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Comment by lukevp | Hacker News Reader

I think we’re a couple years out max from Peak Developer and a lot of the growth / entry level roles will start getting taken over by the experienced devs who can adapt to coordinating a set of AI agents to do the actual coding and testing and DevOps more efficiently, and it’s all downhill from there. So I don’t see an entry level, mess around directly writing code job, to exist in abundance in say 10 years.

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I can see that happening. However, I also believe that college or some form of structured education will step in to bridge the gap. Historically, education has played a role in transitioning people from knowing little to becoming workforce ready. With AI changing the landscape, the gap will undoubtedly be wider, but education systems may evolve to accommodate that shift. By the looks of it, AI could itself fill that gap.

That's the exact problem though. Companies have been outsourcing training to colleges for decades now, further and further reducing available career paths as mentioned and causing degree inflation, higher education costs for everybody, etc.

It's also unlikely to change because it's just one more symptom of how companies are run these days, and that mindset has societal-scale momentum now.

Why wouldn’t they? Despite what idealists think that people should go to college to “expand their minds and be better citizens of the world”, most people can’t afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars and not expect to be ready for careers.

I didn't intend to sound crunchy like that. College for practical means has long been the norm in the US vs. elsewhere, going back to agricultural schools in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is nothing wrong with that; what is NOT good is the whole-sale replacement of job training to colleges, as it cannot properly encompass every eccentricity of a particular job, leading to the problems mentioned before.

College is about getting the knowledge to perform your field, not the knowledge of every particular procedure one could possibly expect to see. The modern emphasis on internships softens the blow somewhat, but it's a half-hearted replacement and is easily abused in many fields.

I don't see this future coming, companies are made and will be made by people, if such level of productivity will be reached it will only increase the demand for more people doing it. Going from assembly to higher level languages didn't shrink the workforce, actually required more developers. Productivity improvements(given i don't believe it will be that much of an improvement) don't necesseraly map to few people doing it

I thought the same, but then I came across a post asking what happens when all the seniors retire?

What happened to when all the Cobol developers retired? Companies mostly kept trying to hire non-existent seniors at moderately elevated rates and paid consultants until they ran out of money. Very few companies did an about turn and started investing in developer training.

And there's still not a COBOL training pipeline.

Check out Infosys "global education center".

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