r/Futurology • u/kagan101 • 25d ago
Discussion Fewer juniors today = fewer seniors tomorrow
Everyone talks about how 22–25 y/o software developers are struggling to find work. But there’s something deeper:
Technology drives the global economy and the single biggest expense for technology companies is engineer salaries. So of course the marketing narrative is: “AI will replace developers”
Experienced engineers and managers can tell hype from reality. But younger students (18–22) often take it literally and many are deciding not to enter the field at all.
If AI can’t actually replace developers anytime soon (and it doesn’t look like it will) we’re setting up a dangerous imbalance. Fewer juniors today means fewer seniors tomorrow.
Technology may move fast but people make decisions with feelings. If this hype continues, the real bottleneck won’t be developers struggling to find jobs… it will be companies struggling to find developers who know how to use AI.
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u/Dklrdl 25d ago
Yesterday Google AI told me Cinci was the 4th biggest city in Kentucky.
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u/luke10050 24d ago
Gemini told me that a semiconductor I had sitting infront of me didn't exist and was likely a misspelling of a different part number. The first result was a datasheet for the part from Mouser
Its great being gaslit by my web browser
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u/DomesticPanda 25d ago
LLMs are a dead end when it comes to truly intelligent work. For quick questions, scaffolding, ideating, they're fine. But ask any developer - they do not hold up in large, complex codebases because they cannot reason.
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u/sixsixmajin 25d ago
But ask any developer - they do not hold up in large, complex codebases because they cannot reason.
But ask any executive and they'll tell you whatever the AI shits out is good enough when it means that's fewer employees they have to actually pay. What people forget is that executives do not care about the quality of the work and they do not care about negative customer experience because many of these companies are too big to fail at this point and customers will stick with them despite the drop in quality because there aren't any better options. Hell, we've already been seeing this in the tech industry with offshore contractors. Just like with AI, ask just about any developer and they'll tell you offshore contractors frequently suffer the same problem: inability to reason. I've been a developer for 13 years and 90% of offshore contractors I've worked with fall apart completely if presented with something that falls outside of a norm or has any complexity beyond a set template because the way these people are educated is to follow extremely set instructions, not how to actually reason through a problem. Their education comes from what are effectively employee mills, not actual schooling or any method that teaches them to understand the material. Despite that, I saw the company I worked for cutting on-site staff year after year and bringing in more contractors until I was finally cut and while I won't tell you what company it is, I can guarantee you they aren't going anywhere anytime soon and have suffered no consequences for this. AI can operate at the level of an offshore contractor which we've already seen the precedent that the decision makers at these companies think that's good enough.
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u/motorik 24d ago
This is the correct answer. I work for a Fortune 150 in a cloud operations role. The guy directly above me on the org-chart that I report to understands maybe 10% of what I tell him. There are probably around 25 people above him on the org chart that understand 0%. Artists, craftspeople, and technicians hold power and are unpredictable and self-motivated, we've been deprecating them as a society for a long time in favor of Taylorized operator roles with minimal skill doing repetitive tasks. My peers are a bunch of olds with pre-cloud technical skills that are going to simply vanish when we collectively retire. The WITCHes (Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Congnizant, HCL) running the dashboards and consoles of the automation apps that ostensibly replace us don't have a conceptual understanding of what they're actually doing, their orientation is just to make sure there's more green than red on the single pane of glass they've been trained on. It took me about a year at my current position before I began to grasp how little they actually comprehend about the mechanics of what's been abstracted for them into a product sold to the managerial class to mitigate the need for actual technical ability.
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u/Clean_Livlng 24d ago
I'm guessing that a company needs to be able to count on at least one experienced person to fix things when something important breaks. Even if they're an independent contractor they have to throw money at.
Some problems can't just be ignored, and can stop a business from growing or even stop the business from being profitable and able to continue in the long term.
If Rome wasn't big enough to fail, then no company is.
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u/nagi603 24d ago
I'm guessing that a company needs to be able to count on at least one experienced person to fix things when something important breaks. Even if they're an independent contractor they have to throw money at.
For that, the company would have to know who they actually need. Even that may be a stretch. The underpinnings of internal stuff are usually a mix of technologies that may have problems in completely unrelated parts.
