I've been in the industry long enough to have been around for a few crashes. My outlook is: this industry has always faced threats that looked like it was going to spell the end of our careers, but we always come out the other side better than ever.
I don't think LLMs are fundamentally more threatening than off shore developers were. Sure, we lost jobs during that time, but businesses realized eventually that the productivity was low and they wanted low level people who were responsible.
I think that will continue. We'll all learn to control these agents and review their code, but ultimately, someone needs to be responsible for these agents, reviewing what they produce and fixing any shitshows they produce.
I won't rule out the possibility of LLMs that are so good that they can replicate just about any app in existence in minutes. But there's still value in having workers manage infrastructure, data, etc.
I’ve been developing professionally since 1996. It’s different this time.
The first crash happened in 2000 not because most of the ideas were bad. But because enough potential customers weren’t on the internet.
Things didn’t recover until 2009-2010 when high speed internet was ubiquitous and more people started having computers in their pockets with high speed internet and the mobile app stores.
Between that time was the housing crash and the entire economy was in a free fall.
But, the Big Tech companies were hiring like crazy post COVID and it’s clear they don’t need that many workers. They definitely aren’t going to be doubling in head count over the next 10 years.
On the startup VC funding side, VCs only fund startups as a Ponzi scheme hoping they can either pawn their money losing startups on the public market - who has gotten wise to it - or via acquisitions and regulators are now much more leery of big acquisitions.
There are too many developers chasing too few jobs and with remote work, competition has gotten stiffer.
Just today someone posted on LinkedIn that they posted a job opening on LinkedIn, didn’t use Easy Apply, forced people to answer a questionnaire to slow down submissions and still got over 1000 applications in 3 hours.
AI is already removing the need to hire junior developers, slowly it will be good enough to lower the number of “senior” [sic] framework developers doing boilerplate.
Did I mention by hook or by crook, the federal government will be hiring less people and getting rid of employees and they will be flooding the market? All of those “dark matter developers” that were content with their government jobs are now going to be competing for private sector jobs
Short version is don’t be a “ticket taker”. Move closer to the customer/stakeholder and further away from the IDE. Think in terms of adding business value and focus more on strategy than tactics (pulling well defined stories off the board).
I didn’t just pull “scope”, “impact” and “ambiguity” out of thin air. The leveling guidelines of all the tech companies boil down to this in one way or the other.
I’ve been moving closer to the “business” for a decade now after spending almost two decades as your bog standard enterprise dev. I haven’t done much active coding except some simple Python scripts in almost 3 years.
My focus is now strategic cloud consulting focusing on application development. I’m not saying necessarily “learn cloud”. Learning how to deal with “the business” and leading implementations that deliver business value is the objective. The “cloud” just happens to be my tool. I’m slowly adding Big Data/ML/“AI” to my tool belt.
Hmm. I maintain a pretty big open-source project, so I guess I'm already kinda that? I honestly love computing moreso than I love coding. I'm not very familiar with business concepts though.
I really hate to say this. But open source contributions don’t matter either. It’s only what you do for a company. No one has time to look at an open source repository. Every open job these days have thousands of applications. They aren’t going to look at your GitHub repo.
I guess I'm just confused now. I can't do technical since that's too commodified, but I can't do business since I'm a youngster with no real world experience.
> My outlook is: this industry has always faced threats that looked like it was going to spell the end of our careers, but we always come out the other side better than ever.
I don't think there ever was as big treat to intellectual jobs. If LLMs ever get really good at programming (at the level of senior) there is 0 reason to keep majority of programmers employed. In addition it's not likely that it would be like other historical events of replacing workers with technology, because it most likely won't create new jobs (well, at least not for humans). So if LLMs won't run out of fuel before reaching that level I'm afraid we are fucked.
> I won't rule out the possibility of LLMs that are so good that they can replicate just about any app in existence in minutes. But there's still value in having workers manage infrastructure, data, etc.
Why would AI advanced enough to spin entire app from scratch have problems with managing infrastructure and data?
What do you define as a “senior developer”? Someone who “codez real gud” and can pass “leetCode hard” interviews or the tech industries definition of a senior developer who operates at a certain level of scope, impact and “dealing with ambiguity” and can deliver business value?
The former type of senior developer will be a commodity and see their pay stagnate or even go down as companies find cheaper labor, AI and more software development gets replaced with SaaS offerings especially with enterprise devs.
> a senior developer who operates at a certain level of scope, impact and “dealing with ambiguity” and can deliver business value?
