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 …
  • annoying_cyclist@programming.dev
    3·
    11 hours ago

    This post is the piece those two were circling around: what happens to the bottom of the chart, and whose job it is to fix it. Spoiler — it’s yours, senior engineer. It’s mine. And most of us are about to get it wrong in a very specific, very tempting way.

    BS. Most good seniors I know would love to hire more juniors, feel badly for the mass of recent college grads who are unemployed, and enjoy mentoring new engineers without needing a wall of AI slop to tell them to do so. When you give us control over the hiring budget and let us hire juniors again, you can blame us for the future senior engineer shortage. Until then, blame the people actually at fault (management, executives, the investor class), not us.

  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
    261·
    22 hours ago

    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.

    • Randelung@lemmy.world
      6·
      19 hours ago

      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.

    • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
      4·
      18 hours ago

      So basically the AI company with AI in the name uses AI a bunch and evangelizes it.

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    61·
    19 hours ago

    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?

  • Farooq@realbitcoin.cash
    21·
    15 hours ago

    Everyone thinks LLMs boost productivity. But from psychological point of view, the developer being both the subject and the object is no where near scientific and reliable.

    In other words, the developer who is using the LLM also reports they are productive. But humans can rarely be good judge over themselves. That’s why we’ve got therapists. So we have to wait for some serious and well done research if LLMs boost productivity.

    Another concern I have which prevents me from using LLMs, is the unknown long term effect on the codebase. You know, writing something is much easier than maintaining it for years after years. And every decision you make, you must be mindful of this. So I’m gonna wait and see what’ll happen after 1-3 years to the softwares with heavy LLM assists. Will their codebase still be easy to maintain?

  • Klear@piefed.worldEnglish
    100·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Logi@lemmy.world
      3·
      17 hours ago

      Yeah, that was probably the prompt. More or less. Then it’s padded with a mountain of slop.

    • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
      31·
      2 days ago

      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?

      • biofaust@lemmy.world
        2·
        22 hours ago

        Typical modern book as well. I keep reading classic philosophy just for being amazed at the amount of concepts crammed in under 100 pages.

        • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
          2·
          21 hours ago

          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.

          • biofaust@lemmy.world
            1·
            21 hours ago

            No, absolutely. At the very least from Hegel onwards, the game changes.

            I read Stoics, the few things we have from Epicureans, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero’s work on rhetoric.

      • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
        12·
        2 days ago

        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.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
      14·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • lad@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        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

    • criss_cross@lemmy.world
      8·
      1 day ago

      Was gonna say I took a pay cut and I’m staying at my current braindead job right now because the market is ass.

    • thenextguy@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • locuester@lemmy.zipEnglish
      52·
      2 days ago

      The graph is anticipating the future. Not current. Take a couple years off.

      • boaratio@lemmy.world
        13·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • setsubyou@lemmy.world
          4·
          22 hours ago

          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.

        • locuester@lemmy.zipEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          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

          • heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
            4·
            1 day ago

            If few are entering as entry-level because snubbed by LLMs, there will be fewer seniors — eventually.

            • locuester@lemmy.zipEnglish
              5·
              1 day ago

              Yeah that’s what I said. It takes about a decade to become Sr. So that’s when we will start feeling the shortage.

      • nothingcorporate@lemmy.today
        7·
        2 days ago

        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.

  • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
    15·
    2 days ago

    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

  • absquatulate@lemmy.world
    24·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
    21·
    2 days ago

    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 profit-oriented industries are absolutely capable of completely and irreversibly wrecking their own economical foundations for a few years with a bit of extra profit.

  • inzen@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • elgordino@fedia.io
      9·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • Mucki@feddit.org
          2·
          1 day ago

          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…