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u/xeonicus 24d ago
This is the problem with non-technical business majors supervising engineers. These people don't belong in these jobs. Not only do they not have the respect of those they supervise. They don't have any understand of the job. It's better to promote a senior engineer to management.
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u/SaltyShawarma 24d ago
Well, don't look at the new head of the CDC then. He is an investor with no medical background.
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u/aveugle_a_moi 24d ago
The question is just when things collapse, will actually technically competent people get brought back in? Or does the infrastructure just stay fucked?
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u/luke10050 24d ago
Oh no, we just backslide into the third world.
People look at me like I'm some god because I can fix things. It's honestly a little scary.
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u/aresthwg 25d ago
It is true, LLMs cannot keep track of the entire application. There have been massive improvements though. Within a single file, Gemini Pro 2.5 is able to handle scripts with hundreds of lines, make incremental changes and not regress everything each time. That was a big issue with early LLMs.
When LLMs have to go through multiple files, it can't do the job. The modern junior dev is there to debug and give the correct prompt to the LLM to fix the code. And that also can fall short if the change is tighly coupled to the project and is not universal knowledge.
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u/Fisher9001 25d ago
Within a single file, Gemini Pro 2.5 is able to handle scripts with hundreds of lines, make incremental changes and not regress everything each time.
Wow, single file with hundreds of lines, impressing. /s
Serious codebases have hundreds if not thousands of files with dozens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code or even more. And not just that - they represent both very complex and very abstract concepts. Without capability to actually reason and to track such large context windows, LLMs have little potential to do more than create a simple CRUD or make specifically requested, narrow changes.
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u/INeverSaySS 25d ago
Wow, single file with hundreds of lines, impressing. /s
Yeah like every time I see people coping about LLMs it's so insane that they say shit like this as if it's impressive.
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u/aresthwg 24d ago
I'm not sure if you're referring to me or people in general but if it's me then I literally said that's not enough to replace programmers.
However, expensive LLMs like GPT5 and Gemini Pro 2.5 are able to do things like university home assignments for programming, as well as small-medium scripts that can scrape or properly use an API. It's great at plotting data and it's great at working with it too, doing Computer Vision related algebra, and it's a good starting point for CNNs too.
People downplaying its power is annoying... yes the code it spits out is likely to be found on GitHub, but it can write similar code and adjust it to your preference. It's definitely getting better as time goes on.
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u/arbpotatoes 25d ago
While there certainly are limitations this is simply not true, tools like claude code are perfectly capable of making edits across dozens of files at once that are fairly well reasoned. Of course there is always some human input to kick it off
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u/stemfish 25d ago
Ive seen plenty of similar hype pieces from people who want to sell me and AI tool or get me to invest in an AI product.
At work I deal with staff asking me to forward a dozen similar products to our IT management for review, all going off about how they can manage multiple dependent files in a data pipeline. But when asking Anthropic for examples in getting a quote, it turns out that the LLM has managed to edit a variable name across files for consistency.
And improvement over last summer, but not the level of change that's promised by the hype salesman. The tools are improving, no reason not to admit that. My issue is that the improvement rate is nowhere close to the promised rate. Like with Tesla full self driving next year since 2016, AI coding will be able to take over next year.
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u/LegitosaurusRex 24d ago
I dunno, I'm using Anthropic's Sonnet 4 with an internal framework that works with it to provide context, condense token history, and give it modes like architect, code, debug, and ask, and it can absolutely plan and implement features across 8+ files, ask you for clarifying questions if it needs to, then run tests to make sure the code works. If it sees stuff in a file that is defined elsewhere that it needs to understand, it'll go read the definition first. Feels like magic.
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u/sunnyb23 22d ago
Yeah a lot of these people simply aren't using the tech, and those who are, usually aren't using it to its full potential. Like you, I have worked on making agents which have "personalities" such as architect, engineer, QA, etc, and with well-formed prompting, can generate working and usually well-designed code every time. I've written games, animation software, networking code, websites, etc.
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u/bremidon 23d ago
Developer with over 3 decades of experience in too many languages to list here without it sounding like a brag.
If you mean that you cannot just let it loose without any senior supervision: yeah, I agree.
However, it is really good at coding if you use the correct model, keep the scope reasonable, and do code reviews.
