I'm about to get a junior engineer to work with at my Big Tech company. This used to be normal, it's now slightly extraordinary. I've not worked with a junior engineer in literally years. Even typing this, I think: this must be hyperbole, it's true though.
Wouldn't you be losing out on the fresh ideas and perspectives new entrants into this field brings ?
I had read "Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley" a few months ago and most of the disruptions in the industry came from engineers who brought in fresh perspective or had the energy to try something different.
Even if juniors most of their ideas are exactly like you said, they would have more energy and almost no trauma from past experiences to experiment more.
While experience is important, it also creates blind spots as it's quite hard to have every experience about a particular topic unless you have been working on that tool/stack alone for decades.
I think it depends on what kind of senior you are. Juniors are by their nature mostly order fillers. Seniors can be anywhere from more complex code order fillers to fairly well developed experts in business logic.
> On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?
Doubtful.
You'll be expected to produce much more, you aren't likely to see raises commensurate with the increased productivity, and the AI tide is still rising and will likely eventually put downward pressure on your pay at an increasing rate.
Indeed. Things are looking very bleak for software engineering as a specialization. It's been clear for years that Capital has been desperate to crack the software development nut, so to speak. Starting about 15 years ago, the intensity of Capital to destroy software engineering as a lucrative discipline really began in earnest: bootcamps, special certificate programs, the "learn to code" movement, and now AI. For at least 20 years I've heard Capital banging on the door to invade and drive wages down and now they've finally won.
The article makes the false assumption that you can only get better at software engineering by a 1:1 interaction when someone better. It doesn't address that AI can take this role. It doesn't address that there doesn't have to be a job market for junior developers for more senior developers to be created. There are other ways like reading or creating your own software to become senior level.
Juniors can't become seniors without doing real work and using their brains to do it. There is no profession, trade, or skill that you can get good at without doing it.
People don't have to be employed to do real work. Keep in mind even senior developers take time to ramp up at a job and learn the ropes of the position.
I'm being told by the corporate leadership that the future of software is basically babysitting agents. "You won't write code anymore, everything will be done through agents. Your job is to direct and review." It is deeply, deeply depressing.
I feel it has rather created an opportunity for a junior programmer to deliver 5x faster than before and it has lowered the barriers to be a decent junior developer. Perhaps in today's job market for junior devs what changed are the metrics against which they are judged for. It's not just knowing theory of coding, it's about speed at which you ship and most importantly quality. Ultimately, how good is such a developer to push code with agents. What do you think?
> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know.
Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist.
The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.
An anecdote - A neighbor who's an accountant was able to vibe code a Salesforce replacement for her company using Claude Fable and saved her company hundreds of thousands of dollars of fees. Claude wrote her an agent loop for maintenance. That's distribution of intelligence. That's breaking boundaries. That's democratization.
Going to college and expecting a job is privilege. You need to be able to put a 100k down. Jobs are based on citizenship whereas AI is available to all. Juniors will be in good hands. Elon and Altman have talked about UBI. With LLMs they control their destiny.
> In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different.
Turns out that as admitted, the opposite was true and was predictable. Such that, in late 2024 [0], I predicted that there would be more layoffs in 2025.
> In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight.
Of course they would. Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?
Surely that makes all of this even cheaper? False. Just ask Apple. [1] Or Boeing [2] [3] with their expensive offshoring and their trade secrets either leaked or the quality degraded.
And those drunk on token usage are now limiting it because it is expensive. Ask Meta, Tesla, Amazon and Microsoft why they are not "tokenmaxxing".
I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers. Our company was senior-heavy and we're just now diversifying.
80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.
I have no doubt any junior, no matter their background or degree, will break into tech fine like all of us did if they are in for the reasons we got in - being nerds and fascinated by software. You can't fake that.
Going back 29 years to the beginning of my career, I'd say maybe 50% of the graduates in my class, probably more, either were not cut out to be engineers or didn't really have any passion for it(or both).
I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?
I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.
To be fair junior developers almost universally kinda suck and you have to teach them the job. They'll take 10x the time to do a job a senior would, and do it in a way that is much more complicated than it needs to be.
The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
I think this is the thing. Companies have always been forced rather against their immediate interests into the cost of hiring junior engineers. As soon as the idea gained traction that this cost was unnecessary, companies stopped. So: we had the post-COVID tech slump, and then immediately after, by horrible coincidence for prospective junior engineers, LLMs turned out to be good at coding. Result: a missing generation of engineers, and a giant headache in about 15 years time. But which tech exec could possibly care about what happens in 15 years?
