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Comment by sakopov | Hacker News Reader

The market rebound appears to be mostly in senior roles [1] while everyone else are falling out of favor including new grads. Definitely puts the "higher than ever" claim in question. Indeed is looking at job postings data and I personally think this is a poor unit of measure. In my humble opinion the market isn't anywhere near where it used to be even several years prior to the pandemic.

[1] https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/07/08/ai-and-job-postings-...

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Even before AI we were trending toward an economy with very few entry level jobs anywhere. AI is supercharging this, and I can easily now imagine a future where there's basically zero (good) jobs for anyone who isn't an expert.

So how do we get the next generation of senior professionals then?

This, I think, is a civilization-scale problem we will need to confront in the next 20-ish years.

The bet seems to be that the seniors are next.

I doubt that (depending on what "senior" means).

The skills to drive AI are much the same as they were for business analysts in the old days. Domain knowledge, insight into user requirements, knowledge of modern UI paradigms, ability to write detailed, consistent requirements docs/ design docs.

There is a deep bench in the industry of these senior-ish people. Many have left to become baristas, dive instructors or hobby farmers, scarred by the pain of building large complex software systems using human labour and absurd Agile rituals. But they could slot straight back in, it's like riding a bike.

AI development is the new waterfall. Its just that the lower level that the BA hands off to, which used to be roomfuls of devs, is now a superhuman who can implement those designs at lighting speed and come back hungrily for more.

But if by senior you mean someone who is just a junior with more experience, someone who's not really in touch with the business's needs and who just works off stuff fed to them by PMs or the like - then yeah, agreed.

Another thing is that orgs will want to keep around somebody who 1) can be held responsible when things go wrong 2) has a reasonable understanding of the system that's their domain end-to-end 3) can reliably diagnose failures and fix them, regardless of how the code was written.

That's not a role that can reasonably be filled by a junior and management armed with agents doesn't really fit either.

> But they could slot straight back in, it's like riding a bike.

Yeah, not quite. There's a ton to learn about how to control an LLM while it's writing code, and even more to learn about how to manage a set of agents.

9 months ago I was comparing it to running a dev team, but now it has changed and there are practices and processes that are unique to managing agents.

e.g. a team of software devs have the self-awareness to not take a single marginally-relevant point in a spec document and spend 20% of their team effort to build an entire subsystem to meet it without checking. The process and rituals that we used to use to make sure that a software dev team was making progress and would hit the project deadline are now largely useless, but we need new ones to make sure the agents are not heading off into unnecessary rabbit holes.

I'm not saying those ex-seniors would not be able to get back in the saddle. I'm just saying there's been more change in the last 9 months than there has in the last 30 years, so it may take a period of adjustment.

But I don't think the things that burned them out before will have changed. Dealing with non-tech executives was always the worst part of the job, and LLMs can't help with that, and are even making it worse ("ChatGPT says this should only take a couple a hours and you're using Typescript instead of Go! Why? Fix it!").

> There's a ton to learn about how to control an LLM while it's writing code, and even more to learn about how to manage a set of agents.

So? The experts have a only few months of experience anyway, gained the slow way (via experimentation). It's not like someone can't pick up those skills in a week.

A week seems a tad optimistic. But quicker than it took us to learn as we went along, sure.

The "a ton to learn about how to control an LLM" is remarkably similar to learning how to work with a new team of humans, perhaps easier. LLMs though eccentric are far more predictable than most humans.

What I love most about AI development is the lack of pushback when you see a completed new feature, realise it was a dumb idea and just pivot hard to something different.

A human would (rightfully) call you out for wasting time and resources. AI slurps up your feedback and dives in again with the same vigour.

That’s what happened in US manufacturing. It’s now 20-30 years down the line and the economically important US manufacturing sectors, like defense, are scrambling to hold onto institutional process and trade knowledge as the final remnants of the old industrial system retire. We all know how useful someone with a fresh comp sci degree and no experience is in a real dev environment is. Imagine the leads showing them the ropes graduated two years prior?

Education needs to adapt. Currently CS graduates barely compete with Gemma-4 26b in programming while seniors are feeding tons of expertise at armies of frontier AI agents. The market now needs junior employees good at "using AI like an expert". Once employers see that junior armed with AI can replace senior at half the salary, we're back where we were 10 years ago.

