Comment by Ronsenshi
14 hours ago
This evolution comes at a cost - if one senior suddenly can do their work and plus work of 5 juniors - why would company keep these juniors? It won't - the moment C-suite realizes they don't need extra people, they will be gone. But at some point senior engineers will retire or find new better paying jobs and said company would need to find a replacement. In the past this replacement could come from one of the juniors that worked in that company for a while and mentored by the senior. Not so much when there's no more juniors thanks to AI.
Not so much evolution here, I'm afraid. Just a plain redistribution of wealth upwards thanks to new tools that made large chunk of workforce obsolete. How this will affect industry in 15 years - nobody seem to think about that.
The same could be said about the mass adoption of open source.
Why hire an experienced coder to create project X, when you can just use an open source project and hire cheaper and less experienced coders to make updates? I've been part of many of these conversations with business leaders and management over the years.
Developers have been giving away their work and devaluing their profession for decades and has basically turned it into digital factory work.
It's why I stopped writing software professionally almost a decade ago.
AI is using all of this open source to train and will eventually put you out of a job.