Companies are not only no longer taking on juniors, they’re making hardware prohibitively expensive. Where do they expect to get their talent if they force everyone to use their braindead toys?
There’s a terrific writeup from the folks at FlintAI — their team is now 5 devs and 45 agents, all living in Slack. Nine agents per developer. The agents take roles — triage, deploy, review — the human steps in for the two decisions that actually matter (code review, release approval), and they report something like a 3x productivity bump. It’s a genuinely impressive piece of engineering and you should read it.
That’s the model everybody’s racing toward right now: take your best seniors, strap nine agents to them, and harvest the multiple. And it works! I’m not knocking it (and I’m doing it too)!
I’m a senior but if the future of my work is reviewing AI code all day I will buy a bunch of goats and become a goatherder.
Extracting productivity from senior engineers is also burning them out faster.
So basically the AI company with AI in the name uses AI a bunch and evangelizes it.
I’ve already started rebelling. That won “efficiency” is in part mine, I’m just going home. Why would I allow my bosses to reap all of the rewards for my shittier workday? And if they don’t agree, I’m going back to writing by hand.
I heard your goats’ grazing land has a datacenter now.
LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain — unnamed Microsoft exec
Unemployed principal software engineer here. This graph is a lie.
In the US? There are jobs in Europe.
They are well hidden if so
Uh… Where have you been looking? There are loads of remote jobs in Europe.
Unemployment in our (EU) IT sector is higher than in the US and rising… What are you talking about?
Was gonna say I took a pay cut and I’m staying at my current braindead job right now because the market is ass.
The graph is anticipating the future. Not current. Take a couple years off.
But if you take a couple of years off, won’t it be tough to get back in?
If you can afford taking a few years off in the first place, you can also afford starting a company and doing your own projects for a while. Don’t leave the field behind, put some software on app stores and pick your topics by what skills you want to learn or maintain. Maybe it even makes money.
No one knows.
I think a true Sr shortage is likely decade+ away. So if you need money you gotta make ends meet somehow.
I’m leaning into the AI space, becoming proficient at understanding and developing harnesses for different purposes, running local models, adjusting to context switching more often than not, etc.
I’m currently working a short term AI Cyber gig for a financial firm I already had a relationship with, but then taking time off to tinker.
Dev/Sys/Net Operations, Cyber. All great fields for leaning into AI
If few are entering as entry-level because snubbed by LLMs, there will be fewer seniors — eventually.
Yeah that’s what I said. It takes about a decade to become Sr. So that’s when we will start feeling the shortage.
My family had just bought a house before I was laid off, and we’re burning through our savings at an alarming rate. If I don’t find a job soon, I’m going to have to liquidate my retirement account. I don’t have years, I have months.
Yup, nobody can get to senior for the same reason RAM is so high: LLMs. In this case, big-brained execs not hiring anyone at lower levels and replacing them all with AI…a little down the road there will be one old engineer named Lily who still understands how tech works and everyone will call her the oracle.
I got retired about six months before I was planning to. That line would have to be a lot steeper to get me to go back.
I’m only 46 and have been looking since February.
Stop hiring and mentoring junior engineers and you’ve quietly unplugged the machine that makes senior ones. A few years out, you run dry — right when everyone else is dry too, and the price of the few left goes through the roof.
Written by AI
Didn’t read the article but I love the braindead chart:
The article isn’t much better.
lol this is one way to make sure it doesn’t look like AI wrote your shit.
AI is stupid, but to be truly outstanding at stupidity, you have to be human.
This was written by ai, right?
Yeah definitely. From the opener “There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet” onwards it reads like I’m reading Claude output.
Has anyone coined a term for that style of writing. I was in a presentation the other day and the guy was very clearly reading what Claude had wrote. It was so annoying. He wasted my time. I could have just asked Claude.
There was this article about how some LLMs replicate the English that is taught in African schools, which is far from what most english speaking use everyday. Can’t seem to find it though, maybe someone else can…
IMHO. This haas been common sense for most senior devs for a while now. Looking at AI workflows there is little opportunity to build up the skill and experience required to become a senior.
I tried reading the article, got about halfway through and it just keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. It starts with this:
There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers. Every company on earth is about to want one who can drive a fleet of agents with judgment — and almost nobody is making new ones anymore, because AI ate the entry-level work juniors used to learn on
That’s it. That’s the whole article as far as I was willing to read. There’s almost no extra information further down. Holy hell.
When you use a LLM to expand two sentence to 5 paragraphs
Bert Hubert wrote about the same consideration in a blog post.
I think the consideration itself is valid. But Berts position has a big difference: He does not pretend that he can tell the future. It is quite logical and to expect that people ceasing to work as junior developers, or them not finding a job, might lead to a scarcity of senior developers. But we do not really know what happens. I’d describe it more as the whole field in crisis. And the jobs that remain, might not be the jobs that experienced senior developers, of which e.g. in Germany purely by demographics many are close to retirement, really want to do.
Something similar, at a perhaps smaller scale, has happened during and after the Corona pandemic in Europe in the field of hospitality: People in this sector could not get work, or only short hours. So they left the field, since there were other, better paying jobs, with more friendly work times. Hotels and restaurants experienced a worker shortage. One could have expected that then, the businesses had to pay more to attract people. But this did not happen at a significant scale. Was happened was automation and reduction of work, lowering of service standards, and restaurants closing. Was this predictable? I do not know.
Besides with software industry being pretty big, I think that the crisis may take another 50 years before having an effect they describe, not many of laid off now people will be able to wait for it
Typical modern article. And then some people are going angry “You obviously have read only the title, not the article in full”. Wonder why people limit themselves only to titles? Maybe because the article is 2 sentences worth of data fit into 20 paragraphs of the life story of Jane Smith who was amazed and sat in awe after reading e-mail that will change her life?
Typical modern book as well. I keep reading classic philosophy just for being amazed at the amount of concepts crammed in under 100 pages.
Never read modern philosophy, but I had completely opposite experience with mid-late XIX century philosophy: too much words and too much repeating of the same thought from too many different angles. But I’m a technician type of guy so I might just have been unlucky with the set of authors. Never cared to read much of philosophy.
I tend to just look at the comments first here for anything even slightly questionable. Seems like some of the dumbed down shit does actual brain damage to read.
You Can’t Just Buy Them
I can hear the objection, because it’s the obvious one and I’ve made it myself: just hire seniors when you need them. Let the other guy train them. Poach the finished product. It’s cheaper, it’s faster, and it has worked for the entire history of this industry. Right? WRONG.
Here’s why that breaks: everyone is about to have that exact same idea at the exact same time. Every company that quietly decides juniors are too expensive is also quietly deciding to buy its seniors on the open market later.
One might think that companies really ought to be smarter. But the histories of whaling and fishing shows that industries are absolutely capable of completely wrecking their own economical foundations for a few years with a bit of extra gain.
Companies smarter? You obviously never got close to one.
So soon? I figured it’d take a couple years for them to realize how they shot themselves in the foot by not hiring juniors anymore.
It’s fucked and it has been for a while now. You see, you currently put yourself at a disadvantage if you DO hire juniors because later down the line others will just poach them from you. You’ll be lucky if they ever turn into a net positive for your country.
Only way this changes is if most big companies that can take the budget hit start hiring juniors again. Fat chance of that right now.