I've been programming for 25 years now because I really like it. But if it didn't pay, I'd do something else, because I really like not being poor even more.
My honest take is forget that burning interest in programming, it likely won't matter that much in a few years. There may be a need for technically strong people who understand whatever the domain the company works on well I say focus on that. Knowing all kinds of deep python/c++ trivia is a decaying skill imo.
Some people have a passion for their craft and use that to generate money. There is a difference between people who just are there for the money and people that are there for the money and the implementing their craft.
Such a large part of the job is dumb meetings, politics and trying to work around bad governance. The only reason to put up with all that is money, because one needs to pay the bills.
Remove the need to pay bills and you'll be left with no one applying for a crappy job making money for someone else.
Implementing the craft has nothing to do with putting up with employment and employers, workplace harassment, waking up at unhealthy hours, wasting most of one's time awake doing things for someone else...
honestly at this point putting out a software-coded job requisition is getting the interview cheaters full stop now.
our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something new, and our interview process is largely centered around getting to know them as a person what they're all about and we seem to do an okay job triangulating "this kid is curious, seems like they'd glue well with everyone here". mildly grill on some technical stuff but mostly just to get a read on where they're at & make assessments on what we're willing to teach.
at this point we've reasoned out that the normal requisition is just going to get an influx of people who think they're charmers and can rehearse an interview and then pan out to be a nothingburger. we've had a couple of those in the past few years and it's annoying. we don't hire often do but when we do we're just interested in having someone around that we like and seems eager to learn, we've had great luck with this formula and this seems to pluck out people who get lost in a sea of incredible looking resumes, we give them a good learning track and goals and they seem to leapfrog past every goalpost we've put in front of them. as far as juniors go, we like hearing about other weird non-computer problems they've solved in life. when we find the right candidate we kind of just know when we talk with them, they universally are pretty open about their own shortcomings but just demonstrate some sort of very passionate need to build or solve things. we see the mission as needing to build them up as a person first and the nerdy stuff is the fun sidequest they can join us and chase dopamine with. we all enjoy teaching & watching people grow so it works out pretty well.
I do think that's part of it. A lot of people jumped into the roles when they saw it as an alternative to other types of STEM or, heck, any work and was likely to pay a lot more money.
They simply ask Claude or ChatGPT. I've had a few interviews with individuals who were definitely cheating. Strange pauses. Obviously typing and then reading from the screen, giving incredibly verbose answers...
I got a degree in mechanical engineering. There's these two technicians under me that for years I thought we just hired off the street and maybe they graduated high school. I have to show them how to use terminal. I have to show them how to fix a Python script.
Imagine my horror when I found out recently both of them have a computer science bachelor's degree from a UC Santa Cruz.
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers. They just don't identify that way, and more importantly it's not their job title, and job titles are what labor statistics count.
This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.
People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.
The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.
> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers.
We've always had people developing, in many forms. Scientists of all kinds, usually with Python, finance people with Excel, etc.
I think that yes, they can go a lot farther now. So this will make the bottom of the software curve grow 10-100x.
Now, the real question for developers is: what does this do to the middle and top or the curve? In my experience that's where maintenance comes in and anyone who's not a trained software developer (and even many SDEs) break their necks. "Casuals" will build what their need, but even with AI guiding them, it's still spaghetti.
It's going to be interesting keeping an eye on this, for sure.
The job descriptions still say: "experience building according to best practices and working with a team". The meaning of that never changed.
What changed is tolerance of failing to meet that standard. That's how layoffs after overhiring happened. The bar was not raised, but moved back to where it was prior to the mid-2010s.
Anyway, it also depends on who is doing the interviews. If your "hobby" projects are built similar enough to what they have at that workplace, then the interview should feel like you're already working there for both you and them. Having absolutely no professional experience is going to automatically put you at a disadvantage. If you know of any startups, even if they're awful places to work, I'd much rather have a couple years of that on my resume than any internship.
What I was really saying is that someone who has been a teacher for a while and then learned to code with AI is now far more likely to get hired at an education software company than someone fresh out of college with a degree in CS. That's the way it should be! That's genuine progress. They may not end up in a coding role, but they'd absolutely crush it as a project manager.
> What I was really saying is that someone who has been a teacher for a while and then learned to code with AI is now far more likely to get hired at an education software company than someone fresh out of college with a degree in CS.
