This is a real issue in legal as well. Now that large language models are creeping into big law and in-house environments, there's a concern that junior associates aren't getting the opportunity to take a step back and learn to consider the broader context.
When your bidding can be drafted and a path laid in microseconds, it's super easy to start off in the absolutely wrong direction. But you don't know you're headed the wrong way unless you've learned it. Unlike software where bugs like this are sometimes surfaced immediately via the compiler or interacting with the product, legal bugs are latent and only reveal themselves after the potentially massive damage is done[1].
These things are a massive unlock for well-trained senior lawyers who can spot the issue upfront. On the other hand, they amplify juniors' ability to introduce errors at the same time they deprive them of necessary understanding. Having a judge rule on a bad contract idea "at runtime" is a catastrophic failure mode.
[1] As an example of this, consider how Gary Kildall arguably flubbed the deal of a century when he allowed the DRI team to attempt to negotiate the IBM form non-disclosure agreement: https://tritium.legal/blog/redline
I've seen a lot of people sharing similar sentiments just because it's Microsoft executives.
These executives came up through engineering. These are not MBA's. Russinovich famously founded Winternals (now Sysinternals), and got bought by Microsoft. Building tools for the OS that the OS vendor didn't think to:
Wasn't the execs sentiment to replace the workforce as soon as possible with ai? But I get it, you get to get a face when you're an exec but no face when you're a jobless junior CS graduate.
> ... arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base.
Nah, I want that COBOL expert treatment in my senior years. Screw the profession, it ain't communism.
Saw this play out in audit firms. They have a very rigid yearly cycle with each group coaching the next. It’s a good model because it’s basically hands on 1:1 tutoring on real world work.
Then leadership couldn’t resist the $$$ temptation of outsourcing the bottom tier to India.
Suddenly you’ve got people that have the senior title but can’t lead because they don’t understand the task they’re supposed to provide leadership on
And because it’s such a relentless yearly cycle you can’t do much to fix it. A single year of that caused substantial lasting damage
It also seems possible that clever, young outsiders will, by creatively employing AI, displace senior devs. Because unlike with law and accounting, novices in software development can generate a lot of their own reps at low cost (mostly just their time, which will be cheap compared to senior devs).
Another possibility could be using junior devs (with AI) to come up with enormous numbers of fresh ideas and minimally working programs, with the promising ones then worked on with senior devs.
Most fundamentally, because AI lowers the cost of testing out ideas and potential software products, it seems like a tool to test notions of what you should build or continue to offer customers in the first place.
I'm currently in the hiring process.. and my head is spinning..
1. Interviewing is becoming more difficult. Many skills we valued two years ago are genuinely becoming less valuable. 2. The skills we tested 2 years ago were in-part a proxy for evaluating critical think and systems thinking skills. So we need to re-evaluate our technical interview process. 3. It's genuinely less friction for me to prompt Claude than some of my SEII colleagues. And wtf - Claude is getting so good that it's starting to feel like it's outpacing the intellectual competency of some people. Sure - it does weird things like add Sleep instead of proper concurrency. SEIIs did that too, and we couldn't as easily reprogram them with Skill.md 4. Core competencies remain necessary. Systems thinking. SOLID principles. Communication skills. These skills are more important than ever. 5. Companies that offshored engineers and traded core competency for perceived-throughput are doing the same calculus with Claude. 6. Core business models are threatened. There is fear that revenue streams will dry up. How does one hedge against that risk? Humans are expensive. 7. Navigating this situation is hard and uncertain
I guess this is a problem if a company just wants to hire “some coders.” “Coders” is a term I’ve only heard used by those that don’t understand what’s involved in building and maintaining nontrivial software systems. You used to be able to get a high paying job just throwing together basic web pages in 1999. Non-technical folks have had site design tools for awhile that replace a lot of this work. There are more true software engineering jobs than there used to be and I think this trend will continue as LLMs create even more demand for software.
I saw my doctor using chatgpt. But he's experienced, finished his schooling before all this. I wonder about the next generation of people who are supposed to save lives and build bridges
Someone at my job just said yesterday “I can’t see a reason to hire any additional devs in the future with AI being the way it is now”
I disagreed vehemently, but it’s really gotten me thinking about just how screwed some orgs are. Especially those with poor technical leadership. Like I can try to convince people otherwise but ultimately they’re not going to believe it until they see productivity reduce by relying solely on AI.
The other part that’s odd to me is I feel like once we do truly reach a point where dev jobs are made irrelevant, I believe that level of intelligence will make essentially all white collar jobs irrelevant, all the way up to the CEO. So it’s kind of this race to all of us not having jobs. It’s just funny that the higher ups at some companies are so delusional to think what they do won’t also be replaced
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] threadWhen your bidding can be drafted and a path laid in microseconds, it's super easy to start off in the absolutely wrong direction. But you don't know you're headed the wrong way unless you've learned it. Unlike software where bugs like this are sometimes surfaced immediately via the compiler or interacting with the product, legal bugs are latent and only reveal themselves after the potentially massive damage is done[1].
These things are a massive unlock for well-trained senior lawyers who can spot the issue upfront. On the other hand, they amplify juniors' ability to introduce errors at the same time they deprive them of necessary understanding. Having a judge rule on a bad contract idea "at runtime" is a catastrophic failure mode.
[1] As an example of this, consider how Gary Kildall arguably flubbed the deal of a century when he allowed the DRI team to attempt to negotiate the IBM form non-disclosure agreement: https://tritium.legal/blog/redline
These executives came up through engineering. These are not MBA's. Russinovich famously founded Winternals (now Sysinternals), and got bought by Microsoft. Building tools for the OS that the OS vendor didn't think to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals
Scott Hanselman is similarly prolific:
https://www.hanselman.com/about/
These are not faceless execs, if you follow the company. These are the people who advocate for the real and good stuff.
Nah, I want that COBOL expert treatment in my senior years. Screw the profession, it ain't communism.
Then leadership couldn’t resist the $$$ temptation of outsourcing the bottom tier to India.
Suddenly you’ve got people that have the senior title but can’t lead because they don’t understand the task they’re supposed to provide leadership on
And because it’s such a relentless yearly cycle you can’t do much to fix it. A single year of that caused substantial lasting damage
Another possibility could be using junior devs (with AI) to come up with enormous numbers of fresh ideas and minimally working programs, with the promising ones then worked on with senior devs.
Most fundamentally, because AI lowers the cost of testing out ideas and potential software products, it seems like a tool to test notions of what you should build or continue to offer customers in the first place.
I disagreed vehemently, but it’s really gotten me thinking about just how screwed some orgs are. Especially those with poor technical leadership. Like I can try to convince people otherwise but ultimately they’re not going to believe it until they see productivity reduce by relying solely on AI.
The other part that’s odd to me is I feel like once we do truly reach a point where dev jobs are made irrelevant, I believe that level of intelligence will make essentially all white collar jobs irrelevant, all the way up to the CEO. So it’s kind of this race to all of us not having jobs. It’s just funny that the higher ups at some companies are so delusional to think what they do won’t also be replaced