Reading through this thread, it feels like there are two main camps:
1. Those who see this as mostly macroeconomics + hype (high interest rates, weak economy, AI as a convenient excuse).
2. Those who believe AI is genuinely reshaping the work structure (seniors + AI can cover more ground, making juniors less necessary).
Maybe it’s both. The economy explains why companies are cautious now, but AI explains where they are cutting first — the “bottom rungs.”
The bigger question, then, is: even if AI isn’t the sole cause, what happens when a whole generation of juniors doesn’t get trained? That’s not just a company-level problem, it’s an industry-wide pipeline issue.
How do we avoid a tragedy of the commons here — where everyone optimizes short-term and we end up with fewer capable seniors in 10 years?
If entry-level roles are shrinking, how should companies rethink talent development?
Without the traditional “bottom rungs,” how do we grow future seniors if fewer juniors ever get the chance to start?
When were companies ever thinking about talent development, especially for SWE? We had some loose "mentorship" roles but IME most folks are left to their own devices or just learn by bandwagoning things from reddit.
I think open source contributions/projects will still be a way to gain verifiable experience.
Other than that, I guess developing software in some capacity while doing a non-strictly software job - say, in accounting, marketing, healtcare, etc. This might not be a relevant number of people if 'vibe coding' takes hold and the fundamentals are not learned/ignored by these accountants, marketers, healthcare workers, etc.
If that is the case, we'd have a lot of 'informed beginners' with 10+ years of experience tangentially related to software.
Edit: As a result of the above, we might see an un-ironic return to the 'learn to code' mantra in the following years. Perhaps now qualified 'learn to -actually- code'? I'd wager a dollar on that discourse popping up in ~5 years time if the trend of not hiring junior devs continues.
I'm looking forward for the weird inflective trend of "organic" programs, "humane" dev treatment, and software development taking a long time being seen as a mark of quality rather than stagnation or worry. :)
I'm half-joking, but I wouldn't be surprised to see all sorts of counterpoint marketing come into play. Maybe throw in a weird traditional bent to it?
> (Pretentious, douche company): Free-range programming, the way programming was meant to be done; with the human touch!
All-in-all, I already feel severely grossed out any time a business I interact with introduces any kind of LLM chatbot shtick and I have to move away from their services; I could genuinely see people deriving a greater disdain for the fad than there already is.
The plan seems to be to hope that AI will be able to replace the senior ICs in the near future. They're certainly gutting the ranks of management today in a way that presupposes there will be far fewer ICs of all levels to manage soon.
That's much longer than a quarterly earnings report away, which makes it "somebody else's problem" for the executives pushing these policies. There's no reason to expect these people to have a long-term strategy in mind as long as their short-term strategy gives them a golden parachute.
presumably this also means the relative value of seniors is now increasing, as the pipeline to replace them is smaller.
its like how the generic "we take anyone" online security degree has poisoned that market -- nothing but hoards of entry level goobers, but no real heavy hitters on the mid-to-high end. put another way, the market is tight but there are still reasonable options for seniors.
Agree, increased value and demand for seniors. But how will the market solve the generation of new seniors if juniors are getting less opportunities?
Take the software development sector as example: if we replace junior devs by AI coding agents and put senior devs to review the agent's work, how will we produce more seniors (with wide experience in the sector) if the juniors are not coding anymore?
Who cares? This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to finally gatekeep software engineering the way lawyers and finance professionals do with their fields! Enjoy the windfall in 5 years!
Job market is not obligated to ensure sustained supply of talented individuals, so, I think, short term they'd just keep chasing unicorns. Long term, governments will be forced to financially incentivize young hires. Or something terrible happens and everything rolls back to 1945.
New Harvard's study (62M workers, 285k firms) shows firms adopting generative AI cut junior hiring sharply while continuing to grow senior roles — eroding the bottom rungs of career ladders and reshaping how careers start.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What was the incentive for companies to train juniors into seniors in the past, post job-hopping era? Curious to know if that incentive has warped in the past two decades or so as someone who's starting their career now.
Cheap labor. It doesn't take that much to train someone to be somewhat useful, in mmany cases. The main educators are universities and trade schools. Not companies.
And if they want more loyalty the can always provide more incentives for juniors to stay longer.
