Comment by woah
3 days ago
There's this weird unspoken assumption in a lot of these HN posts that any layoffs or lack of hiring is due to companies shirking on providing the cushy jobs they owe software engineers. Actually, they hire engineers to get stuff done. If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.
This is basically how most engineers talk to their managers, politely implying - "can you see how this decision has a short term payoff but a long term consequence?"
Before LLMs I only worked at one place that "only hired seniors and above" and now its the most commonplace thing in the world.
Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.
> Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.
Seems a bit like asking where the bread will come from, if no-one is forced to bake it.
More like where the bread will come from if nobody learns how to bake it and the knowledge of how to bake it is lost.
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not to take away from the point too much, but i think the whole idea of market economies is nobody needs to be forced to do anything, no?
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I imagine the reality lies somewhere in between the two extreme takes that you present here.
> If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.
AI works fine to get a vibe coded BS version of the app. No doubt there. But eventually, especially once scale hits your app, it will devolve into an unholy mess of low performance and (extremely) high cost if you do not have a bunch of senior talent able and willing to clean up after the AI mess.
Unfortunately, our capitalist economy only rewards the metrics you mentioned... but by the time the house of cards collapses, either from financial issues stemming from the above or because the tech debt explodes, it's too late to turn the ship around.
And I've even heard rumors of software engineers that don't even write apps or write code that runs on the internet at all. They say some of them don't even use javascript or python! The horror.