Huh. That's my situation... Sort of. Been programming since I was a kid but went into another field. That gave me hope, thank you.
Programming plus something else has always been a massive advantage. The corollary of this is that moving industries requires you to learn another domain if you want to be useful.
Would be interesting to see how this affects the service companies.
Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.
The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.
Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.
I am not really seeing how the first chart can be construed as AI disrupting the junior job market...
The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.
Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.
The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.
I was just about to comment the same. It’s like a hammer in need of a nail. Here’s where ChatGPT released and jobs dovetails so it must be true.
It will also be interesting to see 2019 through 2021. There was a glut of hiring post COVID and companies have to think about every dollar they spend post ZIRP.
Honestly, we need maybe ten or more years of data to see any real patterns.
And I typically work as a data scientist, but my role has involved more and more software engineering over time, so that might be driving some of the changes also.
Junior level employees are always the worst off during a market downturn, and employers need to justify to shareholders why they are laying off or not hiring, because a shrinking business is worth less than a growing one, so they'll come up with an excuse why they don't actually need employees. Currently, that excuse is AI.
Or people who were remote got called back to the office. Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one. An increase in the net number of jobs is not the only possible explanation. The jobs might just be changing their geographic requirements.
Anecdotally, I know one couple who is selling their house to move back to a tech hub for better job opportunities. Another couple working from a rural location recently had one partner lose their big tech job. If the laid-off partner doesn’t get a new job in the next few months, I expect that they will start talking about moving, too.
> Or people who were remote got called back to the office.
That's not the explanation according to this article [1].
> Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one.
It is hard to afford Bay Area rents -- even if you have a job. I can't see someone looking for a job signing a 1-year lease at these rates. Also, unlike the old days, interviews are remote, being physically present in the Bay Area doesn't give you an advantage.
It’s not hard to afford Bay Area rent if one partner is still employed in tech, especially if they are older and have savings or home equity to cash in on.
The article you linked to seems to say only that employers have been unsuccessful at enforcing 100% in-office work. It does not say that people have been successful at keeping their 100% remote jobs in other states and far-off locations. Overall, we seem to be reaching a compromise where many are forced to live within commuting distance of their office but aren’t necessarily there every day. This compromise is what is pushing up rents from what I am seeing among my network.
In other words, “remote” and “hybrid” are not at all the same but you are using the terms interchangeably. You can’t live in Idaho and commute to SF three days a week without major inconvenience and expense.
Junior devs will need different skills. One will actually like being near a keyboard, and doing it as much for passion as profession/profit.
The people who are succeeding are learning and playing and building their own experience they can demonstrate.
There's few shortcuts if any that last. It comes out in the wash quicker.
On the senior end there remains a gap and advantage between understanding of human vs understanding of AI on how best to approach or work through things.
There are non technical people building and shipping software. That’s fine, but not all software is equal: the software you release and it’s behind an ecommerce platform (or a bank, or a hospital, or the train system) is not like the software behind your custom-made productivity app. I think for the former software we still need people with the title “software engineer”
i suspect many licensed civil and other engineers may be looking at the currant situation as the moment when software people stop being able to just call themselves “engineers “ because they can type source code into an editor just like drawing a plausible bridge on paper doesn’t qualify you as being able to actually build one.
That does make it sound like there are only 2 types of software. The “serious” and the “unserious”. There’s probably a few dozen types rather, it’s much less black and white. At a client we have non-technical people ship “serious” software based on their 20+ years of experience in their respective field that definitely doesn’t need the same approach as a banking or health care application, but it would also be an insult to group that with productivity apps. No juniors or coding knowledge needed; LLMs fill that gap.
I as a senior am still called in to consult and shoot down attempts to actually integrate it into the wider system without triggering a full technical review.
We don’t need to rebuild the ladder, and we don’t need juniors. By the time the seniors leave the job market, the software engineer profession as we know it simply won’t exist. I very much doubt that there will be the higher level architect position either. If Fable 5 is anything to go by, we’re all replaceable with 12 to 24 months. The rest is social inertia.
Fable 5 will be genuinely weak compared to what's coming, I mean, we need to remember this is kinda the beginning still, we will genuinely reach a point where all benchmarks will score 99.9%. Think Opus 10, GPT-10... :)
Also Fable 5 isn't "that impressive" as a lot of people have that kind of intelligence since 6 months+ by using combo of models and loops (I scored better on HLE than gpt-5.5 xhigh last January with some good tooling and 6x the cost), but for a lambda Claude Code user, I can see why it looks that good.
