase used to end in the 18-25 range. Getting rid of juniors and making someone get enough experience on side projects to be considered a senior would take considerably longer. Exactly how long are parents supposed to be subsidizing their children’s living expenses? How can the parents afford to retire when they still have dependents? And all of this is built on the hope that the kid will actually land that job in 10 years? That feels like a bad bet. What happens if they fail? Not a big deal when the kid is 27, but a pretty big deal at 40 when they have no other marketable skills and have been living off their parents. The difference is there are juniors getting familiar with those enterprise products today. If they go away, they will step into it as senior people and be unprepared. It’s not just about the syntax of a different language, I’m talking more about dealing with things like Active Directory, leveraging ITSM systems effectively, reporting, metrics, how to communicate with leadership, how to deal with audits. AI might help with some of this, but not all of it. For someone without experience with it, they don’t know what they don’t know… in which case the AI won’t help at all. I even see this when dealing with people from a small company being acquired by a larger company. They don’t know what is available to them or the systems that are in place, and they don’t even know enough to ask. Someone from another large company knows to ask about these things, because they have that experience.
        charcircuit 8mo ago
4star3star 8mo ago
We are currently at a point where the master furniture craftsmen are doing quality assurance at the new automated furniture factory. Eventually, everyone working at the factory will have never made any furniture by hand and will have grown up sitting on janky chairs, and they will be the ones supervising.
- greedo 8mo ago
  This is a great example... Designing and building chairs (good chairs, that is) is actually a skill that takes a lot of time and effort to develop. It's easy to whip up a design in CAD, but something comfortable? Takes lots of iterations, user tests etc. The building part would be easy once the design is hammered out, but the design is the tough part.
- esafak 8mo ago
  The majority can be like that but the few can set the tone for many.

by greedo 8mo ago

charcircuit 8mo ago

You can get experience without an actual job.

igor47 8mo ago
Can I rephrase this as "you can get experience without any experience"? Certainly, there's stuff you can learn that's adjacent to doing the thing; that's what happens when juniors graduate with CS degrees. But the lack of doing the thing is what makes them juniors.
- charcircuit 8mo ago
  >that's what happens when juniors graduate with CS degrees A CS degree is going to give you much less experience than building projects and businesses yourself.
  - al_borland 8mo ago
    How much time will someone realistically dedicate to this if they need to have a separate day job? How good will they get without mentors? How much complexity will they really need to manage without the bureaucracy of an organization? Are senior software engineers of the future going to be waiting tables along side actors for the first 10+ years of their adult life, working on side projects on nights and weekends, hoping to one day jump straight to a senior position in a large company? The questions I instinctively ask myself when looking at a new problem, having worked in an enterprise environment for 20 years, are much different than what I’d be asking having just worked on personal projects. Most of the technology I’ve had access to isn’t something a solo hobbyist dev will ever touch. Most of the questions I’m asking are influenced by having that access, along with some of the personalities I’ve had to deal with. How will people get that kind of experience? There is also the big issue of people not knowing what to build. When a person gets a job, they no long need to come up with their own ideas. Or they generate ideas based on the needs of the environment they’re in. In the context of my job, I have no shortage of ideas. For solo projects, I often draw a blank. The world doesn’t need a hundred more todo apps.
    - charcircuit 8mo ago
      >How much time will someone realistically dedicate to this if they need to have a separate day job? Typically parents subsidize the living of their children while they are still learning. >Most of the technology I’ve had access to isn’t something a solo hobbyist dev will ever touch That's already true today. Most developers are react developers. If hired for something else they will have to pick that up on the job. When you have niche tech stacks you already will need to compromise on the kind of experience people have. With AI having exact experience in the technology is not that necessary since AI can handle most of it.
      - al_borland 8mo ago
        Parents can only subsidize children if they are doing well themselves, most aren’t. That “learning” phase used to end in the 18-25 range. Getting rid of juniors and making someone get enough experience on side projects to be considered a senior would take considerably longer. Exactly how long are parents supposed to be subsidizing their children’s living expenses? How can the parents afford to retire when they still have dependents? And all of this is built on the hope that the kid will actually land that job in 10 years? That feels like a bad bet. What happens if they fail? Not a big deal when the kid is 27, but a pretty big deal at 40 when they have no other marketable skills and have been living off their parents. The difference is there are juniors getting familiar with those enterprise products today. If they go away, they will step into it as senior people and be unprepared. It’s not just about the syntax of a different language, I’m talking more about dealing with things like Active Directory, leveraging ITSM systems effectively, reporting, metrics, how to communicate with leadership, how to deal with audits. AI might help with some of this, but not all of it. For someone without experience with it, they don’t know what they don’t know… in which case the AI won’t help at all. I even see this when dealing with people from a small company being acquired by a larger company. They don’t know what is available to them or the systems that are in place, and they don’t even know enough to ask. Someone from another large company knows to ask about these things, because they have that experience.
        charcircuit 8mo ago

4star3star 8mo ago

We are currently at a point where the master furniture craftsmen are doing quality assurance at the new automated furniture factory. Eventually, everyone working at the factory will have never made any furniture by hand and will have grown up sitting on janky chairs, and they will be the ones supervising.

greedo 8mo ago
This is a great example... Designing and building chairs (good chairs, that is) is actually a skill that takes a lot of time and effort to develop. It's easy to whip up a design in CAD, but something comfortable? Takes lots of iterations, user tests etc. The building part would be easy once the design is hammered out, but the design is the tough part.
esafak 8mo ago
The majority can be like that but the few can set the tone for many.