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I mean, it’s just like having an army of interns that works for (near) free. It’s a huge positive for productivity, and I don’t think we will forget how. I’m more concerned with how we make new senior/staff engineers from now on, since the old “do grunt work for a couple years, then do simple well defined work for a few years” is 100% not a career path that exists even now.

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This is my question as well. I am already wondering how prepared college grads will be. Getting help with programming assignments meant going to the dungeon and collaborating with fellow students while the TA made their rounds and overall just figuring it out. Today, an LLM knocks out the programming assignments in once shot, probably. And industry seems hellbent on hiring seniors mostly so where are the juniors to become seniors going to come from?

I think the talent pipeline has contracted and/or will and overcorrect. But maybe the industry’s carrying capacity of devs has shrunk.

The ironic part is that for about 10 years from 2012-2022 I used to tell people that I was very bullish on programming as a career, since I couldn't imagine any possible future where we needed less software to be written in year N+1 than we did in year N. I just didn't think of any world where we could have more software written with fewer engineers. Surprise!

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