Comment by anonymous908213

This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a networking service, something which is not really made clear until near the end.

The article is self-serving in identifying the solutions ("do things related to the service we offer, and if that doesn't work, buy our service to help you do them better"), but it is a subject worth talking about, so I will offer my refutation of their analysis and solution.

The first point I'd like to make is that while the hiring market is shrinking, I believe it was long overdue and that the root cause is not "LLMs are takin' our jerbs", but rather the fact that for probably the better part of two decades, the software development field has been plagued by especially unproductive workers. There are a great deal of college graduates who entered the field because they were promised it was the easiest path to a highly lucrative career, who never once wrote a line of code outside of their coursework, who then entered a workforce that values credentialism over merit, who then dragged their teams down by knowing virtually nothing about programming. Productive software engineers are typically compensated within a range of at most a few hundred thousand dollars, but productive software engineers generally create millions in value for their companies, leading to a lot of excess income, some of which can be wasted on inefficient hiring practices without being felt. This was bound for a correction eventually, and LLMs just happened to be the excuse needed for layoffs and reduced hiring of unproductive employees[1].

Therefore, I believe the premise that you need to focus entirely on doing things an LLM can't -- networking with humans -- is deeply faulty. This implies that it is no longer possible to compete with LLMs on engineering merit, and I could not possibly disagree more. Rather than following their path forward, which emphasises only networking, my actual suggestion to prospective junior engineers is: build things. Gain experience on your own. Make a portfolio that will wow someone. Programming is a field that doesn't require apprenticeship. There is not a single other discipline that has as much learning material available as software development, and you can learn by doing, seeing the pain points that crop up in your own code and then finding solutions for them.

Yes, this entails programming as a hobby, doing countless hours of unpaid programming for neither school nor job. If you can't do that much, you will never develop the skills to be a genuinely good programmer -- that applied just as much before this supposed crisis, because the kind of junior engineer who never codes on their own time was not being given the mentorship to turn into a good engineer, but rather was given the guidance to turn them into a gear that was minimally useful and only capable of following rote instructions, often poorly. It is true that the path of the career-only programmer who goes through life without spending their own time doing coding is being closed off. But it was never sustainable anyways. If you don't love programming for its own sake, this field is not likely to reward you going forward. University courses do not teach nearly effectively enough to make even a hireable junior engineer, so you must take your education into your own hands.

[1] Of course, layoff processes are often handled just as incompetently as hiring processes, leading to some productive engineers getting in the crossfire of decisions that should mostly hurt unproductive engineers. I'm sympathetic to people who have struggled with this, but I do believe productive engineers still have a huge edge over unproductive engineers and are highly likely to find success despite the flaws in human resource management.