Is there any chance for me (a student) to become like this? I'm fine with coding changing (I just love computing) but I'm scared of the entirety of the field being completely torched.
Please take my advice with a huge grain of salt. It’s been literally decades since I was an entry level developer. I try my best to keep my ear to the ground and look through the eyes of people at all levels of the industry. Part of my job is mentorship as a “staff software architect” at a consulting company.
What would I do these days? I would stay in computer science and if possible get an MBA. I dropped out of graduate school in 2001. But what I learned helped me a lot.
If you can’t go to graduate school, at least take a few business classes. I think the only way to survive will be focusing more on the business than the technology and work for a consulting company.
I don’t mean being a “consultant” who is really just a hands on keyboard coder doing staff augmentation. I mean working for one of the Big 5 consulting firms or one of the smaller equivalents.
The US is definitely moving toward privatization and the first thing they do is bring in more consultants.
I don’t work for any of them. I specialize in strategic cloud consulting. But that market seems congested at the low end.
As far as I've heard, MBAs have also become completely saturated as well. Out of the frying pan into the fire.
I get you're trying to be "consoling", but frankly the bajillion pivot ideas, hopium arguments, endless counterarguments, and other indirection is why I think there's nothing optimal that can be done. All I can do is go through the motions with my current internship and major and rely on Christ rather than this fickle world. I made the wrong choice. Nothing that can be done.
Isn’t that what everyone said about outsourcing too?
My view is LLMs will compete with outsourced developers (and contractors/consultants for one-off jobs), where job context and project scope is already subject to a communication gap.
A big role of full time employees is not just to code, but to interact to various degrees with PMs/Sales/Customers/the rest of the company stakeholders to varying degrees.
Ultimately someone has to know enough of the technical side of both the product and company to actually _know_ what to prompt/review for.
Sure, if the entire industry becomes agents selling agent-developed products to other agents and providing agent-on-agent support, then… yeah. But that is a shell game.
> A big role of full time employees is not just to code, but to interact to various degrees with PMs/Sales/Customers/the rest of the company stakeholders to varying degrees.
That’s true the further you get up in your career. But most of the time, it is:
- junior developers get tasks where both the business problem and technical solution is well defined and they need a lot of handholding and supervision
- mid level developers get tasks where the business problem is mostly well defined and they use their own judgement to create the technical solution. They should be able to lead work streams or epics
- Senior developers are responsible for leading major deliverables with multiple work streams, epics and are over seeing mid level developers and juniors. This is usually the first level where you spend the majority of your time dealing with strategy and “ambiguity” and with the “business”.
- staff - strategy involving many large implementations.
AI can already do a creditable job as a junior level developer and is rapidly moving up to being able to do the work of a mid level developer.
No matter what your title is, if you are just pulling tickets off the board with well defined business cases, you are doing mid level developer work. My definition is what I’ve seen, heard and read about from every major tech company.
Ok, except I guess I would say your definition of mid-level and junior both fall under what I would consider “junior”— maybe I would call what you define as “junior” as “intern” ?
I don’t see how LLMs completely eliminate anyone who is doing anything more than simply pulling well-defined tickets off a board
While I’ve spoken to people at other BigTech companies about their leveling guidelines, the only one that is still in my personal possession after I left is Amazon’s :).
I guess the question is whether the person you are replying to is potentially living in a country where most of the work is currently being outsourced, as this could significantly impact their career path.
It is interesting that you bring up outsourced work, as I strongly believe that a lot of the bad code generated by AI is the result of not feeding it enough information.
When you outsource work, you are usually forced to document things more thoroughly to work around language and domain knowledge. Basically, clarity is a requirement and maybe outsource companies will experience the most impact.
I was a junior after companies had already decided to out source low-level development roles. And I also faced the roadblock of lacking a degree, or any college at the time, so internships were not an option.
What I did was learn the skills that companies were hiring for and kept applying until I finally found some tiny company willing to pay me peanuts ($8.50hr, I'm not joking, I continued to work two jobs that entire year). They got a cheap worker, and I got experience that I leveraged into a better job.
How does that translate to your situation? If you're in college, find internships, it's the easiest way to get your foot in the door. Are you out of college or never went? Time to look at job postings, evaluate the skills they are looking for, and learn those skills.
Yeah, it sucks but that's also a fact of life in this industry. I have to "reskill" every few years too, because not every job I've had segues into another job. In reality, every senior developer decays over time into a junior because the tech landscape changes pretty quickly, and your choices are to mitigate that decay through learning the tech that's being hired for, or become a people manager.
