Comment by fn-mote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fn-mote | Hacker News Reader

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> For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall.

My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI.

Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites, and not getting what we consider quality. Now maybe you're going to see a larger and larger gap between F500 companies and the rest (surely you do already), but playing out the consequences is a long and interesting story.

> coding without AI will feel as antiquated and inefficient [...]. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse.

Fortunately, the "punishment" by the market will just be reduced salaries. Move out of the Bay Area now. :)

> And coding is just one of the many applications where AI an replace brains.

And writing about those is interesting. With the development of DALL-E (etc), I would say coding isn't even the primary interesting application. (If "it's not AI", whatever... that's not the point.) Or not yet.

> My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI.

That might be true for you and me but imagine somebody fresh out from university - the job market for junior devs will totally collapse in the near-near future. And then what? Where do the mid-level engineers come from if there are no* junior roles? Where will the future senior level engineers come from? We're certainly living in interesting times..

*: There will be some artisanal companies who will pride themselves in having hand-written, AI-free code. These companies will be a minority and 90% of junior level software development jobs will disappear in no time.

Mid level engineers will come from building something like GitHub, Netflix or Gmail over the weekend using powerful AI. The skills of current senior engineers will be much easier to gain since the feedback loop for software architecture and design will be down to hours instead of quarters. Being able to architect massive software systems well, will be expected from a new graduates.

The role of junior software developers will not be needed, just as we don’t need people doing multiplication by hand.

This seems the likely end result. We'll always need SWEs, of course, but gone will be the days of entire dev teams working toward a common product.

I suspect SWE may trend toward other ailing fields like law with individual devs working on entire 'cases' and it being very competitive; rather than the recent "20min Js tutorial on YT to SF startup" industry.

Senior developer aren't senior because they can type code very fast. They are senior because they can take on responsibilities and make decisions. A junior that types code very fast is a junior that types code very fast.

I think we’re in agreement.

The key here is what are you taking responsibilities and decisions for. Senior engineers take decisions which consequences will be apparent in a year or two. If productivity increases to the point where features that take months to deliver take days, the decisions made _currently_ by senior engineers can be taken by fresh graduates.

There’re still going to be senior roles, but their scope will be much bigger and expertise sought will be different than what senior engineers do currently. No one will hire a senior engineer just because they can architect and deliver a scalable SaaS product on a short timeline.

Engineers who learn and adapt will be fine. Engineers who dropped learning the moment they graduated from college… not so much.

Mid level engineers will be surpassed two years later. And then seniors. But we'll still need humans in the loop, humans who understand.

> Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites

They used to, 10 to 15 years ago. Now they just hire a SMM specialist to set up their Instagram account. Why would they bother with a website?

Even those places that do have their own website (as opposed to just relying on Facebook Pages and Google's information sidebar), they just use Squarespace or Shopify. Shopify in particular has also been incorporating a lot of AI into their tooling as well, reducing the need to hire copywriters, translators, etc.

Nah, I’ll leave the bay once salaries drop. Not years before.

I wouldn't own housing there.

I don’t!

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