If nobody hires juniors, then where are the seniors supposed to come from?
Just like how CAD has almost entirely eliminated that line of work, the same thing will happen in software development. Only the “architects” will remain.
There is an implicit assumption made by the people concerned about junior devs disappearing that that’s where senior developers come from.
The reality is that almost junior developers never gain significantly better skill, no matter how their age or title.
I regularly work with people with decades of “experience” that still have no idea how to use a database engine. A real senior developer could write their own database engine from scratch. That’s the difference!
If they don’t know that, then the database engine internals will forever remain a mysterious black box to them.
Explaining each of the four letters in ACID is the follow-up question if they pass.
These are the equivalent of “why do we put steel rebar into concrete?” If you can’t answer these questions immediately upon graduating then you cannot ever be responsible for anything. You can only be entrusted to copy or “fill in the blanks” where an anctual engineer worked out the design.
I mean I guess they can choose to jump teams or jobs every couple years to gain some breadth, but it seems cruel to force people to hop around to move up the ladder. (Even though I admit this is still the fastest way, but for different reasons!)
It actually doesn’t make sense when you think about it - the idea that entry level roles will be cleanly eliminated. Certainly there could be a period with drastically fewer entry level roles, but that logically can not remain the case.
Not sure if there is a single silver bullet to solve this, but one thing is all juniors could start building things only for fun and solving small problems they understand (ala YC advice), and once solved, allow room to build it better each time.
Rolling the ladder up behind us - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328894 - June 2025 (201 comments)
Besides morals, you'll always need people in the interface between the computers and the world. Maybe they won't write too much code, but they'll need to specify and verify behaviours anyway.
With the rise of AI it will only get worse.
Seniors will have to come from somewhere, but it wouldn't be through this pipeline, even if companies were still hiring at full rate for entry-level work.
For some just getting into the field, this could be a great opportunity -- if you can figure out where the puck is heading, you can skate directly there.
I've interviewed more that a few "software architects" who couldn't put together a for loop, and these folks were largely just BS artists and PowerPoint generators.
But yeah I'm sure increasing energy input into symbolic systems will not increase their entropy and thus the demand for workers capable of formal logic to keep it in check.
Because dumping representations of formal logic on a exponentially increasing repository of compressed data will surely start giving out output with higher informational content than the input. Any time now. Just double the size of the model a few more times and we will start getting lower entropy outcomes for free.