No one's getting replaced, but you may not hire that new person that otherwise would have been needed. Five years ago, you would have hired a junior to crank out UI components, or well specc'd CRUD endpoints for some big new feature initiative. Now you probably won't.
He wants educators to instead teach “how do you think and how do you decompose problems”
Ahmen! I attend this same church.
My favorite professor in engineering school always gave open book tests.
In the real world of work, everyone has full access to all the available data and information.
Very few jobs involve paying someone simply to look up data in a book or on the internet. What they will pay for is someone who can analyze, understand, reason and apply data and information in unique ways needed to solve problems.
Doing this is called "engineering". And this is what this professor taught.
Might want to clarify things with your boss who says otherwise [1]? I do wish journalists would stop quoting these people unedited. No one knows what will actually happen.
Most people don't notice but there has been a inflation in headcounts over the years now. This happened around the time microservices architecture trend took over.
All of sudden to ensure better support and separation of concerns people needed a team with a manager for each service. If this hadn't been the case, the industry as a whole can likely work with 40% - 50% less people eventually. Thats because at any given point in time even with a large monolithic codebase only 10 - 20% of the code base is in active evolution, what that means in microservices world is equivalent amount teams are sitting idle.
When I started out huge C++ and Java code bases were pretty much the norm, and it was also one of the reasons why things were hard and barrier to entry high. In this microservices world, things are small enough that any small group of even low productivity employees can make things work. That is quite literally true, because smaller things that work well don't even need all that many changes on a everyday basis.
To me its these kind of places that are in real trouble. There is not enough work to justify keeping dozens to even hundreds of teams, their managements and their hierarchies all working for quite literally doing nothing.
> Garman is also not keen on another idea about AI – measuring its value by what percentage of code it contributes at an organization.
You really want to believe, maybe even need to believe, that anyone who comes up with this idea in their head has never written a single line of code in their life.
It is on its face absurd. And yet I don't doubt for a second that Garman et al. have to fend off legions of hacks who froth at the mouth over this kind of thing.
It's refreshing to finally see CEOs and other business leaders coming around to what experienced, skeptical engineers have been saying for this entire hype cycle.
I assumed it would happen at some point, but I am relieved that the change in sentiment has started before the bubble pops - maybe this will lesson the economic impact.
My boss said we were gonna fire a bunch of people “because AI” as part of some fluff PR to pretend we were actually leaders in AI. We tried that a bit, it was a total mess and we have no clue what we’re doing, I’ve been sent out to walk back our comments.
> “How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”
Pretty obvious conclusion that I think anyone who's thought seriously about this situation has already come to. However, I'm not optimistic that most companies will be able to keep themselves from doing this kind of thing, because I think it's become rather clear that it's incredibly difficult for most leadership in 2025 to prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term profitability.
That being said, internships/co-ops have been popular from companies that I'm familiar with for quite a while specifically to ensure that there are streams of potential future employees. I wonder if we'll see even more focus on internships in the future, to further skirt around the difficulties in hiring junior developers?
Yesterday, I was asked to scrape data from a website. My friend used ChatGPT to scrape data but didn't succeded even spent 3h+. I looked website code and understand with my web knowledge and do some research with LLM. Then I described how to scrape data to LLM it took 30 minutes overall. The LLM cant create best way but you can create with using LLM. Everything is same, at the end of the day you need someone who can really think.
Junior staff will be necessary but you'll have to defend them from the bean-counters.
You need people who can validate LLM-generated code. It takes people with testing and architecture expertise to do so. You only get those things by having humans get expertise through experience.
junior engineers aren't hired to get tons of work done; they're hired to learn, grow, and eventually become senior engineers. ai can't replace that, but only help it happen faster (in theory anyway).
If AI is so great and had PhD level skills (Musk) then logic says you should be replacing all of your _senior_ developers. That is not the conclusion they reached which implies that the coding ability is not that hot.
Q.E.D.
113 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 88.9 ms ] threadAhmen! I attend this same church.
My favorite professor in engineering school always gave open book tests.
In the real world of work, everyone has full access to all the available data and information.
Very few jobs involve paying someone simply to look up data in a book or on the internet. What they will pay for is someone who can analyze, understand, reason and apply data and information in unique ways needed to solve problems.
Doing this is called "engineering". And this is what this professor taught.
[1]: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/technology/ai-will-sh...
All of sudden to ensure better support and separation of concerns people needed a team with a manager for each service. If this hadn't been the case, the industry as a whole can likely work with 40% - 50% less people eventually. Thats because at any given point in time even with a large monolithic codebase only 10 - 20% of the code base is in active evolution, what that means in microservices world is equivalent amount teams are sitting idle.
When I started out huge C++ and Java code bases were pretty much the norm, and it was also one of the reasons why things were hard and barrier to entry high. In this microservices world, things are small enough that any small group of even low productivity employees can make things work. That is quite literally true, because smaller things that work well don't even need all that many changes on a everyday basis.
To me its these kind of places that are in real trouble. There is not enough work to justify keeping dozens to even hundreds of teams, their managements and their hierarchies all working for quite literally doing nothing.
I'll never forget the sama AGI posts before o3 launched and the subsequent doomer posting from techies. Feels so stupid in hindsight.
You really want to believe, maybe even need to believe, that anyone who comes up with this idea in their head has never written a single line of code in their life.
It is on its face absurd. And yet I don't doubt for a second that Garman et al. have to fend off legions of hacks who froth at the mouth over this kind of thing.
I assumed it would happen at some point, but I am relieved that the change in sentiment has started before the bubble pops - maybe this will lesson the economic impact.
My boss said we were gonna fire a bunch of people “because AI” as part of some fluff PR to pretend we were actually leaders in AI. We tried that a bit, it was a total mess and we have no clue what we’re doing, I’ve been sent out to walk back our comments.
This is becoming unbreathable for hackers.
Pretty obvious conclusion that I think anyone who's thought seriously about this situation has already come to. However, I'm not optimistic that most companies will be able to keep themselves from doing this kind of thing, because I think it's become rather clear that it's incredibly difficult for most leadership in 2025 to prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term profitability.
That being said, internships/co-ops have been popular from companies that I'm familiar with for quite a while specifically to ensure that there are streams of potential future employees. I wonder if we'll see even more focus on internships in the future, to further skirt around the difficulties in hiring junior developers?
Better learn how to learn as we are not training(or is that paying) you to learn...
Finally, the c-suite is getting it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41462545
You need people who can validate LLM-generated code. It takes people with testing and architecture expertise to do so. You only get those things by having humans get expertise through experience.