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Comment by pootietangus | Hacker News Reader

”… I think that at this point, you might see the problem for many junior engineers. If a senior or even lead engineer can break down his problem into the smallest pieces and task an AI coding assistant with writing those pieces, then why bother with a junior engineer at all?”

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There are a lot of careers with no formal training on-ramp. If demand for software engineers continues and there’s no practical way to get enough on the job experience, there will be plenty of self taught developers that grind long enough to get the experience they need. I became a software engineer at age 40. No one would take me seriously as a junior developer, so I just kept leveling up my skills until I could get a mid-level role at a company that was desperate enough to hire me.

the senior engineers will age out, so the industry would want to make sure there's a pipeline of new software engineers

"Why should I train them up when they might leave? Let somebody else train them, then I'll hire them afterwards." — Companies, in a prisoner's dilemma.

well you sit them down before they take the offer and level with them "If you come here I promise I'll treat you good and train you up for a bright future, but in exchange ideally I want you to stay for at least two years if you can help it, otherwise the cost of training doesn't work out"

It's not a legal agreement but a gentleman's agreement. They may still freely leave for whatever reason, especially if they were not treated well or treated like a slave (ie employer broke the agreement), but if all goes well it's some assurance, or at least a communication so everyone is on the same page. And usually being on the same stage and starting out with such trust sets the stage nicely for a good, trust-based safe working relationship

This. So much this.

I train them for you, you train them for me, together we make a happy industry.

The juniors you train today someone will poach, surely, as you'll poach someone else's, and it levels out.

Training people is a cost, an investment, if everyone does it the cost is amortized across the industry. If I can cut that cost by using AI I'm now at a competitive advantage, everyone will look to cut that cost because the downside of paying for training juniors that may leave is worse for that company than the downside of the whole industry not training juniors any more.

That's true in the short term.

Fast forward half a decade forward, and there's no juniors or mediors to onboard, no-one to have gemeric expertise that can be fine tuned to your product.

From the individual incentive standpoint, it's not immediately clear who would make a decision to establish such a pipeline and subject their organization to short-term competitive disadvantage. A CEO of a public company can't really say "our R&D is 2x our peers because we're building a pipeline".

What I suspect is going to happen is something like the regional pilot situation, where one toils for pennies at lower levels and then gets to comfortable compensation numbers 10-15 years later.

I suspect we will continue to have junior developers, albeit the tasks they are tasked with may change. One big issue is that it is expensive to have senior devs essentially correcting AI slop. Additionally, at current prompt pricing I suspect a junior dev is a better ROI still. A more likely result is increased expenditure due to trying to keep up with the AI hype, not a reduced team size.

I have yet to hear of a productive software development shop successfully reducing staff count due to LLM usage.

Founders at AI Slop Fixers Consulting Inc will become billionaires.

I'm sure there'll be a lot of such work, but I don't think it will attract crazy investor dollars.

Millionaires, at best. :p

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