Comment by tibbar

Comment by tibbar 3 days ago

This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by

a) getting really good at clarifying requirements

b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.

This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.

johnnyanmac 3 days ago

>Junior engineers can fight back against this by

Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue.

>This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas:

This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%.

And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.

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kaashif 2 days ago

Surely people who can't get a job aren't "junior engineers" - they're just graduates.
Junior engineers, i.e. people who have already been hired, can indeed fight back by getting really good at their jobs.
But you're right, it doesn't help you get hired if you can't even get an interview.

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- lnsru 2 days ago
  
  Being real good does not change the fact, that one is cost factor and at the end only a row in payroll spreadsheet. Junior with low salary and low compensation during layoff -> priority departure.
  Having in couple hours unannounced meeting. My boss told me over private channel, that he just got fired. It’s very interesting and the home mortgage does not really help today. I was really good. Better than expected and accomplished few optional projects. Looks like it didn’t help again.
  
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05 2 days ago

> learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.

This sounds almost word for word like The Onion’s classic: Secretary Of Labor Assures Nation There Still Plenty Of Jobs For Americans Willing To Outwork Robots

[0] https://theonion.com/secretary-of-labor-assures-nation-there...

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tibbar 2 days ago

Wow. That is ... too painful and true to life to really be funny at this point. But, ok, still funny.
To be fair, I meant something a little different -- something like -- learn how to be a robot priest who can get it to follow the desperate prayers of humans. And, like, how to unstick the robot arm when it accidentally punches through a wall. Etc.
Not that that is particularly comforting, in an existential sense. Maybe buys you a couple years till you have to pivot again.

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- bluefirebrand 2 days ago
  
  If "a couple of years until you have to pivot again" is all new grads have to hope for, they might as well forget it
  Instead they should start learning how to shoot guns and build pipe bombs.
  
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conductr 3 days ago

> when the bottleneck is communication + taste

That was the bottleneck in the industry when it was in growth phase, it's a mature sector now and it's all about efficiency and profit now. Speed to market and product iteration speed isn't the most important thing anymore, there's not a lot of innovation taking place. Outside the actual novel AI specific companies out there, of course, there are a few other spots of growth and exceptional companies but largely the kings have been crowned.

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echelon 3 days ago

Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees).

I'm genuinely curious.

I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand.

Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output.

From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now.

We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.

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raw_anon_1111 3 days ago

I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development.
I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc.
Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination.
Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder.
> We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
It seems to be working…
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...

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- Lio 2 days ago
  
  > GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK
  GenAI does not exist yet.
  
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  jcheng 2 days ago
  
  Generative, not general
  
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ookblah 2 days ago

this is honestly what i think is going to happen as everyone is still figuring this out and why for large companies i think they are walking into a giant ass trap and the execs can't or don't care to see it as long as it boosts the stock.
most people (read: MOST) working at X corp aren't going to be using AI to accelerate their work, they are going to "phone it in" like you said or buy themselves more time to do other stuff. i think with the onslaught of vibe and slop most people don't have a vested interest to go above and beyond to ensure quality as long as it works, even experienced devs. that's honestly probably what i'd be tempted to do.
where we see the most exponential gains will be people who are paid enough to care, smaller teams that have a direct vested interest in long term success (founding teams, etc.) or people paid to just clean up a mess.
hiring and the landscape will be super interesting to see in the next year or so. probably team structure will change drastically as well.

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