Thank you, and yeah agreed that, for now, it's not replacing everyone.

  > Investing in relationships has been the key job security hack for me

Connections frequently take precedence over skill! It's hard to determine skill through a piece of paper and some coding exercises under pressure. But a connection give a good signal on that and truth is almost no job requires maximizing skills (exception is at the bleeding edge and even there not always). It's also a signal about soft skills, trusting the connection isn't going to suggest someone that's difficult to work with.

I think it's easy to miss because we're often so data focused and because we want meritocracy. But the truth is you can't measure everything and not everything that's measurable is easy to measure. It takes more work to determine if some junior from a no name school is better than someone from a prestigious school. By connections make that easier to determine just like the prestige of the school serves as a signal, even if noisy. I think it's important to remember how this compounds too. Like your first year undergrad at Stanford is probably at a very similar experience level to a first year at a community college. But that gap widens and the gap isn't only due to coursework and lecturers.

Yeah, very helpful to have a solid network like that. My other job offer was from a previous manager wanting to recruit me.

But yeah, tough out there to land your first job right now.

I think this generalizes poorly. A junior can use an AI to learn (just like anyone) but a junior is also much more likely to feel the pressures of getting things done quickly and not taking the time to understand what was written. A junior is also less likely to be about to identify when the AI makes errors as well as when accurately describe the demand to the machine.

I see people refer to AI as "training wheels" but even training wheels force you to learn balance while riding a bike. They just give you more flexibility in how much you can lean. But AI, it is easy to just accept the answers and treat it like a black box. There is no need to practice the actual skills of a developer: designing algorithms, analyzing, testing (designing tests!), reading code deep with a code base and learning how it connects, interpreting asks and determining appropriate ways to solve those problems (a big part of experience is having fewer unknown unknowns. Known unknowns are incredibly valuable)

While all that is possible with AI, I don't see it happen often in practice due to other pressures. And with AI it seems there's just become increasing pressures to get more done faster. But a junior still needs time to learn. We all do, but juniors need more and have less experience and ability to find this time

“AI”—assuming you mean LLM-based coding assistants—don’t learn. All they have is the context you give them. Seniors may learn how to manipulate that context to get better results over time, but that’s not the AI learning in any meaningful sense.

That kinda made sense except for "When a junior uses AI the junior learns"