Senior (now): - AI build me an app that uses a graph DB that will deploy in the edge. Batch DB requests to keep costs low. Oh, use good cache + memoization to reduce hits. Write great tests, some logging and implement hot-reloading for a great dev-to-ops workflow that is also resilient. Man, before I had to do this all by hand, this is a godsend!

Junior (now): - AI build app please.

Email from boss: Junior! Whatever it is you've deployed, it's making 1M reqs/min to the DB and ate up our quota 2h ago. Shut it down now!

Junior (future): - AI1 design for cost. AI2 eval for performance. AI3 align for business goals. AI4 criticize AI1 and AI2 using top standards. AI5 set up a competing swarm. AI6 here's a budget, spend on real users and action on telemetry and their feedback.

> Junior (future): - AI1 design for cost. AI2 eval for performance. AI3 align for business goals. AI4 criticize AI1 and AI2 using top standards. AI5 set up a competing swarm. AI6 here's a budget, spend on real users and action on telemetry and their feedback.

Ugh, please no, why isn't these instructions in the system prompt of the harness if they are so valuable to the junior's work...?

No worries, obviously the AI will cure aging so we will be able to run civilisation with the current experts forever.

...at least, until they accumulate enough stocks to retire on.

...however, for each one that retires and cannot be replaced due to the no-upcoming-juniors problem, evidently, the value of the companies they own goes down. So they won't be able to retire, or at least not all of them. So there's no problem!

we had this thing called apprenticeship and it is now illegal

this is a good point. Similar to minimum wage, if the value of a young hire is zero, then working for free to gain experience is probably necessary (otherwise no one will hire).

We have other structural issues in society that make this difficult now. For example the fact that without a large pay check, few young people will be able to live near the place where jobs are available, afford essentials, and will have no health care.

But yes, if we returned to a culture of "children live with parents until married" and "apprentice at a company until your work is valuable", and companies returned to "hire what you actually need, then invest heavily in employee growth for the long term", and reducing churn of employees (so that employees and employers have incentive to do this), then it might be possible.

So how do you solve the problem of the company investing in their employees to make them more valuable and then the employees go to another company to get paid more (because that company does not spend on developing employing employees) or the employees leave to start their own company to compete with their original employer?

It's moot, because it will never happen. The apprentice system worked because they could perform actual useful work, if only sweeping the floor and such. An apprentice would only slow me down. A Keurig and a Roomba would be far more useful.

That was my point, to make a system of apprenticeship work, we have to solve this problem (I wasn't saying it was possible). Otherwise one company is churning out qualified apprentices at their detriment, others are hiring at a discount and reaping the rewards of not training.

> So how do we get the next generation of senior professionals then?

Why would AGI owners need senior professionals?

Seems like we're going to the type of economy we had before WW2. Meanwhile the higher education industry is still going like we're in the 1990s.

The problem is, if we don’t confront it now, what will happen to this generation? We are cosy in our experienced bucket, but we should not let it happen, even if it pragmatically gives us more safety. I honestly think expertise should be less relevant with AI. The point of entry level was never just about them building expertise. It was also about them bringing fresh ideas, fresh culture -as annoying as it is sometimes - and challenge the establishment. We are moving towards a stagrowth of incremental “improvements”. Not 20 years. This year. When everything moves fast we cannot afford to have this Damocles sword hanging.

> This, I think, is a civilization-scale problem we will need to confront in the next 20-ish years.

Humans will have to redefine what it means to "earn", to "deserve", to "succeed", to be "responsible", to exist...

We should have confronted this when computers and factory robots first appeared, but we keep putting it off and kicking it down the road until it won't be possible anymore.

Hell we should have addressed this during the Industrial Revolution, but instead we added minute hands to clocks so workers would have to work more for less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Em96NVxO9Q "So this is progress - Terry Jones 1991"

There is no spoon.

We have a remarkable tendency to believe that our particular technological moment is somehow unprecedented. Locke's labor mixing never required kinetic effects. Talent, skill, judgment, creativity, effort, and, more importantly, time; were always part of the concept.

Perhaps the mistake is not that technology ever changed what is valued, but that we have.

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