A few reasons:
-2.5 years is a pretty short time for a new tech development, even if it fails eventually
- usually when a new tech is introduced, the biggest gains happen when the environment is changed to fit it. That takes time: libraries, api's, verification tooling, rl environments, skilling users, etc.
- possibility of orders of magnitude hardware cost reduction - Optical. Analog. Rram. Many others. Something will work. And internal improvements in the model architecture. And there's scaling in reasoning time.
I think they’ll be writing that new tech, and will be able to read the source code, and reason from first principles. I doubt they will need human generated training data.
I think it case of coding it may not be as bad, because new training data (AI generated code) is always empirically validated by tooling and by consumer. It may not be good but it mostly works, otherwise it is discarded or patched, so it has a bottom bar of "it works".
If needed it can synthetically create the datasets. There isn't a need for software engineers to make a dataset when AI could even more easily put one together.
Actually I believe these agentic models will teach you the value of software engineering faster. You can vibe entire code bases in days and learn more quickly.
In my experience with all agents, including Fable, is that they work great when there is automated validation. But as soon as it needs to design something, it just keeps adding so much slop.
That’s just the latest position that the goalposts have moved to. They haven’t stopped improving yet, I have no reason to think they’ll stop at the ideation phase. Or any of them, really.
just the other week I asked Fable 5 to diagnose the cause of some intermittent latency spikes on an API that queries an OpenSearch cluster at work. I encouraged it to look at the datadog metrics, splunk, the whole works. I let it loose to look at whatever it wanted.
End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its suggestions and deployed them to prod. Guess what? Didn’t fix the issue. Alas, a human was needed after all.
either everyone’s working on toy problems, or they’re working on very cookie-cutter code. I’m really not sure. I DO remain impressed with Fable 5 but the idea that we’ll all be unemployed in 2 years is hilarious delusion. we’re already at the point where many organizations are stealing back some other AI spend.
By any chance, is the following true: you had no empirics in the loop. It couldn’t validate any of its theories by experimentation. If the solution requires being able to make actual changes in order to gather more information and it is not allowed to, and this is the only way to solve the problem, by definition it couldn’t do it, nor could you. Or was it something that could be worked out entirely on an a priori basis from the available data?
And while we’re talking about hilarious delusions, perhaps you should look at the current capability curve of AI and weigh it against the constant stream of arguments for why it couldn’t have continued at every point and yet has.
i’m not an anti-AI believer. And our career is changing dramatically no doubt. i just think people overestimate short term gains and underestimate long term gains. (applicable to your comment)
In this case i had no empirics in the loop. The scenario was only reproducible under high api load. I could load test, but management isn’t eager to spend prod-like costs in staging (requires scaling opensearch a lot in stage). What can i say.
wow an actual ai-pilled comment on here for once, I agree with your sentiment. People opining about "rebuilding the ladder" have no idea whats coming for the software industry, and the general populous of white collar work.
"Models can code well now but they cant do high level architecture" is just a logical fallacy. Its literally only true in this particular moment in time. But if they can code well, whose to say they wont architect well? And at that point, what do SWEs do? If anything, SWEs are in the critical path of automation for these AI labs anyway, so theres a very strong incentive to automate us out vs other professions, and it'll happen soon. All these random 1-off datapoints of "Fable 5 can't do X very idiosyncratic thing" are completely missing the point. 6 months ago, even attempting that problem with any "tool" would be totally intractable, and now it _just_ writes a slightly subpar solution. You can do some basic extrapolation here, its not that complicated.
Your best bet is to just chose a different career, or, if you still want to be in the software industry, be more enterprising.
I’m always struck by a bit of wonder at comments like this. It seems everyone’s experience is all over the place. Curious, what types of things are you working on where you see these results?
I’m at 90%+ code AI generated by stats. I work in embedded systems. It still goes off the rails all of the time and needs a heavy hand to guide it. It does not currently feel like it will ever be truly able to operate independently. It’s a very useful tool, but it’s just not there yet in my day-to-day.
I’m sorry if I’m a bit snarky in this reply, but I see comments like yours all the time and I find them exasperating. Look at what you’ve just said: you’re in embedded devices, one of the more niche software roles. 90% of your code is written by AI. Your complaint is that you need to correct it sometimes. You’ve watched as AI goes from chatbots that literally cannot hold a conversation with a human being to LLMs that can do your job with supervision in less than five years, but you just don’t see what the fuss is about.
