If it can be taught, an AI can do it. The only work left is either manual or inherently new.
Absolutely not the case now. Maybe it will be in future, but that's basically impossible to predict.
Doubtful.
You'll be expected to produce much more, you aren't likely to see raises commensurate with the increased productivity, and the AI tide is still rising and will likely eventually put downward pressure on your pay at an increasing rate.
So you could have the senior oversee the junior or just have them oversee Claude.
Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist.
The job was always "software architect", "software engineer", "web developer", etc.
The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to describe this.
A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical sense) than a senior manager who's never looked at code, but perhaps not as good at choosing what to code in the first place.
An anecdote - A neighbor who's an accountant was able to vibe code a Salesforce replacement for her company using Claude Fable and saved her company hundreds of thousands of dollars of fees. Claude wrote her an agent loop for maintenance. That's distribution of intelligence. That's breaking boundaries. That's democratization.
Going to college and expecting a job is privilege. You need to be able to put a 100k down. Jobs are based on citizenship whereas AI is available to all. Juniors will be in good hands. Elon and Altman have talked about UBI. With LLMs they control their destiny.
Turns out that as admitted, the opposite was true and was predictable. Such that, in late 2024 [0], I predicted that there would be more layoffs in 2025.
> In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight.
Of course they would. Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?
Surely that makes all of this even cheaper? False. Just ask Apple. [1] Or Boeing [2] [3] with their expensive offshoring and their trade secrets either leaked or the quality degraded.
And those drunk on token usage are now limiting it because it is expensive. Ask Meta, Tesla, Amazon and Microsoft why they are not "tokenmaxxing".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/06/12/boeing-...
[3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513787/boeing-and-the...
80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.
They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.
That's often how jobs work. I happen to like my job, but let's not pretend like everyone is going to make sufficient money following their most passionate interests.
I do the job for money. Period.
I also happen to really enjoy computers, systems, etc. I enjoyed most of the jobs I've had, but the reason why I was there doing the job, as opposed to being at home nerding out for my benefit alone, was always the need to pay bills.
So it really is good to find people who are a good fit for a specific position - and who, in the worst-case scenario, would do the work even for free or without anyone supervising them.
The question is whether the younger generation has grown up with the motto “money first and at any cost”… Not everyone, of course, but when I see how everything everywhere is reduced just to monetary value, it makes me feel a little down sometimes.
This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.
People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.
The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.
We've always had people developing, in many forms. Scientists of all kinds, usually with Python, finance people with Excel, etc.
I think that yes, they can go a lot farther now. So this will make the bottom of the software curve grow 10-100x.
Now, the real question for developers is: what does this do to the middle and top or the curve? In my experience that's where maintenance comes in and anyone who's not a trained software developer (and even many SDEs) break their necks. "Casuals" will build what their need, but even with AI guiding them, it's still spaghetti.
It's going to be interesting keeping an eye on this, for sure.
This is just the natural next step towards a more mature kind of consulting. The client needs help scaling up their project or deploying it to the rest of their business. This is massive opportunity for any entrepreneur since the client is coming much better prepared.
Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.
The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.
Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.
The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.
Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.
The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.
The people who are succeeding are learning and playing and building their own experience they can demonstrate.
There's few shortcuts if any that last. It comes out in the wash quicker.
On the senior end there remains a gap and advantage between understanding of human vs understanding of AI on how best to approach or work through things.
And as systems become more complex with time, we will need more people with the title “software engineer”
Also Fable 5 isn't "that impressive" as a lot of people have that kind of intelligence since 6 months+ by using combo of models and loops (I scored better on HLE than gpt-5.5 xhigh last January with some good tooling and 6x the cost), but for a lambda Claude Code user, I can see why it looks that good.
For sure, sufficient money is important part of this equation.
But I strongly believe that if you find (your sort of) fun in what you do then you become faster and more efficient at it.
Edit: Cleaning, nursing etc. Yes there are professions that almost no one wants to do. But that doesn’t mean that these people do it just for money.. this is prejudice that if you don’t like it and don’t have fun that other people are the same. No, they aren’t.
Great, when is he applying?
I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?
I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.
The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
Too many if not most can't even change a single sentence in their curriculum in 1-2 years.
It doesn't mean University isn't worth it, it's worth less if you aren't self-directed learner building things.
Maybe, just maybe, companies should invest into training again instead of outsourcing training to universities and saddle the prospects with the cost in the form of student debt? FFS we used to tell our children "if a job requires you to pay for entry, you're getting scammed" - and yet, we've all accepted it with "academia", "coding bootcamps" and god knows what else.
Universities should be a place for the gifted to advance science, not be degree mills for large companies too goddamn lazy and penny-pinching!
But nobody wants to set up programming trade schools or apprenticeships so shrug.
They weren’t a panacea either.
Universities aren’t vocational schools. An undergraduate education can, at best, teach you how to learn complex topics independently and give you foundational knowledge you can build upon later whether you’re going into industry, pursuing a PhD, or doing something unrelated.
The place for you to learn “practical” software development is an internship or an entry-level role, assisted with a lot of self-directed learning that hopefully university made possible for you.
One might argue that it might not be a bad idea to have apprenticeships like they do in traditional trade crafts. I'd argue that this is what the junior programmer role is.
in your place i’d focus on delivering big wins for end-users via multiple roles ; i personally believe the days of being a specialist in one type of stack (ex: “i’m a ui developer”) are over , in this next stage we’ll say “i build products for young people looking for educational opportunities “ ; ie you’ll beed to cut across use-cases and disciplines in a way that was atypical just a few years ago
It's a job, working for someone else. What other reason is there?
our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something new, and our interview process is largely centered around getting to know them as a person what they're all about and we seem to do an okay job triangulating "this kid is curious, seems like they'd glue well with everyone here". mildly grill on some technical stuff but mostly just to get a read on where they're at & make assessments on what we're willing to teach.
at this point we've reasoned out that the normal requisition is just going to get an influx of people who think they're charmers and can rehearse an interview and then pan out to be a nothingburger. we've had a couple of those in the past few years and it's annoying. we don't hire often do but when we do we're just interested in having someone around that we like and seems eager to learn, we've had great luck with this formula and this seems to pluck out people who get lost in a sea of incredible looking resumes, we give them a good learning track and goals and they seem to leapfrog past every goalpost we've put in front of them. as far as juniors go, we like hearing about other weird non-computer problems they've solved in life. when we find the right candidate we kind of just know when we talk with them, they universally are pretty open about their own shortcomings but just demonstrate some sort of very passionate need to build or solve things. we see the mission as needing to build them up as a person first and the nerdy stuff is the fun sidequest they can join us and chase dopamine with. we all enjoy teaching & watching people grow so it works out pretty well and we've transitioned a couple to senior positions in the past 4-5 years. people who may have not had any business on paper being in this field who panned out to be incredible resources some of the heaviest hitters our org has seen.
I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired?
By "project" do you mean "product"?
deadbabe•49m ago
tokioyoyo•44m ago
fer•34m ago
akmarinov•34m ago
Used to have an “academy” where we pick people up from first year in uni and get them to learn from zero.
Haven’t had one in ~3 years, no plan to.
Also half the company was downsized.
No hiring in 3 years, cutting tons of people and tons of people leaving, we’re now at a point where in the tech i work in, our most junior person is a senior with about 10 YoE
throwyawayyyy•33m ago
ttoinou•33m ago
a34729t•32m ago
1270018080•30m ago
throwaway4233•6m ago