Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

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My immediate guess is that these kinds of tools will greatly enlarge the productivity gap between junior and senior developers.

Senior devs will be able (they already are) to generate code, at first boilerplate and gradually more complex code, and effectively work as planners and passive reviewers, in a similar way to how some companies just hire legions of juniors with some architects/seniors guiding and reviewing their work.

The problem with that flow, I think, is that it completely disrupts the junior to senior pipeline. Senior roles might be valued even more than today, but reaching that stage or simply entering the market might become much more difficult.

I feel my career is pretty safe, but I’m not sure about someone joining the industry 5 years from now.

That's an interesting take. The ChatGPT seems to do very well at doing what it's told, but it needs very explicit requirements and supervision to discover missing requirements. It's a junior developer, basically.

That could put junior developers out of a job just like glass terminals put many data entry and server room operators out of jobs.

I agree with this. These AI tools have caused my (not a junior) productivity to skyrocket as a result of eliminating almost every instance of needing to check documentation/stackoverflow/etc. for easy questions in addition to providing most of my annoying boilerplate code. Since I am my own expert opinion on whether the output is correct/satisfactory, I can quickly breeze through verification of output & make corrections as necessary.

Yup. And provided you’re a newcomer, the path to becoming able to provide that expert opinion involves years of performing precisely the tasks that AI is getting rid of.

My guess is that we’ll eventually see some kind of “higher degree bootcamps” that accept people with junior baseline skills and take them to the senior level, since learning on the job might become less feasible.

The Innovator's Dilemma book popularized the idea that it's frequently newcomers who are the beneficiaries of breakthrough changes for mostly structural reasons. Could it apply to individual people too in this case?

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