I’m not sure what else there is to say. People who don’t want to see things won’t see them.
I'm in internal tooling for blue and network teams, 70% of my code is generated and I have the same experience as your. The two 'new' hires (1 year into the job, so not so new) however are probably in the same boat as GP, but they just don't see the work we have to put to rewrite their AI-generated issues into something legible and useful, or read their AI-generated PRs filled with duplicated/dead code.
Honestly, the biggest improvement AI have brought me is the complete end of my imposter syndrome. People say comparison is the thief of joy,but in my case, previously invisible devs getting more visibility, suddenly pushing new code every week at the same pace as me but clearly without any understanding any of the underlying issues did wonder to my self esteem. I still consider myself among the worst of my group, but my group evolved from 'all devs I know' to 'the competents', which is very nice.
Not sure how this works for y’all. On my team, they would get blocked to merge on code review until they met quality bar, and if this happened enough they would be having a performance issue that would be dealt with (they would be given multiple chances to course correct - polite talk from team lead, polite talk from manager (doc trail begin), not polite talk from manger, bad perf review / no raise + no RSU year, PiP, fired)
Keep in mind that a good chunk of people here are basically AI boosters: they work for AI companies, sell AI courses and training and certifications, own shares or otherwise benefit from AI companies doing well.
To the direct point: I've used AI for a lot of things. It's good, you can definitely build some things faster. It's far from perfect.
Also, if we were sooooo close to AGI, why would Anthropic and OpenAI continue hiring SDEs like mad, which they are? Why would Claude & co have embarassing bugs years after release (the glitchy scrolling bug, their websites being fully async in 2026!!)? Etc.
People just disagree, some people find that thought impossible unless their opponents are being paid, due to how obviously brilliant they are. And, that seems to be the minority position actually, mostly the discussion is the turkeys telling each other how Christmas is a myth.
The steam engine was invented in 1765 (+/-) but employment crashed in the textile industry starting in 1815, 50 years later.
LLMs were practically invented in 2017, 9 years ago.
Of course, software is software and we live in a faster age, but guess what, human needs and desires are infinite so requirements keep going up.
At this point I have 0 trust in purely agentic coding (i.e. the 0 supervision approach). YouTube randomly stops displaying subtitles, Gemini CLI (before its shutdown) and Claude Code suffer from constant refresh glitches, the Gemini and Claude mobile websites are synchronous, like we're living in the 60s (if I minimize Firefox both Claude and Gemini stop answering and Gemini until about 1 month ago would also lose my prompt - this is the kind of thing people were fired for in the past, etc). If this level of buginess is the best agentic coding can produce with unlimited state of the art mega corp tokens, software itself will collapse faster than the job market.
Claiming that there will be no more SDEs of any kind, worldwide, in max 2 years, is an extreme position.
I'm not even an SDE. If they're turkeys, AI boosters are pheasants :-p
And I know why the legitimate AI boosters do it. They were genuinely impressed by what they saw in agents, especially since many hated programming anyway. They extended the line into the future and assumed complexity was linear. These people looked at LLMs and agents and didn't see what was there, but what could be (frequently from a position of major SciFi consumers through their entire lives, as all techies are).
Optimism is a positive, extreme optimism is a great flaw.
> Claiming that there will be no more SDEs of any kind, worldwide, in max 2 years, is an extreme position.
Nobody said that. The claim is that within 24 months the models will have the capability required to replace all of us. I stand by that. How quickly that moves to everyone actually getting replaced is a social and economic question. There may very well be well be a long tail, I’m sure today you can find traditional weavers and barrel makers somewhere, they just happen to be economic novelties.
For the record, I’ll say that by 10 years out the profession is hollowed out enough for it to count as destroyed, and the process has already begun.
Ok... let's say the profession is destroyed. Who maintains all these ever increasing piles of code? Who figures out the requirements, who creates specifications? Who solves issues that are reported by users?
The timescale of this analysis is a big issue IMO- Covid hiring was all kinds of whacked out - with FANG companies competing to hire literally entire graduating cs classes.
I'd like to see a larger date range. The Stanford dataset starts in 2021 (covid, work from home, low interest rates, govt stimulus), which is one of the weirdest economic times in the last 100 years. It would be useful to see how Jrs are doing compared to ~10 years ago.
