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 cost effectiveness of those tokens will only get better over time, until they are competitive in cost : intelligence when compared to any human SWE.

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theamk 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Nah, TFA states it very well:

> The jobs disappearing are the ones where the work product is code written to spec. The jobs growing are the ones where the work product is judgment about what code should exist.

AI is happy to follow instructions, no matter how stupid, unoptimal or unnecessary those are. To be successful, you need someone to understand the details and make the decisions.

And while that "someone" could be a person that does not go in the details and doesn't understand the code, they would be equivalent of non-technical CEO - sure, those exist, but they have a much harder time creating successful products.

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boshalfoshal 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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.

	▲	theamk an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> There are not that many novel things to do, I am currently work on embedded / low-level / devtools and there are tons of novel things to do. Perhaps the "programming" skills are not needed as much, but demand for "engineering" is as high as ever. Maybe it's the case in web dev? TFA shows that the number of "web developers" is decreasing strongly.