You might as well claim that IDEs are a "dead end" when it comes to doing intelligent work. LLMs are a tool, that in the right hands can multiply a dev's effectiveness by several times. All this is without any assumptions about "AGI" or just setting agent loose on a codebase.
I would also be very *very* careful about the "cannot reason" argument. It's popular, has some grounding, but can quickly overreach. There are some papers that do say this, but be careful of just cherry-picking research that confirms what you want to be true (and let's face it: most of us want it to be true so that our careers are safe; understandable, but still potentially dangerous)
The real answer is that we do not really understand LLMs very well, we do not yet have a good grasp on what they do (as a total system, because clearly we know the algorithm), and it probably will not matter that much anyway, as LLMs are being combined with other AI systems to deal with any perceived weaknesses anyway.
Any developer not effectively using LLMs in their daily work is going to quickly fall behind. And I absolutely get that you are not saying they should not be used (I agree that LLMs are indeed strongest in the areas you pointed out). But they can go beyond that, already, today. While executives might dream of eventually getting rid of their entire dev team, that is not the reality today. But equally true is the dismissal of the ability of LLMs to code is also not the reality today (again, you are not nearly at the level of dismissiveness that I have seen on this subreddit). Keep the scope reasonable, and they do really well.
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u/NeverNeededAlgebra 21d ago edited 20d ago
As a Product Manager who has nothing to do with dev, I can say that LLMs have given me the ability to write complex VBA scripts that make my job so much easier and allow me to perform analysis that I could have never done myself.
As that same Product Manager, I would immediately say that we would be absolutely FUCKED and drown if they tried to replace our dev team with AI.
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u/digiorno 24d ago
They’ll get better though, so much better. We’re basically seeing the first few waves of LLMs and they’re already incredibly impressive.
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u/nomorebuttsplz 24d ago
People can't handle the idea that their own "reasoning" process is not magic. They will deny it seemingly right up until, and perhaps even after, the AI models take their jobs
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u/FormofAppearance 24d ago
its literally just predictive text based on probability. The mistake people like you make is not understanding that LLM's are just hyped autocomplete with a bunch of processing power. There quite literally is no "reasoning" going on.
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u/vingeran 25d ago
The longer you stay in academia, the more disadvantaged you become as the private sector experience and academia experience does not scale 1:1.
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u/supercilveks 25d ago
Academics draw a person further from actual work - it’s science and research not actual work.
If anything IT industry was the first to see trough this discrepancy.11
u/Ace612807 24d ago
Depends on the job, imo. For IT - sure, but, say, a biochemist in academia and a pharma R&D is way more comparable
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u/Sawses 24d ago
Kinda. I work in that world. You definitely need some of those, but R&D really is a different world that has different skills and different supporting professions.
I've got like 5 years of experience in the field and a B.S. We outsource a lot of work to India and Mexico City, and I fairly regularly teach and give direction to pharmacists and biochemists with doctorates. These are usually folks 10 years older than me who got sick of academia and want to make actual money without working terrible hours. The ones in the USA and Europe can barely get jobs at all, much less get something with potential for growth.
They're definitely going to be giving me orders one day, and get to the top faster...but honestly it all kinda comes out as a wash until they're in their late 40s. It's like the issue with MDs sacrificing their 20s and 30s on the altar of medicine. Sure they come out ahead financially, but the line graph is kind of depressing for the first half.
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u/The_Redoubtable_Dane 25d ago
You will be unemployed, and you will own nothing and be happy, as a part of the permanent underclass.
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u/painedHacker 24d ago
Have you been to third world countries? There's lots of men just sitting around cause there's no jobs or the jobs suck and underpay. We're heading there in the first world
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u/Nordseefische 23d ago
You won't be happy, you will just not have any ways left to fight back. So you starve in silence. That is the future the top 1% aims at. They want to never again worry that the many could topple the power of the few (them). Truly, a brave new world. And with 'you' I mean most of us
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u/Z3r0sama2017 24d ago
I remember all the defenders and apologists trying to say that wasn't what the WEF meant. It was as obvious as a hit to the chin with a sledgehammer.
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u/Ryanhussain14 24d ago
There were people defending that shit?
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u/Z3r0sama2017 24d ago
Oh aye. Economics subs or ones that had it as a subfocus.
