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Comment by lvspiff | Hacker News Reader

I'm finding myself to look to hire less high level IC engineers as a mid/senior level engineer IC with ChatGPT is just as well informed and can put together the ideas necessary to implement the same things. Together they can do it just as fast and produces a similar outcome for as much as 25% less.

I see it as a move towards the middle where the need for high paid knowledgable people in certain subject areas will decrease, the need for people who can perform remedial tasks and rote memorization will decrease, but the pool in the middle with enough knowledge to query an LLM in a fashion to get the answers will be a necessity.

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this seems very short sighted. mid/senior level engineers will not have the knowledge that they need to make the educated decision between 3-4 alternatives that chatgpt might spit out. There's also no liability for any decisions made if you can just blame chatgpt.

Also good managers inspire. Inspire growth, productivity, learning. Good luck with chatgpt

With any luck, the roles most suited to AI replacement will be CEO, COO, and CFO. But I'm sure if that turns out to be the case, the researchers will be promptly fired and the information quickly buried before anyone ever learns of it.

Another perspective: Many jobs in software do not require high levels of experience and expertise. People reach senior status (not by job title but by their role in the organization) early in their careers, after maybe 10 or 15 years. Beyond that, further experience brings only marginal gains, which can also be achieved by better tools. These jobs may be highly paid, but they are also the kind of mid-level jobs automation is expected to threaten.

I honestly don't think we've had good LLMs and experience in using them for long enough to make that kind of call yet. How do you know what you're getting isn't just lots of tech debt, for instance?

They said hire less not hire at all.

I agree there appears to be a great potential where this becomes a force multiplier reducing the need for the more experienced engineers to sit on top. To other sibling comments, yes we need better methods for managing tech debt with these emerging tools but that doesnt make OP wrong.

That sounds right.

I have worked with so very few principal engineers and architects that "get it" because they are not hands on.

Find some good staff / principal engineers that care about growing and mentoring people and use the tools available to augment their efforts with less body counts.

And on the flip side, junior engineers can be much more performant in their roles and grow into that mid-level engineer much faster by allowing them more opportunity to learn conceptually with less rote coding.

The doers are going to thrive and the talkers and fakers are gonna struggle.

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