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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

In 10 years where do the senior dev's come from? Real question. Seems like with lower entry level jobs now, in 10 years there won't be seniors to hire.

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Even if we grant this is going to be a problem, it makes no sense for any individual company to do anything about it. Why take on the cost of training a junior when they can bail in a few years? This is especially true if you're not a big tech company, which puts you at risk of having your junior-turned-senior employees poached by big tech.

Give your juniors reasons to stay at your company? It's not hard if the company cares at all.

>It's not hard if the company cares at all.

It's pretty hard for a non-big tech company to pay big tech level salaries.

You can incentivize people to stay with things other than salary. Salary plays a part of course, but there is a lot of other aspects that make staying at a job worthwhile.

And most of my friends and colleagues would take a full remote role that pays half what big tech, 5 days in office pays. Add in an extra week of PTO and you have a great pitch to devs.

I'll believe it when I see it reflected in applicant resumes. (east coast tech firm)

What do you mean? You’re not getting applicant resumes to your smaller org?

I personally turned down an Apple offer because they required 3 days in office and went this a much smaller fully remote team.

In 10 years, the management (or "leadership" if you like the taste of boot) responsible for doing the cutting will have moved on to something else, with no consequences for them.

Junior devs eventually will have been brought up with agentic coding, etc. Hopefully whatever the "new way" becomes is how they'll be taught.

Currently part of the problem is the taboo using AI coding in undergrad CS programs. And I don't know the answer. But someone will find the right way to teach new/better ways of working with and without generative AI. It may just become second nature to everyone.

Kids are always the best with technology. The generation in high school right now will be god tier at getting results from LLMs.

Might have been the case before. But these days, kids are brought up on locked-down content-focused machines (e.g. ipads). They struggle with anything harder than restarting an app.

How are high school kids that barely know the basics of the topic going to get “god tier” results from LLMs?

I can see how that would seem logical, but imo the issue with it not following the normal trend is the inconsistency and inaccurate results of LLMs.

When my little cousin was three and already knew how to use the phone by himself people were claiming he was gonna be a tech wizard and everybody was talking about digital natives. But when he got to high school he didn't know how to turn a computer on. How useful is it to be god tier at getting results from LLMs, if you have zero clue if the result you got is any good?

Not even a little bit. Where I work we regularly churn through kids just out of college and most of them don't have Clue One how to operate anything on their computer.

Yeah, growing up in the 80s or 90s might have had you uniquely well-positioned to be "good with computers", because "the computer that has games and the internet" was (in some sense) the same as "the computer that adults are supposed to use for work".

That's not true anymore in the smart phone / tablet era.

5-10 years ago my wife had a gig working with college kids and back then they were already unable to forward e-mails and didn't really understand the concept of "files" on a computer. They just sent screenshots and sometimes just lost (like, almost literally) some document they had been working on because they couldn't figure out how to open it back up. I can't imagine it has improved.

Very senior teachers and educators have been noting this observation for a decade-plus now. Computer literacy has tanked.

While agentic coding can make you productive, it won't teach you to deeply understand the source code, algorithms, or APIs produced by AI. If you can't thoroughly audit any source code created by an AI agent, then you are definitely not a senior developer.

This is just not true. I have witnessed people who would have been called dabblers or tinkerers just a few years ago become actual developers by using cursor. They ask a few key questions when they get stuck about engineering best practices and really internalize them. They read the code they are producing and ask the assistant questions about their codebase. They are theorycrafting using AI then implementing and testing. I have witnesses this with my own eyes and as AI has gotten better they have also been getting more knowledgeable. They read the chains of thought and study the outputs. They have become real developers with working programs on their github. AI is a tool that teaches you as it is used if you put in the effort. I understand many folks are 'vibe coding' and not learning a single thing and I don't know if thats the majority or the minorty, but the assertion that all people learn nothing from use of these tools is false.

You're talking about people who put in a significant non-trivial effort to thoroughly understand the code produced by the AI. For them, AI was just one path to becoming proficient developers. They would have gotten there even before the AI boom. I was not talking about such highly-motivated people.

