Comment by Thanemate
6 days ago
The skilled seniors better stop downplaying what actually led them to be skilled in the first place, and realize that the conditions to develop that skill has been gone and almost deemed unproductive in today's workplace.
Not disagreeing that LLM's are a force multiplier, but I highly doubt whatever value will end up finding multiplying in the next generation of seniors, at this rate. It's surreal to me that I have to point out that recognition AND recalling are both necessary components of skill acquisition, because humans largely knew this since the dawn of education.
I have been thinking about it - paid apprenticeship is the answer - just as it is in other professions like medicine.
Seniors should be paid to actively introduce juniors to the trade over couple of years. No more bootcamp entry.
And it would be significant $ for senior to agree to expend his time and energy on software engineering apprentices. There would be also very limited number of places with good seniors. Exactly like medicine for a long time now.
In fact it is already happening in some companies I know about - seniors geting their bonuses tied to juniors being under their wings.
> Seniors should be paid to actively introduce juniors
Instead lets train the contractors of an IT sourcing company and then we don't need you.
This is something for educators to deal with, not a 50+ senior IC, but yes your point is extremely important.
As an educator (UK) it's very hard to find people with experience to join us. The pay is SO crap and the workload is huge. Trying to teach complex, large systems is impossible, because we don't have them. We can't throw 1,000 files and 20,000 lines of code at a student and teach them how the system was engineered. We can show them toy systems.... which is fine if there is a work route that takes them and nutures them for 5 or so years. But without that pipeline, shrug not sure what we do about it
i would rephrase "Force multiplier" as "Force power up".
If your "force" is above 1 then its ok to have AI power up your force. 2.3 to the power of 3 is 12.169.
But if you're a beginner and your "force" is bellow 1 so power upping this makes it worse. 0.2 to power of 3 is 0.008