I don't get why people care about "the death of junior SWEs" and "its a big issue if there are no junior programmers to be the senior SWEs of tomorrow"
Just look at the writing on the wall, there will be no need for senior SWEs of any type within 1-2 years anyway, and shortly after that we won't need Staff SWEs, etc. People here are way too myopic. AI is progressing very fast. We went from hiring juniors in droves 3-4 years ago to basically proclaiming the death of junior SWEs. Who is to say this won't continue up the ladder?
AI will be good enough to replace all SWEs in any capacity - there is no point in "investing" in rebuilding this ladder when you can just invest in more GPUs (in the case of oai/ant/meta/google/etc). or just pay those aforementioned companies more in tokens if you are a smaller outfit.
> The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.
And how many people do you need for this? There are many roles where people are literally hired for their programming/engineering skill. Modern LLMs _largely_ commoditize that skillset.
There are not that many novel things to do, and even if there are, you don't need too many people to do them as LLMs give you more and more leverage over execution details.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadAll our good ideas come from senior level people drawing from a rich history of experience and bold vision.
While experience is important, it also creates blind spots as it's quite hard to have every experience about a particular topic unless you have been working on that tool/stack alone for decades.
If it can be taught, an AI can do it. The only work left is either manual or inherently new.
Absolutely not the case now. Maybe it will be in future, but that's basically impossible to predict.
Doubtful.
You'll be expected to produce much more, you aren't likely to see raises commensurate with the increased productivity, and the AI tide is still rising and will likely eventually put downward pressure on your pay at an increasing rate.
Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist.
The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.
An anecdote - A neighbor who's an accountant was able to vibe code a Salesforce replacement for her company using Claude Fable and saved her company hundreds of thousands of dollars of fees. Claude wrote her an agent loop for maintenance. That's distribution of intelligence. That's breaking boundaries. That's democratization.
Going to college and expecting a job is privilege. You need to be able to put a 100k down. Jobs are based on citizenship whereas AI is available to all. Juniors will be in good hands. Elon and Altman have talked about UBI. With LLMs they control their destiny.
At this point every statement that contains "democratization", coming from a tech person, is almost guaranteed to reduce our rights in the long run.
Turns out that as admitted, the opposite was true and was predictable. Such that, in late 2024 [0], I predicted that there would be more layoffs in 2025.
> In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight.
Of course they would. Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?
Surely that makes all of this even cheaper? False. Just ask Apple. [1] Or Boeing [2] [3] with their expensive offshoring and their trade secrets either leaked or the quality degraded.
And those drunk on token usage are now limiting it because it is expensive. Ask Meta, Tesla, Amazon and Microsoft why they are not "tokenmaxxing".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/06/12/boeing-...
[3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513787/boeing-and-the...
80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.
I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?
I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.
The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
It's a job, working for someone else. What other reason is there?
Remove the need to pay bills and you'll be left with no one applying for a crappy job making money for someone else.
Implementing the craft has nothing to do with putting up with employment and employers, workplace harassment, waking up at unhealthy hours, wasting most of one's time awake doing things for someone else...
our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something new, and our interview process is largely centered around getting to know them as a person what they're all about and we seem to do an okay job triangulating "this kid is curious, seems like they'd glue well with everyone here". mildly grill on some technical stuff but mostly just to get a read on where they're at & make assessments on what we're willing to teach.
at this point we've reasoned out that the normal requisition is just going to get an influx of people who think they're charmers and can rehearse an interview and then pan out to be a nothingburger. we've had a couple of those in the past few years and it's annoying. we don't hire often do but when we do we're just interested in having someone around that we like and seems eager to learn, we've had great luck with this formula and this seems to pluck out people who get lost in a sea of incredible looking resumes, we give them a good learning track and goals and they seem to leapfrog past every goalpost we've put in front of them. as far as juniors go, we like hearing about other weird non-computer problems they've solved in life. when we find the right candidate we kind of just know when we talk with them, they universally are pretty open about their own shortcomings but just demonstrate some sort of very passionate need to build or solve things. we see the mission as needing to build them up as a person first and the nerdy stuff is the fun sidequest they can join us and chase dopamine with. we all enjoy teaching & watching people grow so it works out pretty well.
How so? I am curious what cheating you are experiencing and how you detect it.
I'm curious what they do to cheat during interview?
Imagine my horror when I found out recently both of them have a computer science bachelor's degree from a UC Santa Cruz.
This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.
People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.
The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.
We've always had people developing, in many forms. Scientists of all kinds, usually with Python, finance people with Excel, etc.
