I continue to believe the first 12-18 months after graduation are vital. I still can't believe some of the things I thought about s/w before I entered the workforce and I can't believe some of the things I got away with over the years since.

DataStructures, Databases, Operating Systems, Discreet Math etc are usually done without any programming at all. besides one or two assignments

The rest of the program it's mostly Math stuff. The only other time you do programming is if you choose an elective towards your graduation.

Absolutely. The value in a CS degree is not in learning this or that language or tool. It is in being able to understand how to solve difficult problems effectively.

1. Juniors grow. Most of them grow fast, becoming solid mid-levels in 1-1.5y (in the right environment)

2. The industry depends heavily on a wide pool of mid-levels. These are the folks who can produce decent quality solutions, and don't need hand-holding anymore. They are the “velocity” of the team. Engineers tend to spend a few years there, before they might grow into seniors.

3. Seniors will age out.

4. AI doesn't grow (as it is today), it's stuck on the low-junior level mostly. This might change, but currently there are no signs for this.

5. Seniors would need to spend _a lot_ of time fixing AI's output, and course-correcting.

Now, all of this combined: the junior --> senior transition takes say, 5+ years on average (I know, depends). If we move on with the "1/2 senior + AI agents" model, how does a company form a new team? When those seniors move away / retire, who's taking their place? What happens to the velocity of the team without mid-levels now?

If we let this go on for a couple of years before a reckoning of "oh crap" happens, it'll be very hard to come back from this --> certain "muscles" of the aforementioned seniors will have atrophied (e.g. mentoring, growing others), a lot of juniors (and mediors!) will have left the industry.

I hope companies will recognize this risk in time...

just having a brain and thinking for yourself will be a super power

half the US economy already relies on the fact that younger people dont know how to use computers

I suspect this will be the future; the vast industry we're in now will shrink (as we're seeing now), and will rely on self-taught programmers more as AI removes the Junior role.

There will always be people who enjoy writing code and will do that for fun, I think. It'll be interesting to see what happens to all the other folks who never wanted to do this in the first place and only got into it because it's a good career.

There is hardly any real logic or coding work involved. You would believe me if you work in a non-tech company. Most of your time goes into navigating the company's process, tools, and people. Yes, it is called People-Process-Technology for a reason. Even the word "Technology" here refers to engaging the tech vendors and consultants to get some work done, or just figuring out how to use a legacy software or constant chasing others to get dependencies resolved. Weeks and months pass by, waiting for a dependency to get resolved so that your last code commit could actually finish it's build. Tons of JIRA tickets and INCs would have flown around meanwhile which creates an imaginary realm of huge work and productivity - all resulting in a single line of code change getting tested. It could even be celebrated via huge email thanking every one (100s of people), making it look like a big achievement.

The point is, AI doesn't replace junior engineer roles. Junior engineers are preferred for assigning all dirty drudgery, who can be blamed if things go wrong and who can give away their credit to bosses when things work well and who kind of flexible with good attitude. That's very attractive!

Basically we hire people to own some risk and accountability. Distribution of work is primarily to distribute the risk, blame and accountability, not really to get the work done. Actual work is done by non-employee consultants in India, eastern Europe or Vietnam etc.

For example, we don't use opensource because we can't hold someone accountable. The fact that opensource simply works, doesn't count. However if some vendor offers the same opensource tech with enterprise support or as a managed SaaS, we would buy that.

Sam Altman already outlined that this year AI agents will reach the level of a base-line senior software engineer on most tasks including web development such as HTML, CSS and Javascript and those web apps can be built in minutes.

One can even say by their own definition of "AGI", it is actually "AGI" for web developers today.