Comment by layer8
3 hours ago
> "With so many companies worldwide faced with upheaval due to AI in software development, I believe this program will become a template for rapidly leveling up new developers across the industry."
This seems cognitively dissonant with the AI upheaval resulting in the industry needing fewer developers. Maybe they want cheaper developers?
Based on posts by people involved like Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich, this initiative is a direct response to the long-term threat of AI completely replacing junior developers, and thus cutting off the pipeline of experience that turns junior developers into senior developers, who are still needed to leverage AI effectively.
There is of course the possibility that AI gets good enough that even senior engineers won’t be needed, but at this point it seems unlikely. My reasoning is that even expert humans make mistakes, which is why we need other humans to collaborate and check each others’ work (which, if you think about it, is a source of a lot of the processes and bureaucracy at companies; trivial example: code reviews.)
So even if AI gets to the level of human experts, this dynamic will not change... unless we hit ASI, where the AI far exceeds human capabilities. At which point we’ve hit the singularity and all bets are off.
Short of that, however, human experts will be needed, which is why programs like this are needed: to future proof against the short term economic pressures to minimize junior workers which will impact the long term pipeline that produces senior experts.
Is there evidence that overall software developer positions are declining relative to other jobs? It wouldn't surprise me if Jevons paradox applied here.
There is mixed evidence on the impact of AI on developer jobs, but on the balance it seems that to the extent AI is impacting dev jobs, it is mostly the junior roles that are being affected.
There is even some evidence that suggests senior roles are more in demand (and getting correspondingly higher pay too) which gels with the common observation that senior workers are more effective at managing the AI which is doing the work of (and hence displacing) junior workers.
Asking a chatbot or Google AI overviews should surface relevant studies.
Exactly. At least in my part of the world (hardware) we are hiring more software folks these days and fewer pure hardware
> Jevons paradox
Thanks! I've heard numerous examples of this. E.g. paint rollers, and later paint sprayers, made painting so much more efficient and cheaper that people wanted their houses and apartments painted more often, ultimately increasing house painter employment. But I didn't realize the phenomenon had a name.
The broader topic of marginal utility is worth looking into if this is interesting to you.
The reason why AI induces more demand is more interesting than simply observing a correlation. At the root of the paradox is the dissatisfaction with AI as it raises the bar for human work. In that sense, AI functions like training wheels more than actually doing anything useful on its own. More people can ride the bike well as a result.
This is the "law of diminishing marginal utility". In other words, LLMs are an NLP-powered google search 2.0. That sums up pretty well why AI hit a plateau a couple of years ago. There's only so much training data and humans become more efficient and creative once exposed to the exact information they were always looking for, but could never find in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
It feels like it's all senior developers now and nobody new. At some point they will want someone new and won't be able to find them.
> At some point they will want someone new
If we freeze AI models at their current stage of development, then yes. If not, given the rate at which models are improving (compare Claude today to Claude 1 year ago), in 3 to 5 years software development could be fully automated.
Well, if you automate everything, the bad parts will still be there, then you need real engineers to fix them
Including development of AI models?
we dont' need to "freeze" models if next versions aren't a huge improvement over previous ones. That seems to be case now.
2 replies →
Are you sure that's how this works?
Let's see, my grandparents were about 160cm when they were 35. My parents were about 170cm when they were 35 and I am about 180cm around 35. You are saying I can expect my grandchildren to be around 200cm at that age and their grandchildren 220cm?
8 replies →
Some of that is long pre-existing, where too many companies would go: "Hey, let someone else hire juniors and train them up, we'll them away after that."
Not that the new LLM-as-junior trend doesn't make it worse.
Your comment completely misses the point. AI is fully capable of replacing shitty developers that cannot program and cannot write original code of their own. This is not a technology problem, missing skills problem, or even an AI problem.
It’s a problem of missing training and missing mentorship coupled with weak leaders who would rather throw their people to the wolves armed with crayons and coloring books until they just figure it out.
Before AI was a thing once a large organization hired too many shitty developers you could occasionally clean house by laying some off and ordering the rest to own more responsibilities. Once AI starts replacing the weakest among us the scapegoats are gone. Then what? Eventually the finger pointers can only point at themselves once there is nobody else to point at.