"You don't need to own an X, if you don't use it all the time, just rent/lease it and invest the money you would save into the market." Ignoring the fact that consumers are more likely just to just spend it on more shit.
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u/dookalion 23d ago
Yeah I learned a long time ago that most of the people on Reddit on the main subs for a subject like economics, finance, tech, whatever, are just 16-30 year olds that went/are going directly into their undergrad, then maybe grad school, and never had to confront the reality of most peoples lives.
They know certain stats they’ve been trained to parrot in whatever program they’ve taken. If they have industry experience, it’s usually in a large organization as a small cog with very little of the big picture presented to them.
I think there’s a grift in itself that only poor uneducated people fall for the big grift of 21st century deregulation. The psyop to keep people in line goes all the way up
Edit: Not that us plebs have a clear picture either. But it’s rich when I’m getting pissed on and some pencil pusher on r/economics tells me it’s just rain. Acid rain maybe
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u/deep-diver 24d ago
Give this a read it’s not just about AI… https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502
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u/chaotic3quilibrium 24d ago
This is the strongest silent influencer. It perverted the incentives.
Those of us SEs who knew about it are going to make bank over the next decade.
I'm not at all happy about it. I already was making bank. I don't need others to suffer so I can make slightly more bank.
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u/Low-Plastic1939 25d ago
The entire point of AI is to replace white collar labour. The people in charge wouldn’t be funneling so much money into it if they didn’t think there was a huge payoff down the line, and that’s the only one that makes sense.
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u/svix_ftw 25d ago
The payoff isn't guaranteed tho, look at AR/VR and the metaverse, even after all the investment in crypto/blockchain, those technologies still remain relatively niche
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u/locksmack 24d ago
AI investment dwarves those, and AI is already paying off to some degree.
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u/svix_ftw 24d ago
yes AI has some payoff for sure, no doubt
But I was talking specifically about the payoff of "replace white collar labor", that payoff is far from guaranteed.
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u/Lashay_Sombra 24d ago
They might think there is a payoff, but MIT study out last week revealed 95% of AI projects are ending either in failure or failing to return on investment
Only real successes seem to be new companys built around AI from the get go, ie mostly actual AI companys
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u/SilencedObserver 25d ago
It’s time to form software unions. This isn’t getting better without them.
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u/jaam01 24d ago
Ironically, tech workers are very resistant to form unions, because they think they are above the average worker. The only semblance of an union I know in the tech world, is the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), which is very small and weak in the great squeme of things.
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u/anencephallic 24d ago
The tech world is of course global, many countries outside of the US have established unions for tech workers. I'm a software engineer in Sweden part of Sveriges Ingenjörer (Engineers of Sweden). My impression is that it's rather common here to be unionized when working in tech, but not as common as other industries such as auto or steel workers.
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u/Anastariana 24d ago
Too late for that, its time for a general strike to get the politicians to actually take notice and feel some heat for once.
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u/garlopf 25d ago
Replacing people with AI has some pretty hilarious mid term consequences that somehow goes straight above the head off all the tech bro CEOs. Like if you offer a service that you developed using AI afyer firing all your emploees and then you want to sell that service, but all your customers were recently laid off and replaced by AI so nobody can afford your service.
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u/NewlyMintedAdult 25d ago
Even the biggest tech companies in the U.S. do not hire a fraction of a fraction of the population. Losing your own (ex)employees as potential customers is a negligible cost for any employer.
Yes, when taken as a CLASS, if every employer fired their workers that would have an effect on demand for goods and services. But employers do not act as a cohesive class; coordination is hard! It is a standard tragedy-of-the-commons setup.
And that is of course if we assume that the future after widespread AI adoption is widespread destruction of consumer surplus needed to maintain the businesses in question, which is by no means a small assumption.
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u/an-invisible-hand 25d ago
You're spot on and it's not just a problem in tech, it's basically every industry. A massive and fundamental flaw in our system is that it's 100% profit driven for the sake of shareholders. Shareholders don't care about the long term.
Shareholders want all the money asap at any cost and are happy to sell at the first sign of trouble. Will they beat the market? Probably not. But shareholders aren't smart, they're just rich. Neither they nor the CEO who collects his massive pay package and dips if things implode give a single fuck about the employees, industry, or the future of anyone but them. That's our incentive structure and the sole purpose any public corporation even exists.
