Comment by DrewADesign
3 days ago
Yes, unfortunately the boring parts are what junior devs used to do so the senior devs could work on the good stuff. Now that AI is doing the boring stuff nobody has to hire those pesky jr developers anymore. Yay?
The problem is that junior developers are what we make senior developers with— so in 15 years, this is going to be yet another thing that the US used to be really good at, but is no longer capable of doing, just like many important trades in manufacturing. The manufacturers were all only concerned with their own immediate profit and made the basic sustainability of their workforce, let alone the health of the trades that supported their industries, a problem for everyone else to take care of. Well, everyone else did the same thing.
> The problem is that junior developers are what we make senior developers with— so in 15 years
In 15 years senior developers will not be needed as well. Anyway no company is obliged to worry about 15 years timescale
And nobody is obligated to make sure they aren’t walking off of a cliff.
Most people don’t share your confidence that we will replace senior engineers and I’d gobsmacked if we could. Just like the magical ‘automation’ can’t replace the people that actually make the physical things that the machines use to do their jobs, or fix the machines, no matter how good it gets. But the quantitatively-minded MBAs just kept kicking the can down the road and assumed it was someone else’s problem that the end of the road was approaching. It wasn’t their problem that there would be a problem in 30 years, and then it wasn’t their problem when it was 10 years, and now that we’re standing at the edge of a cliff, they’re realizing that it’s everybody’s problem and it’s going to be a hell of a lot more painful than if they’d had an extremely modest amount of foresight.
Now, US manufacturers are realizing that all of their skilled laborers are retiring or dying, and there isn’t enough time to transfer the more complex knowledge sets, like Tool and Die making, to a new set of apprentices. Many of these jobs are critical not only to national security, but also our country’s GDP because the things we do actually make are very useful, very specialized, and very expensive. Outsourcing jobs like making parts for fighter jets is really something we don’t want shipped overseas unless we want to see those parts pop up on aliexpress. If nobody is responsible for it and nobody wants to fund the government to fix it, but it is a real problem, it doesn’t take a genius to see the disconnect there.
It’s yet another place where we know our own capacity as a society is shrinking and hoping that ??? (Ai? Robots? Fusion?) will fix it before it’s too late. I never thought programming would join elder-care in this category though, that came as a surprise.