Comment by ramesh31
2 days ago
No one's getting replaced, but you may not hire that new person that otherwise would have been needed. Five years ago, you would have hired a junior to crank out UI components, or well specc'd CRUD endpoints for some big new feature initiative. Now you probably won't.
> well specc'd CRUD endpoints
I’m really tired of this trope. I’ve spent my whole career on “boring CRUD” and the number of relational db backed apps I’ve seen written by devs who’ve never heard of isolation levels is concerning (including myself for a time).
Coincidentally, as soon as these apps see any scale issues pop up.
[dead]
On the other hand, that extra money can be used to expand the business in other ways, plus most kids coming out of college these days are going to be experts in getting jobs done with AI (although they will need a lot of training in writing actual secure and maintainable code).
Even the highest ranking engineers should be experts. I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best.
Using AI isn’t rocket science. Like you’re talking about using AI as if typing a prompt in English is some kind of hard to learn skill. Do you know English? Check. Can you give instructions? Check. Can you clarify instructions? Check.
> I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best.
Because junior engineers have no problem with wholeheartedly embracing AI - they don't have enough experience to know what doesn't work yet.
In my personal experience, engineers who have experience are much more hesitant to embrace AI and learn everything about it, because they've seen that there are no magic bullets out there. Or they're just set in their ways.
To management that's AI obsessed, they want those juniors over anyone that would say "Maybe AI isn't everything it's cracked up to be." And it really, really helps that junior engineers are the cheapest to hire.
> plus most kids coming out of college these days are going to be experts in getting jobs done with AI
“You won’t lose your job to AI, you’ll lose it to someone who uses AI better than you do”
Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call.
At least in my personal case, struggling with renewal at Virgin Broadband, multiple humans wasted probably an hour of everyone's time overall on the phone bouncing me around departments, unable to comprehend my request, trying to upsell and pitch irrelevant services, applying contextually inappropriate talking scripts while never approaching what I was asking them in the first place. Giving up on those brainless meat bags and engaging with their chat bot, I was able to resolve what I needed in 10 minutes.
Its strange you have to write this.
In India most of the banks now have apps that do nearly all the banking you can do by visiting a branch personally. To that extent this future is already here.
When I had to close my loan and had to visit a branch nearly a few times, the manager tells me, significant portion of his people's time now goes into actual banking- which according to him was selling products(fixed deposits, insurances, credit cards) and not customer support(which the bank thinks is not its job and has to because there is no other alternative to it currently).
> Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call.
In IT, if at a minimum, AI would triage the problem intelligently (and not sound like a bot while doing it), that would save my more expensive engineers a lot more time.
This is mostly because CS folks are given such sales and retention targets; and while I’ve never encountered a helpful support bot even in the age of LLMs, I presume in your case the company management was just happy to have a support bot talking to people without said metrics.
“brainless meat bags” have you ever thought they are instructed to do so to achieve product selling quotas?
Anyone who blindly follows orders is a brainless meat bag too.
2 replies →