I think that yes, they can go a lot farther now. So this will make the bottom of the software curve grow 10-100x.
Now, the real question for developers is: what does this do to the middle and top or the curve? In my experience that's where maintenance comes in and anyone who's not a trained software developer (and even many SDEs) break their necks. "Casuals" will build what their need, but even with AI guiding them, it's still spaghetti.
It's going to be interesting keeping an eye on this, for sure.
I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired?
By "project" do you mean "product"?
What changed is tolerance of failing to meet that standard. That's how layoffs after overhiring happened. The bar was not raised, but moved back to where it was prior to the mid-2010s.
Anyway, it also depends on who is doing the interviews. If your "hobby" projects are built similar enough to what they have at that workplace, then the interview should feel like you're already working there for both you and them. Having absolutely no professional experience is going to automatically put you at a disadvantage. If you know of any startups, even if they're awful places to work, I'd much rather have a couple years of that on my resume than any internship.
What I was really saying is that someone who has been a teacher for a while and then learned to code with AI is now far more likely to get hired at an education software company than someone fresh out of college with a degree in CS. That's the way it should be! That's genuine progress. They may not end up in a coding role, but they'd absolutely crush it as a project manager.
Huh. That's my situation... Sort of. Been programming since I was a kid but went into another field. That gave me hope, thank you.
Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.
The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.
Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.
The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.
Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.
The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.
It will also be interesting to see 2019 through 2021. There was a glut of hiring post COVID and companies have to think about every dollar they spend post ZIRP.
And I typically work as a data scientist, but my role has involved more and more software engineering over time, so that might be driving some of the changes also.
Anecdotally, I know one couple who is selling their house to move back to a tech hub for better job opportunities. Another couple working from a rural location recently had one partner lose their big tech job. If the laid-off partner doesn’t get a new job in the next few months, I expect that they will start talking about moving, too.
That's not the explanation according to this article [1].
> Or they lost their job while living elsewhere and had to move to the Bay to find a new one.
It is hard to afford Bay Area rents -- even if you have a job. I can't see someone looking for a job signing a 1-year lease at these rates. Also, unlike the old days, interviews are remote, being physically present in the Bay Area doesn't give you an advantage.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-stab...
The article you linked to seems to say only that employers have been unsuccessful at enforcing 100% in-office work. It does not say that people have been successful at keeping their 100% remote jobs in other states and far-off locations. Overall, we seem to be reaching a compromise where many are forced to live within commuting distance of their office but aren’t necessarily there every day. This compromise is what is pushing up rents from what I am seeing among my network.
In other words, “remote” and “hybrid” are not at all the same but you are using the terms interchangeably. You can’t live in Idaho and commute to SF three days a week without major inconvenience and expense.
The people who are succeeding are learning and playing and building their own experience they can demonstrate.
There's few shortcuts if any that last. It comes out in the wash quicker.
On the senior end there remains a gap and advantage between understanding of human vs understanding of AI on how best to approach or work through things.
I as a senior am still called in to consult and shoot down attempts to actually integrate it into the wider system without triggering a full technical review.
Also Fable 5 isn't "that impressive" as a lot of people have that kind of intelligence since 6 months+ by using combo of models and loops (I scored better on HLE than gpt-5.5 xhigh last January with some good tooling and 6x the cost), but for a lambda Claude Code user, I can see why it looks that good.
On the bright side, maybe that means the end of new javascript frameworks every 6 months :)
In my experience with all agents, including Fable, is that they work great when there is automated validation. But as soon as it needs to design something, it just keeps adding so much slop.
End result - 2 hours later it produced a convincing theory with lots of references, and burned a bunch of tokens too of course. just for fun we tried its suggestions and deployed them to prod. Guess what? Didn’t fix the issue. Alas, a human was needed after all.
either everyone’s working on toy problems, or they’re working on very cookie-cutter code. I’m really not sure. I DO remain impressed with Fable 5 but the idea that we’ll all be unemployed in 2 years is hilarious delusion. we’re already at the point where many organizations are stealing back some other AI spend.
And while we’re talking about hilarious delusions, perhaps you should look at the current capability curve of AI and weigh it against the constant stream of arguments for why it couldn’t have continued at every point and yet has.
Yes, the solution is to just burn more tokens.
In this case i had no empirics in the loop. The scenario was only reproducible under high api load. I could load test, but management isn’t eager to spend prod-like costs in staging (requires scaling opensearch a lot in stage). What can i say.
