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Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers. They just don't identify that way, and more importantly it's not their job title, and job titles are what labor statistics count.

This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.

People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.

The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.

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> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers.

We've always had people developing, in many forms. Scientists of all kinds, usually with Python, finance people with Excel, etc.

I think that yes, they can go a lot farther now. So this will make the bottom of the software curve grow 10-100x.

Now, the real question for developers is: what does this do to the middle and top or the curve? In my experience that's where maintenance comes in and anyone who's not a trained software developer (and even many SDEs) break their necks. "Casuals" will build what their need, but even with AI guiding them, it's still spaghetti.

It's going to be interesting keeping an eye on this, for sure.

Yes, and to be fair, I'm not saying those people that used to be behind the wheel at the "bloodsucking SaaS companies" are out of luck, or necessarily had bad intentions either.

This is just the natural next step towards a more mature kind of consulting. The client needs help scaling up their project or deploying it to the rest of their business. This is massive opportunity for any entrepreneur since the client is coming much better prepared.

> If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny.

I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired?

By "project" do you mean "product"?

The job descriptions still say: "experience building according to best practices and working with a team". The meaning of that never changed.

What changed is tolerance of failing to meet that standard. That's how layoffs after overhiring happened. The bar was not raised, but moved back to where it was prior to the mid-2010s.

Anyway, it also depends on who is doing the interviews. If your "hobby" projects are built similar enough to what they have at that workplace, then the interview should feel like you're already working there for both you and them. Having absolutely no professional experience is going to automatically put you at a disadvantage. If you know of any startups, even if they're awful places to work, I'd much rather have a couple years of that on my resume than any internship.

What I was really saying is that someone who has been a teacher for a while and then learned to code with AI is now far more likely to get hired at an education software company than someone fresh out of college with a degree in CS. That's the way it should be! That's genuine progress. They may not end up in a coding role, but they'd absolutely crush it as a project manager.

> What I was really saying is that someone who has been a teacher for a while and then learned to code with AI is now far more likely to get hired at an education software company than someone fresh out of college with a degree in CS.

Huh. That's my situation... Sort of. Been programming since I was a kid but went into another field. That gave me hope, thank you.

Programming plus something else has always been a massive advantage. The corollary of this is that moving industries requires you to learn another domain if you want to be useful.

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