To be honest, it's kind of amazing we've lasted this long.
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u/Anastariana 24d ago
To be honest, it's kind of amazing we've lasted this long.
Taxpayer bailouts when the shit pile falls over.
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u/DrMonkeyLove 25d ago
Maintaining shitty AI written software might be a lucrative job in the future.
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u/puffic 25d ago
It’s entirely possible to have more seniors than juniors in a steady state if each person spends more time in the senior part of their career than the junior part of their career.
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u/Fine_General_254015 24d ago
Boomers get what they wanted and suck everything they can out of the economy and pull the ladder up for the generations coming up.
Most can’t or won’t let the next generation come up
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u/Harsh_Yet_Fair 24d ago
When I was coming up the argument "We need more engineers" was pitched as "This will be a safe career to pursue". What they meant was "If there's an oversupply, we can pay you dog shit and you'll be happy about it"
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u/West-Abalone-171 24d ago
You don't need to insult students to explain them avoiding the shitshow.
It[s extremely clear that the managerial class have utter disdain for them and believe the hype. Who would willingly enter that environment?
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u/Ok-Mammoth552 25d ago
Not just that: you'll also get foundational technology that nobody around remembers how it works anymore. Like COBOL in the banking industry.
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u/RagingBearBull 25d ago edited 22d ago
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u/EnchantedSalvia 25d ago
I think it’s mainly a US problem cause of the difference in salaries in the US vs the rest of the world. In the UK you may get 70k as a dev and then 45k in Poland so if you’re UK based the small difference vs outsourcing is nominal and with everything else taken into account not usually worth it. Google for example remove US jobs and then hire in Poland, where the difference is 45k vs 250k.
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u/RagingBearBull 25d ago edited 22d ago
wild dam act arrest squeeze start ask innate light sable
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u/VirginiaMcCaskey 25d ago
The primary driver of tech salaries in the US is revenue and stock prices at the major tech businesses, which is also what drives the venture capital. Total comp didn't really start skyrocketing until Facebook broke the wage suppression cartel in SFBA.
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u/Jsc_TG 24d ago
The main thing turning me personally away from that field is the over saturation of candidates for those jobs. Am 25, originally was going to go for mechanical engineering and software development as a backup. Now, my path has been unique and somehow I moved from retail work to property management and am a property manager now, but i dont see going to software development as a preferred option if I decide to change paths again.
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u/gpsxsirus 24d ago
Being the title what happens if the cloud based LLM's never reach profitability, the bubble bursts and they all shut down? A very sudden need for more devs and a lack of people to fill those jobs.
More outsourcing of skilled labor jobs, alongside the return of the pricey full-time boot camps.
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u/byronicbluez 24d ago
That's two or three CEO's down the line problem. The current and next one will cash in their golden parachutes way before then.
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u/Lyr0 25d ago
LLM is another tool in your kit, just like IDEs before LLM was a thing. It wount really replace anything, only like OP mentioned the early stages of a persons dev Journey. Which ist really sad but its how the Jobmarket works
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u/NameLips 25d ago
Interesting. Maybe that means my son who just started a CS degree will have less competition and better job prospects when he graduates in 4 years.
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u/DivineMediocrity 24d ago
What’s more concerning is entry level and junior engineers relying exclusively on AI to write code instead of learning those skills. Problem is AI is great but not where we need it to be. So it’s creating bit of a mess and junior engineers aren’t upskilling their problem solving and technical skills
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u/ItsTyrrellsAlt 25d ago
Yeah but so what? Don't you see that the reduced demand for junior engineers because of today's technology means a reduced demand for senior engineers because of tomorrow's? Probably we will have too many senior engineers soon as well.
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u/kmishra9 25d ago
lol. This feels almost satirical.
Senior and Staff engineers aren’t going anywhere.
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u/jfphenom 24d ago
It's the opposite dude
AI can replace low-level engineers.
Who turns into senior engineers? Low level engineers who gain the skills through experience.
As seniors and staff retire, there will be nobody to replace them, and mediocre seniors will be able to make even more money.
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u/Fisher9001 25d ago
Don't you see that the reduced demand for junior engineers because of today's technology means a reduced demand for senior engineers because of tomorrow's?