I'd suggest working on your defeatest attitude though. As someone with pretty low self-esteem myself, I get it. Just four hours ago I was calling myself an idiot for making a mistake, but instead of wallowing, I took the time to "prove it" and verify that I was the root cause of the the issue. If I was, I would take those findings and learn from them, but it turns out, all I proved was that I was not responsible and I got to pat myself for building out a system that allowed me to figure this out.
You're going to have to find a way to tell yourself that you're proud of what you've done. Nobody else is going to say it. And rejection sucks. You have to learn to graciously accept rejection, and objectively look at what you've done and compliment yourself. I take the "shit sandwich approach" of finding two good things about what I've built, and one point of improvement. YMMV there, but it definitely helps with the mental health to compliment yourself when you deserve it.
> How does that translate to your situation? If you're in college, find internships, it's the easiest way to get your foot in the door. Are you out of college or never went? Time to look at job postings, evaluate the skills they are looking for, and learn those skills
I’m saying this ironically as a 50 year old (check my username) - “okay boomer”.
That doesn’t work anymore. Internships are much harder to get than they use to be.
“Learning in demand skills” doesn’t work either. Everyone is doing it. Every job opening literally gets thousands of applicants within the first day with people who also has the same generic skillset.
When I was looking for your standard C# CRUD enterprise job where they wanted AWS experience last year and the year before as a “Plan B”, I applied for literally hundreds of jobs and heard crickets. Not only had a coded and led major projects dealing with AWS and before dealing with AWS, I worked at AWS in the consulting department (full time).
Plan A offers came quickly (within two or three weeks) both times. Full time positions doing strategic consulting (personal outreach) and one or two offers from product companies based on my network. But that doesn’t help when someone is just starting out.
By the way, I also started out in 1996 by getting a return offer to be a computer operator based on an internship. But it ain’t 1996 anymore. It’s a shit show out here right now for people with experience.
Sucks to hear about the internships. I figured they'd still be relevant as I was mentoring people in an internship pipeline just 5 years ago, but a lot has changed since then. I do wonder how the effects graduation rates, as one of the reason we had so many interns at my previous job was because the local engineering school required an internship to graduate.
You're right though, shit is fucked. I didn't want to say that and have the person in our conversation thread get even more disheartened - that isn't helpful to them. But I agree with you and my experience job hunting just last year mirrors what you are saying. I've been thinking of what I'd do if I got laid off and well, sounds like it won't be a good time.
I mean the foundations didn't go away, they just got more profound (advances in programming language design, distributed algorithms, formal methods etc.). Previously closed down layers just got open sourced (RISC-V, FPGAs). I estimate that 98% of all engineering efforts are always hidden beneath some facade that takes away its spotlight (through politics, committees, marketing etc.). I'm close to 15 years in and there are still programming languages, data structures or protocols I never heard of.
The world was never as complex as it is today, advancements were never that accelerated, and expectations on scalable software were never this high. Do you really buy the marketing fuzz that the work is "done" just because your software runs on hyperscaler #3 or in a k8s cluster? The amount of available open source projects steadily increases, those can (and should) be used to learn from and contribute something back. Free and open source software is used everywhere and whole businesses are built on some, yet Linux and all those other projects are just increasing in complexity. Sure, everybody wants to be the expert and yet nobody really is. Fact is, unfinished projects are everywhere and there's a lot of work to be done.
LLMs have the chance to make personal computing even more personal and should be treated as valuable assistents to learn with. LLMs won't ever be the desired oracles of some kind (yes, I don't buy that "AGI is near" crap), they'll rather be good personal sparing partners. APIs still break constantly and there are transient errors everywhere. I can imagine some small shops and personalized apps, yet people that aren't into tech won't magically get into it because of some progress in machine learning. If you're in it just for the money times might get challenging here and there (what isn't?), but if you're in it for the engineering times can look pretty bright, as long as we make good use of our ambitions. There are still some engineering efforts to take before a smartwatch can also act smart in isolation. Our tooling just took a leap ahead - go make use of it, that's it.
I don't think LLMs are fundamentally more threatening than off shore developers were. Sure, we lost jobs during that time, but businesses realized eventually that the productivity was low and they wanted low level people who were responsible.
I think that will continue. We'll all learn to control these agents and review their code, but ultimately, someone needs to be responsible for these agents, reviewing what they produce and fixing any shitshows they produce.
I won't rule out the possibility of LLMs that are so good that they can replicate just about any app in existence in minutes. But there's still value in having workers manage infrastructure, data, etc.