I think a huge problem here is that AI removed a lot of the incentive to hire juniors. The “churn” of writing code is mostly solved, so senior engineers can now rejoice in perfecting software architecture and guiding/babysitting the LLMs to do the rest. Even if someone does hire a junior, they usually end up using an LLM themselves the output will be useless vibecoded shit, but a lot more of it than what the junior could type themselves, which wastes a lot of time for senior folks and is overall useless. Together this means that bosses will avoid hiring anyone without experience even harder than before.
However this also means that in 10-20 years when the current gen of senior engineers retire, there may not be anyone to replace them. No matter how much theory you learn (which I agree everyone in the profession must do), experience is priceless in software development.
This is another example of how capitalist incentives lead the whole system to ultimately undermine itself. Nobody cares about what happens in 10-20 years, the only thing that matters are quarterly profits. So, nobody wants to invest in training new experts. And this has been going on long before LLMs as well, it’s just that this tech makes the problem even more acute.
I think a huge problem here is that AI removed a lot of the incentive to hire juniors. The “churn” of writing code is mostly solved, so senior engineers can now rejoice in perfecting software architecture and guiding/babysitting the LLMs to do the rest. Even if someone does hire a junior, they usually end up using an LLM themselves the output will be useless vibecoded shit, but a lot more of it than what the junior could type themselves, which wastes a lot of time for senior folks and is overall useless. Together this means that bosses will avoid hiring anyone without experience even harder than before.
However this also means that in 10-20 years when the current gen of senior engineers retire, there may not be anyone to replace them. No matter how much theory you learn (which I agree everyone in the profession must do), experience is priceless in software development.
This is another example of how capitalist incentives lead the whole system to ultimately undermine itself. Nobody cares about what happens in 10-20 years, the only thing that matters are quarterly profits. So, nobody wants to invest in training new experts. And this has been going on long before LLMs as well, it’s just that this tech makes the problem even more acute.