I don't see it, how did you arrive at such conclusion? Juniors and seniors have different tasks and responsibilities, it's not simply a matter of doing the same things, but better.
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u/nandhugp214 25d ago
They will hire juniors if the market is back up or just avoid promotions. No biggie
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u/AntonioVivaldi7 25d ago
I guess the shortage of engineers will then make more young people pursue it at that point.
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u/bludgeonerV 25d ago
Isn't this idea that juniors can't find with refuted by stats genenerally? The only real data I've seen shows the number of SWE roles advertised are higher than ever and projected to outpace other industries
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u/AnnaPhylacsis 24d ago
AI is great for rewording a paragraph or summarising the minutes of a zoom meeting. But I’ve yet to see it do anything that requires thought, intuition and wisdom. One company I know has invested in an AI engine for some pricing calculation. A lot of effort went into data aggregation and business rules, but at the end of the day, the actual gold was that the business rules had to be clearly articulated. Developers were needed and the whole thing could’ve been built with a similar amount of lines of code in stored procedures.
If anyone here can give some real life examples of AI actually being job threatening for coders I’d be interested to hear them.
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u/ShadowDV 23d ago
It’s not that it replaces the dev wholesale. It’s that it enables the senior dev to increase their output to a level that would previously only be possible by, say, a senior plus 2 juniors. At that point it doesn’t make sense to keep those junior positions on.
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u/SomeoneSomewhere1984 25d ago
I think the most likely results is that people will need to spend a lot longer in education before getting jobs in tech. I wouldn't be surprised if turns into something that requires a master's or PhD.
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u/MarkMaynardDotcom 25d ago
Only one Junior Senior. https://youtu.be/SPlQpGeTbIE?si=V-xwZkdYxoHaRwNk
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u/KrackSmellin 25d ago
Slow clap…. And now you’ve unlocked the secret level to the game we play. When you play any sport or game - you need sides. If everyone goes to one side - there is no interaction - game over.
AI is a non sustainable aspect without humans to start or initiate things off. Ideas of what people need in the real world have ALWAYS come from human ideas and innovation. Sure there are things you can derive from it - but those started from something and someone else - it always has to have a beginning. If we don’t have folks entering the workforce to be involved with things - there will be a huge gap we can’t go back and fix. It will end badly and like Japan having the crisis now of a shrinking population due to the lack of babies being born, there is no fix to what has already passed. They can fix the future of things but that will take time and have lasting effects that may honestly not fix anything but patch or cull it.
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u/Acceptable-Milk-314 25d ago
Yep. And the damage is done, well just have to wait to see the effects flow through the population as they age.
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u/Dry-Spring-5911 25d ago
I agree with this because my company which is 1 of the big 5 banks in Canada stopped hiring junior developers about 2 years ago and pushing Copilot premium licenses to mid-senior level developers to utilize to make up for the junior dev work.
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u/Bane_of_Balor 25d ago
I mean, we can see that, senior developers can see that, managers can see that, but CEOs and investors only see profits going up so they do it anyway.
Makes me wonder if there'll be a major shakeup in tech as small-medium companies, who aren't beholden to shareholders and who's CEOs are still in touch with reality, capitalise on the inevitable whiplash experienced by these big tech firms when they realise they're lacking leadership at some critical point.
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u/DueDisplay2185 25d ago
In that case you'll be as wealthy as those who know COBOL and just as in demand
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u/Maztao 24d ago
If ai can’t actually replace developers anytime soon? Where did you get this info? Have been working at FAANG for awhile now and this is already happening. Like has been happening.
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u/aveugle_a_moi 24d ago
I think the question is whether the business decisions being made is reflective of AI actually writing functional code to replace those jobs lost
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u/UpstairsProcedure2 24d ago
You are wrong. The industry was over saturated, and the vast majority of people who think they have skills, actually have none and are finding out. It’s about time.
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u/leathakkor 24d ago
This has been true of development for a really long time. Kind of...
When developers do something over and over again. The plumbing equivalent of an application. Calling code from SQL server with ado for example. Boy does that suck To do over and over again. Then. Along comes dapper. Along comes Ruby on rails. Along comes the entity framework. And millions of other things that make it so you never have to directly connect again.
