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"Between the time Mr. Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a “golden ticket” to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting."

The big question for me is how much of the reduction in available job for boot camp graduates is because of AI-assisted programming productivity boosts, and how much is because they are now competing with 100,000+ more experienced people who got laid off in the last couple of years (due to a retraction in market size after an over-exuberant hiring period by tech companies during the pandemic).

Anyone seen any credible studies about that?

	▲	hedora 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		For experienced developers, copilot and friends seem to be a slight win. (Maybe 2x one day out of five.) That’s as not as big a boost as, say, IDE autocomplete. However, for entry level Lego style coding, I can imagine it’s a bigger improvement. I’d be curious to see a study that breaks productivity gains out by task. (Including learning new languages/frameworks/code bases). My prediction is that the sorts of jobs coder camps target will get hit harder than most, because most productivity gains will be there. That probably implies that type of development training will need to focus more on higher level tasks, like incorporating requirements or making tactical design decisions.
	▲	mike_hearn 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Seems hard to do a credible study on that. You'd need hiring managers to answer "how many more bootcampers would you have hired in a counterfactual world without AI", which seems very hard and subjective. Intuitively you'd expect AI to be a big win for bootcampers. Their productivity is typically low because they're constantly hitting roadblocks and getting stuck, even on simple tasks. Unsticking them is an AI strong suit so they should be able to plough through tasks much more effectively despite still asking for the same low starting salaries. Problem is, AI also benefits the more experienced types, even if less. And if you can pick between a desperate senior or a bootcamper, and the price gap isn't that big, why would you go for the bootcamper? The senior will still be much easier to work with even if they both would have access to top of the line models. So it's got to be the layoffs (ending of ZIRP and COVID stimulus).
	▲	stevekrouse 27 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I 100% agree that this is the right question. My intuition is that higher interest rates, lower multiples, and layoffs are the cause. AI is just what we point to to give ourselves comfort that our smaller teams can accomplish as much as our bigger teams used to.

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Havoc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To me they never made sense in the first place - outside of ZIRP era that is which was very much a fluke. Something that someone from the street can pick up in a couple months isn’t likely to command an enduring market premium.

Doesn’t help that most of them taught precisely the things LLMs are good at. Boiler plate front end and a sprinkling of glue together back ends.

	▲	toast0 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		To the extent that they could be a somewhat reliable pipeline into a programming job, they made sense for people with reasonable programming skills (or perhaps capacity, if we're generous) and a lack of credentials. Can do the work, but can't get hired? Find a reasonable boot camp (hard), do the time and get access to their placement assistance. From there, now you've got work experience and will have an easier time getting through hiring pipelines. I think they were definitely oversold as the solution to everyone's lack of a good job, and some of them were outright scams.

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psunavy03 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Today: "We can save money! We don't have to hire all these junior devs!"

2035-2045: "Why does our software suck? Why is it so hard to find good senior devs and architects?"

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n_ary 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/yYVus

Opinion:

I am extremely tired of this same old bs about “almost 60% developers use AI”. Yes, 60% developers use AI because the previous glorious Google/Bing has drowned in slop and now my search for documentation of a particular library or an arcane question returns 100% SEO spam, so I need to ask claude(or my local llama running on ollama) and get a decent enough(albeit outdated) valuable result from which I can pursue more from somewhere. At no time does it mean that, AI is doing a significant part of my work, and no my IDE already generates all the code I need and no I am not going to blindly use the rote replication of the example from StackOverflow that the AI just generated when I said it to generate a particular function, because these examples are often not the best implementations.

The AI hype and the desperate lobbying is doing a lot of harm to our industry as a whole. We should see it for what it is, some rich naive dudes invested a lot of money because they feel FOMO from last gold mind rush if AirBnB/Uber/Netflix/Spotify era and is freshly burned from crypto dud hype, so they want to kill the industry by scaring away new folks and make everyone as lazy so we get slow frog boiled to accept garbage from these AI crop.

Also, the market and macro economy is unstable for almost 5 years now due to ZIRP expiring, random war, uncertain geopolitical power struggle, failed regulatory keep up allowing a handful of tech predators to acquire and extinguish new ideas and competitions and so many factors. It is just an uncertain time, money now flows on hype and not so much on good ideas because previous good hype has paved way to too much greed, and of course certain giants built too big of a moat and raised the bar and now the new management is milking the cows until the cows collapse in next few years when the new competition rise once the macro settles a bit.

I am optimistic, from next year, we will see a massive improvement in prospects(despite trump happened). We just need to hold on a bit.

	▲	_aavaa_ an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Reminds me of quote Sussman gave when asked about MIT switching away from Scheme: "Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course."
	▲	Suppafly 15 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>I am extremely tired of this same old bs about “almost 60% developers use AI”. I don't even believe that is accurate unless you're considering things like IDE autocomplete to be AI or assuming everyone using visual studio user is using copilot.