At least in my bubble it's astonishing how it's almost never worth it to stay at a company. You'd likely get overlooked for promotions and salary rises are almost insultingly low.
>> What was the incentive for companies to train juniors into seniors in the past, post job-hopping era?
You get a lot in the interim!!! I started at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture.) The annual attrition was ~20%, but they still invested over a year of training into me.
But it worked:
- They needed grunt work in early years (me, working 75hr billable weeks). Not sure how much of this is viable now given LLMs
- They had great margins on the other four years. Not sure how much of this is viable now, as margins have shrunk in the past 25yrs as there is more way competition
- They used me to train the next cohort in years 4/5
- I appreciated the training and give them 60hr billable weeks on average for five years
It was a brutal and exhausing five years but i'm forever thankful to AndersenConsulting/Accenture for the experience.
There is no incentive now because the social contract is broken and there is too much mobility. Best you can do is find a supportive boss / a company that provides training opportunities.
Another way is maintaining the final balance field for the readings. Every new transaction you save it into the transactions table and adjust the balance field as well.
You can have a job to go through the transactions from time to time to save important balances that user would need (e.g: daily, monthly and quarterly balances).
My initial thought was that there would be high offer on some jobs while low offer on others, causing high demand for some jobs and low demand for others. That would cause differences in prices for each job.
However nobody would like to pay more than they charge for their own jobs, since they're compentent in that other task too. That would lead to people spending more time with tasks they don't like because they are more expense to hire someone to do it. Sad world.
To fix that, since everybody is competent in everything, they could organize themselves to rotate the jobs. Each person would be responsible for that job for a period of time, then they'd rotate. That could work with highly regulated jobs (like medicine or politics) but wouldn't work for others (like software development, gardening, etc). That would force a lot of energy to be spent in regulation. Less freedom. Sad world.
Finally, it doesn't matter if we're leveling people's competency by the highest or lowest level of competency available in any field, if they are always the same, that means there is no growth and there would be less networking and connection among people. A sad world.
On the other hand if they started at the same level of competency but could actually become more competent by exercising some job, than we'd create a difference. Given the time and the compounding effect, these differences would grow, causing people to look each other with respect and setting targets for themselves to reach higher levels of competency in a particular field.
The differences is what makes us special. They lead to growth. We should respect all the differences.
I organize my life in pillars. One of them is Occupational pillar, made of Profession, Projects and Leisure. Profession is my main occupation, but I have other side projects as well.
I usualy book time in advance to work on my projects, but I also work on them when I have some free time from my profession. If I'm too tired then I go for my leisure time (rest is also important).
About routines, I have a morning routine (that I do everyday when I wake up) and a night routine (before going to sleep). Other than that I have simply morning, afternoon and evening work slots. These work slots changes depending on the day.
I simple way to avoid the "what should I be doing now?" is starting doing "what should I do tomorrow?"
You don’t need to change anything. Also you don’t need to stick to one field only. Many of the most successful people in History were actually multi-talented and polymath. The most interested people I had a chance to talk to also had experience in multiple fields and activities. People like you are curious, and this is a virtue.
But if something is bugging you about this, maybe you could invest some time giving one step back and getting to know yourself better. This will make the exploration on your options more assertive. Study your personality and temperament. Read some biographies of successful people with the same personality of you. Consider options of fields that are more dynamic and let you work on a wide variety of fields (e.g.: entrepreneurship).
Instead of looking for the right activity for yourself, I’d suggest looking for the right mission or purpose for yourself. Doing any task in any fields but that is actually linked to a strong sense of purpose is much more fun.
1. Those who see this as mostly macroeconomics + hype (high interest rates, weak economy, AI as a convenient excuse).
2. Those who believe AI is genuinely reshaping the work structure (seniors + AI can cover more ground, making juniors less necessary).
Maybe it’s both. The economy explains why companies are cautious now, but AI explains where they are cutting first — the “bottom rungs.”
The bigger question, then, is: even if AI isn’t the sole cause, what happens when a whole generation of juniors doesn’t get trained? That’s not just a company-level problem, it’s an industry-wide pipeline issue.
How do we avoid a tragedy of the commons here — where everyone optimizes short-term and we end up with fewer capable seniors in 10 years?