"Models can code well now but they cant do high level architecture" is just a logical fallacy. Its literally only true in this particular moment in time. But if they can code well, whose to say they wont architect well? And at that point, what do SWEs do? If anything, SWEs are in the critical path of automation for these AI labs anyway, so theres a very strong incentive to automate us out vs other professions, and it'll happen soon. All these random 1-off datapoints of "Fable 5 can't do X very idiosyncratic thing" are completely missing the point. 6 months ago, even attempting that problem with any "tool" would be totally intractable, and now it _just_ writes a slightly subpar solution. You can do some basic extrapolation here, its not that complicated.
Your best bet is to just chose a different career, or, if you still want to be in the software industry, be more enterprising.
I’m at 90%+ code AI generated by stats. I work in embedded systems. It still goes off the rails all of the time and needs a heavy hand to guide it. It does not currently feel like it will ever be truly able to operate independently. It’s a very useful tool, but it’s just not there yet in my day-to-day.
Obviously, YMMV.
I’m not sure what else there is to say. People who don’t want to see things won’t see them.
Honestly, the biggest improvement AI have brought me is the complete end of my imposter syndrome. People say comparison is the thief of joy,but in my case, previously invisible devs getting more visibility, suddenly pushing new code every week at the same pace as me but clearly without any understanding any of the underlying issues did wonder to my self esteem. I still consider myself among the worst of my group, but my group evolved from 'all devs I know' to 'the competents', which is very nice.
To the direct point: I've used AI for a lot of things. It's good, you can definitely build some things faster. It's far from perfect.
Also, if we were sooooo close to AGI, why would Anthropic and OpenAI continue hiring SDEs like mad, which they are? Why would Claude & co have embarassing bugs years after release (the glitchy scrolling bug, their websites being fully async in 2026!!)? Etc.
The steam engine was invented in 1765 (+/-) but employment crashed in the textile industry starting in 1815, 50 years later.
LLMs were practically invented in 2017, 9 years ago.
Of course, software is software and we live in a faster age, but guess what, human needs and desires are infinite so requirements keep going up.
At this point I have 0 trust in purely agentic coding (i.e. the 0 supervision approach). YouTube randomly stops displaying subtitles, Gemini CLI (before its shutdown) and Claude Code suffer from constant refresh glitches, the Gemini and Claude mobile websites are synchronous, like we're living in the 60s (if I minimize Firefox both Claude and Gemini stop answering and Gemini until about 1 month ago would also lose my prompt - this is the kind of thing people were fired for in the past, etc). If this level of buginess is the best agentic coding can produce with unlimited state of the art mega corp tokens, software itself will collapse faster than the job market.
Claiming that there will be no more SDEs of any kind, worldwide, in max 2 years, is an extreme position.
I'm not even an SDE. If they're turkeys, AI boosters are pheasants :-p
And I know why the legitimate AI boosters do it. They were genuinely impressed by what they saw in agents, especially since many hated programming anyway. They extended the line into the future and assumed complexity was linear. These people looked at LLMs and agents and didn't see what was there, but what could be (frequently from a position of major SciFi consumers through their entire lives, as all techies are).
Optimism is a positive, extreme optimism is a great flaw.
Nobody said that. The claim is that within 24 months the models will have the capability required to replace all of us. I stand by that. How quickly that moves to everyone actually getting replaced is a social and economic question. There may very well be well be a long tail, I’m sure today you can find traditional weavers and barrel makers somewhere, they just happen to be economic novelties.
For the record, I’ll say that by 10 years out the profession is hollowed out enough for it to count as destroyed, and the process has already begun.
LLMs/turtles all the way down?
Just look at the writing on the wall, there will be no need for senior SWEs of any type within 1-2 years anyway, and shortly after that we won't need Staff SWEs, etc. People here are way too myopic. AI is progressing very fast. We went from hiring juniors in droves 3-4 years ago to basically proclaiming the death of junior SWEs. Who is to say this won't continue up the ladder?
AI will be good enough to replace all SWEs in any capacity - there is no point in "investing" in rebuilding this ladder when you can just invest in more GPUs (in the case of oai/ant/meta/google/etc). or just pay those aforementioned companies more in tokens if you are a smaller outfit.
And how many people do you need for this? There are many roles where people are literally hired for their programming/engineering skill. Modern LLMs _largely_ commoditize that skillset.
There are not that many novel things to do, and even if there are, you don't need too many people to do them as LLMs give you more and more leverage over execution details.