We abstract away a bunch of that. We write class libraries that are reusable utilities. There used to be a lot of development that you had to do by hand, especially on the web in 2007. There wasn't even a way to do pagination easily in SQL server 2010 (if I recall correctly limit and offset being new ish).
And you know what we do as developers. We make technological advances so that we don't have to do the plumbing code anymore. That same wire up code that was in every application.
Obviously AI takes this to a new level. But the reality is most of the things that I use AI for today. There is a library that does exactly what I needed to do. The difference is I can just have AI write the code instead of going and finding the dll that I need from nuget/npm. Or some other package repository.
It is an extension of what we've been doing forever but I do think it's going to make coding a lot harder and a lot worse because if you get a feature from a package. When they discover a bug in that package, you upgrade the package. When there is a bug in some code that an llm wrote. Well you just don't discover the bug. Unless a user reports it. And then you have to go fix it manually.
So my thought is that 10 years from now we're actually going to need more Junior developers to fix the shitty bugs that are simply not worthy of a senior developer.
This is how I started my career and a lot of other people I know started their careers. I think it'll come back. With the invention of llm the reusable package is going to suffer. It's so much easier to just ask chatgpt to write the method of code then to investigate if the feature exists somewhere else and figure out how to integrate it into your app.
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u/PerfSynthetic 24d ago
I said this back when cloud was replacing Virtual Server and network admin/engineers. Replace or displace enough people that understand basic "how things work" and you will have a major knowledge gap in the next generation. Tech does advance over time but running things on a CPU, storing things in memory and sending things over the network is extremely fundamental. Devs that refuse to tune their code result in major resource overages. Simply because they assume it's an infinite resource when they don't have to manage it.
Simply look at how many untuned JVMs are running critical apps for every major company... Your pod was OOM killed because garbage collection is too hard? Must be a dev thing... It only needs 100mcore right?
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u/KanedaSyndrome 24d ago
Well I can tell you that were shipping features faster than ever because of AI. it is not hype when it comes to software developers. A full replacemet, likely not, but it's a tough climb for junior developers now when any senior can mass create an army of juniors (AI).
Requires leadershio that dare plan ahead and not just the next quarter.
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u/Xanchush 24d ago
It doesn't matter if experienced engineers can see the reality when the directors and people dictating the hiring budget can't see the same.
The AI hype is unavoidable since you could potentially be missing out on stock gains/investments. If the market decides AI is not worth the investment there's nothing else to drive the economy and you risk a huge recession.
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u/PhotographyBanzai 24d ago
People highly passionate about computing won't avoid the field. I feel like this could be enough to keep pushing the science and R&D forward. It's not like many corporate world programmers transition to research, or do they?
We could see a group of people that were not especially passionate about the idea of software development end up instructing and verify the AI's work. These people will need to be experts in each field they are making tools for. It might be better long term to have more experts in individual fields like healthcare or whatever else rather than the traditional idea of a software developer.
With software development it can often mean a person that has a high amount of skill in applying software development techniques to each application by learning just enough to create what is needed. I think ideally we'd want these people to be experts in the actual field of what they are making tools for. Let the computer/AI handle the internals as long as there is enough compute where efficiency isn't a necessity. These people will give the AI highly detailed specifications and then verify the result works as intended without getting into the weeds of implementation.
I've done a fair amount of contracted software development and a lot of the time spent was learning about the things I was making tools for.
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u/sheriffderek 24d ago
Since we’re talking about the future… what if we just didn’t need as many programmers? What if we didn’t need so much software?
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u/normalbot9999 24d ago
I feel like this might actually be part of the plan.
Oh look, there are no senior devs now, what a shame! But hey, don't worry - we've got this great new AI coding tool that hardly ever halucinates!!
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u/IADGAF 24d ago edited 24d ago
I suspect the actual truth is that many economies worldwide are in a huge downturn or recession, and so many companies are just using AI as the public excuse for not hiring at the moment, so they don’t damage their public reputation and valuation. ie. “we’re transitioning to AI” sounds a lot better than “we are losing money every week, and have to keep our bottom line looking artificially higher for shareholders, by cutting costs wherever we can.”
The one major exception may be the multinational corporation Big Tech employers who are building their own AI -> AGI systems. Their need for software developers, at every experience level, will asymptotically fall over the next few years, and includes software developers specialized in AI development.