Yeah and when you account for the amount of investment that has gone into the current generation of LLMs... it makes zero financial sense.

Some people dont want to hear that, but...

who are these mythical jr devs and where do i find them

i just want devs who actually read my pr comments instead of feeding them straight into an llm and resubmitting the pr

Agentic coding is like leading and instructing a team of a bunch of very dumb but also very smart junior devs. They can follow instructions to the T and have great memory but lack common sense and have no experience. The more experienced and skilled their leadership, the better chance of getting a good result from them, which I don’t think is a good job (yet?) for an entry level human SWE.

> Junior devs eventually will have been brought up with agentic coding

But if they're not hired...?

This is the same reason they force you to do the math by hand in undergrad and implement functions that are already in the standard libraries of most languages. Because you don't know anything yet, and you need to learn why the more automated stuff works the way it does.

As an occasional uni TA, I'm leaning toward banning LLM for easy coursework while allowing it on more difficult & open-ended ones.

Pretty sure it's a self-destructive move for a CS or software engineering student to pass foundational courses like discrete math, intro to programming, algorithm & data structure using LLM. You can't learn how to write if all you do is read. LLM will 1-shot the homework, and the student just passively reads the code.

On more difficult and open coursework, LLM seems to work pretty well at assisting students. For example, in the OS course I teach, I usually give students a semester-long project on writing from scratch x86 32-bit kernel with simple preemptive multitasking. LLM definitely makes difficult things much more approachable; students can ask LLM for "dumb basic questions" (what is pointer? interrupt? page fault?) without fear of judgement.

But due to the novelty & open-ended nature of the requirement ("toy" file system, no DMA, etc), playing a slot machine on LLM just won't cut it. Students need to actually understand what they're trying to achieve, and at that point they can just write the code themselves.

Exactly. When I was in school even in 80's, it was common to have to hand write out a program during an exam. You had to know stuff in the old days.

I hand-wrote code in the late 00s. Java, assembly, C. The graders gave us some grace since we couldn't test, but you were expected to be pretty accurate. Hell, one quiz was just 20 identical pages on which we iterated through the Tomasulo algorithm.

My guess is that at some the code itself, in a language humans easily comprehend, will become superficial as we delegate more and more of the logic to AI development. Perhaps in the near future AIs will be writing things at a much lower level by default and the entire act of programming as we know it goes away.

Kind of like that meme or how two AIs talking to each other spontaneously develop their own coding for communication. The human trappings become extra baggage.

There will still be plenty of seniors, they will be in the 40s and 50s. The problem you speak of is much further out, once those seniors retire.

I think a large chunk of people are naively assuming exponential growth and no longer needing senior devs in 10 years.

I suppose the idea is that those junior developers who weren't hired will spend 10 years doing intensive, unpaid self-study so that they can knock on the door as experienced seniors by that time.

Are you serious? How on earth are these people going to eat or pay rent for 10 years? As well, most companies would laugh you out the door if you were applying a senior role without any experience working in the role.

> Are you serious?

No, I was being sarcastic.

Laugh all you want, for some people it’s more real than you think.

I'm not laughing at all. I'm definitely not making fun of those who may be affected by this. My sarcasm was directed at people or companies planning to implement such ideas.

> In 10 years where do the senior dev's come from?

From company interns. Internships won't go away, there will just be less of them. For example, some companies will turn down interns because they do not have the time to train them due to project load.

With AI, now employed developers can be picky on whether or not to take on interns.

In 10 years a lot of the senior developers might be cut as well due to strongly improved AI.

From the bread line, after they've all been displaced by AI, if you happen to need one for God knows what reason, the CEOs are hoping

10 years is Hassabis current AGI projection.

I think this is the gambit that we have already committed to.

Seniors that are 30 years old will still be around and now then they will make more money.

They will be promoted but they won't have the requisite experience. We'll have people in the highest positions with the usual titles, but they will be severely underqualified. Enshitification will ensue.

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