But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.

Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.

I think the problem is evaluation. They can't tell who the good juniors are with respect to the new skills that they are looking for, so they go for experience instead. It doesn't seem sustainable though for obvious reasons.

> AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.

New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.

Same here. The absolute star in my team is the youngest. But! I think what's happening is that the distribution in this age group has shifted. Essentially the absolute best (high IQ, super ambitious, great communicator, cracked builder types) are now even better positioned than ever before. But the majority of mass in this age category now suffers, i.e. everyone that's "good" or "very good" but not exceptional/brilliant.

The juniors I have seen don't even try to understand anymore what they are building. They don't understand the product, they don't understand the technology. So everything AI is building for them is nonsense. "Reviewing" it is impossible. Some of them think they are being extra clever having Claude process review comments for them. Even if you hire one, this way they are out the door within the month.

Let me guess: Your hiring manager is Indian and only hiring Indians?

I had a job search as well and same. Previous slam dunks that stalled at final interviews with someone who had a higher recommendation.

Fortunately I have some unique skills that allowed me to land a gig.

Our field started as a niche for geeks. For a long time, CS paid you the average for engineering work - hardly equivalent to six figures today for most with the exception of seniors. It's still like that on most of the world.

Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills or incredible hard work. Big tech is full of these people.

I'm not saying that was a bad thing at all, but it always felt unsustainable. CS salaries will decline and fewer people will want to be software developers, balancing the market. Then it may go back to where it came from with the geeks sticking around. No more coding bros. Maybe that's okay.

When I got my degree, I never expected more than a slightly above average salary. I do this because I love it and can't imagine myself doing anything else. I was lucky and I'll take the luck I had.

Thanks, it's been tough on him. I'm glad we're able to support him through this, others are not as fortunate.

He's looking into pivots now and taking flight lessons.

>All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.

If everyone's middle bench is a disaster, there's no one that did it right to contrast their poor decision-making. They're hiding the evidence that will help them skip accountability.

These executives are going to get some short-term performance based payout and move to the another company while talking up the "Bold AI transformation" they lead waaaay before any fallout kicks in. Notice how there's less "We moved to Cloud / on-prem" slop on LinkedIn? It's because the same people have a new bandwagon to chase.

It's not what the article or study are about. Theyre about entry level white collar jobs.

I think "junior software engineer" is more like the entry level job that people on HN care about

That sounds about right. There was a well-established funnel from schools directly into entry-level positions. Absent that funnel, it's not clear how getting those entry-level positions was ever especially straightforward outside of a very robust tech hiring environment over the past decade.

I got my first dev job by moving laterally within a company from customer support. Helpdesk aka “Helldesk” was a common pipeline for people. I don’t think those jobs are easy to get either now.

I feel like I never see anyone else say this. That was about when I got my career started and it was always difficult for me. And now it seems over despite all that work in the begining.

- knowing what to prompt

- directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails

- verification

- setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models

economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes

Upvoting this for asking the candid question that so many commenters dance around. I can't imagine a 22-year-old confidently walking into an interview (or getting introduced to a team) and assuring everyone that they have the "harness" or "guardrails" to confidently contribute at the level of a 10x engineer.

If we apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to this disruptive technology, I do believe AI will hit a "slope of enlightenment" where an AI-assisted Analyst is properly understood in industries and can take productive roles. Conveniently, this will probably coincide with a lower interest rate where companies have funds for a talent acquisition spree/rapid growth.

With that being said, today's graduates are stuck in an awful market with a lot of charlatans selling crappy online courses and bad ideas.

I imagine the meta will be “build a micro saas product that’s marginally successful” for younger folks. It’s trivial to make a product but you learn a lot seeing what the AI does wrong.

At that point AI will be significantly more advanced than today.

>"At some point, it will be cheaper to take the risk and train the junior entry person again"

I think they will have big problem finding people who will actually train those juniors by then.

>"A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing."

Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht

> I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.

A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.

The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.

If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.

Masters degrees are a way for people to spend longer in the education-costs-more-than-the-value-to-the-educator phase of their career.

> But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.

Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.

are you incharge of making those decisions at work?

maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.

I mean... yes.

Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not all of them, but for most the skills were portable. Several of the carriage-making businesses transitioned to automobiles. Studebaker and Oakland (which became Pontiac), for example. I'm sure the most experienced people lost big, of course, and we shouldn't minimize the damage done to people's livlihoods.

Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage.

It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.

This is unironically the best comparison.

maybe they became taxi drivers. But that too will be gone soon.

Can't beat capitalism + technological innovation.

You’re probably not wrong. I’ve gone from being essentially destitute as a child to what people would call “well-off” and having the context of both experiences is…eye opening.

I have moneyed acquaintances now that I never would have had before. For some of them the mere hint of their income being reduced in any way is enough to send them into spasms. These are people with enough money for their next 3 generations to live off of. Luxuriously.

I just don’t get it.

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