Comment by phtrivier
2 days ago
> Juniors need to leap into their careers and build up a good head of steam by demonstrating acquired experience,
Junior devs at least have the option of building a portfolio of usefully software on their own machine at home, while eating ramens.
They can build websites for mom'n'pop stores. They can participate into open source projects. Etc, etc...
I dread the people who won't get jobs into other fields because managers have been told by corporate that "we don't need people, chatgpt can do everything".
> while eating ramens
For many, even cutting their budget isn’t enough to pursue what you’re describing. Modern careers in software are very hard to reach for people who can’t afford to wait for a real paycheck, and it drives away a massive group of potential talent.
> Junior devs at least have the option of building a portfolio of usefully software on their own machine at home, while eating ramens.
Bold of you to assume today’s young adults can live without a steady paycheque that doesn’t suck up 40-80hrs of their time a week. I mean, how else will that roof end up over their heads?
And most parents have been brainwashed to believe that any child not living on their own once they become adults are failures, and still need to be kicked out of the house such that they are forced to learn self-sufficiency.
AFAICT, most parents of adult offspring have zero clue about how bad things actually are out there, with most still telling their children to go from business to business with printed-off Résumés. Outside of blue-collar jobs, I haven’t seen this work for a good twenty years, now.
I'm probably picturing "junior" as "people still in college preparing to get their first job".
My point is that a luxury of the software engineering craft is that you can practice "at pro level" very cheaply. Even as a teenager, learning and using vscode/python/react/etc... on your own is a possibility.
Learning Salesforce and SAP and the internal support tool of BigCo is not.
That being said, I completely agree that we're going to put a generation of "wannabee white collar" in a dire situation. Cynically, this might be an overdue correction from the years of "college degree for everyone", and maybe (just maybe) some people will actually thrive in the "hard-to-llm-ize" profession if they can retrain.
(If the market laws apply, someone will build "turn advertisement-copy writers into electricians", and it would not necessarily be for the worst ? I know, easy to tell for me, who got the opposite deal by being a software engineer on demand at the right time at the beginning of my career.)