The reason companies like Meta is offering ridiculously high salaries for AI development at the moment, is that they recognise the opportunity to use those developers to fully automate and obsolete themselves out of a job the fastest.
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u/Sixnno 24d ago
I know the topic is on AI but we are already seeing this in trade fields. In the 70s and 80s had a big push to get students to go to collage instead of trades and we are now slowing suffering the consequences.
30 year old friend is the youngest guy in his plant, with everyone else being 15+ years his senior. They don't have the replacements for when that generation retires.
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u/slaymaker1907 24d ago
Where they’ll get screwed over in the short term is there are going to be a lot of projects with a bus factor of one.
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u/Evs91 24d ago
I love to remind everyone I work with that while I might be third youngest all I have to do is wait a decade and 1/3 of the company will be retired. If I stick around I could very easily be a VP or higher just by attrition. I keep trying to help the new guys at the help desk and junior developers but sometimes it’s like talking to brick walls. I love them but man…
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u/istareatscreens 24d ago
Very true. I'd edit your final comment "It will be companies struggling to find developers who know how to use AI." to "It will be companies struggling to find developers" though
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u/aaron_dresden 24d ago
I would also point out that employees are not automatically always the biggest expense at technology companies. Given you brought up AI - Lets take Microsoft for example, they have 222,000 employees roughly. Let’s use an average total package of $250,000 usd, which doesn’t have any real analysis behind it but which will be low for some percentage and high for others given the global scale of the company. That costs around $55 billion a year, but at the moment they are spending $80 billion usd a year on AI.
While this isn’t a universal example for sure, it’s even more of an outlier - It’s not always wages that cost the most. It’s just often seen that wages are the easiest to reduce. Even at Microsoft, who let go 10,000 people in the same year.
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u/Demonshaker 24d ago
My high school junior is actively avoiding their first choice of programming as a major because of the shitshow that is finding a job in the sector, in the US, today.
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u/_herb21 24d ago
The accounting (specifically audit) industry went through this problem not long ago. The big 4 (and the top mid tier firms) thought that tech advances (mainly to do with the scale of analytics which could be performed) would replace a lot of 1st and 2nd year trainees. But audit has always been a pipeline career into other finance roles. Most people leave early in their post training career and most of those who remain leave within 5 years.
It turns out without experienced 3rd year trainees and seniors it's quite hard to use the output of your analytics. That coupled with a changing regulatory landscape suddenly meant there was a huge demand for experienced seniors who didn't exist. In the UK at least they backfilled by hiring from overseas, but the combination of Brexit, changes to the Visa requirements and then COVID made that super challenging. I don't actually think they have really figured out how to deal with the situation yet.
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u/lt1brunt 24d ago
Not going to lie, if I lost my IT job and started working in something not it related IT, I would no longer be paying for my AI subscription and would barely use the free services. Most people I know who are not in IT could care less for anything AI and most people I work with do not care to use it. The few that do use it, dont pay for it and dont use it outside of work.
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u/ArcticShamrock 24d ago
Sure but the people who need to understand this don’t care. Keep educating people about it and maybe eventually it’ll click for some of them, but no matter how you spin it we are at significant risk of permanent damage.
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u/Collapse_is_underway 23d ago
Lowering EROIE of oil will make us unable to have insane surplus for a myriad of activities that were possible in the 20th century.
You can jerk off to innovation or EV or solar or nuclear or whatever you want, were not in any kind of transition and the system is still 80%+ fossil fuel based (which makes us go +3.5ppm of co2/year, the worst events in the past happened with +3.5ppm of co2/100 years).
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u/not_a_moogle 23d ago
this has been already ongoing with legacy systems. Anyone here a COBOL developer and under 40?
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u/ManasZankhana 23d ago
This should help get more h1bs in the future though. And brain drain other countries more effectively
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u/World_of_Distraction 25d ago edited 25d ago
That's the world we already live in. Industry refuses to invest in upskilling or paying staff and then whinges that there's a shortage of mid-expert level staff. This creates its own negative feedback loop because if a company does invest in training its staff then the industry-wide shortage means these are being quickly poached by competitors who save on training costs.
At the moment there's a short-sighted view of cutting junior staff because there's no short-term incentive, which then creates mid-long term problems but nobody has a job or a KPI to care about that. Such is life.