If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
I feel that too. I am a self-taught dev. Got a degree, but not in CS. I don't know if I could get hired today.
Not sure how to fix it; feels like the entire industry is eating the seed corn.
Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human relationships matter.
where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on?
I do think I could get a job from my network because I’ve worked in the industry for years and done good work; I’m a little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at least ignore those LinkedIn requests
- go to events/conventions/join clubs related to programming (need to be located near a large city for this)
- talk to other students/self-learners and wait for them to get to the next step
I’ve been unemployed a long time and have been thinking of improving at networking. These are what I came up with.
If you're a senior, maintain relations with last year's graduating class (and with your placement services people).
If you get an internship, keep in touch with people there.
If you are a new grad: go to alumni events. Go to alumni events! GO TO ALUMNI EVENTS.
If you are still in school: talk to your alumni and career office; they will be able to connect you better.
If you are in High School: consider a university with a co-op program.
The value of fact-to-face connection should not be underestimated.
Again: this may be uncomfortable for some people, but it is the way of the world.
And although it hasn't discouraged me, I have to admit that I've been burned by juniors when caught in the middle between them and senior leadership on output expectations or strategy because frankly it's much more challenging to mentor how to navigate company politics than it is to mentor professional coding acumen. I want to be humble here. I don't think that's the junior's fault.
It feels like these problems go a lot deeper than AI. Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team. We've all experienced this. It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.
Even before LLMs, there were periods recently where multiple companies had "senior only" hiring policies. That just inflated what "senior" was until it was basically 5 years of experience.
This time seems a bit different, however. There are both supply and demand side problems. The supply of students it tainted with AI "learning" now. Colleges haven't realized that they absolutely have to effectively crack down on AI, or the signal of their degrees will wither to nothing. The demand side is also low, of course, since the candidates aren't good, and AI seems to be a good substitute for a newly graduated hire, especially if that hire is just going to use the AI badly.
So the irony here is that LLMs are actually going to be decent at COBOL by default. And other uncommon/esoteric codebases. For example I vibe-ported some Apple ii assembly to modern C/SDL and... it works. It's stuff that I just wouldn't even attempt at manual development speed. It may be actually an easier path than training someone to do things, as long as you have a large enough test suite or detailed enough requirements.
Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we came to the same conclusion. You used to be able to make yourself useful by doing the easy / annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to waste time dealing with. In exchange you got on-the-job experience, until you were able to handle more complex tasks and grow your skill set. AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.
I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally. It's almost like the aftermath of a war killing off 18-30 year olds leaving a demographic hole, or the effect of covid on education for certain age ranges.
Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.
While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in minutes usually, sometimes maybe an hour if its obscure enough. You just have to feed the model enough context, full stack trace, every time.
Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR.
I'd worry less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the logic issues.
Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks. Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.
We're not hiring a lot of rotary phone makers these days.
Who is hiring their own shoe-smith? It's been 30-ish years since my carpenter father last had work boots resoled.
It's almost as if... technology and economy evolve over time.
For all the arguments software people make about freedom to use their property as they see fit, they ignore non-programmers use of personal technology property is coupled to the opinions of programmers. Programmers ignore how they are middlemen of a sort they often deride as taking away the programmer's freedom! A very hypocritical group, them programmers.
What's so high tech about configuration of machines with lexical constructs as was the norm 60+ years ago? Seems a bit old fashioned.
Programmers are biology and biology has a tendency to be nostalgic, clingy, and self selecting. Which is all programmers are engaged in when they complain others won't need their skills.
If that were to actually happen, we'd wind up excluding many of our greatest technical performers while drowning in a sea of would-be middle managers. People skills matter, but so do many other strengths that don't always overlap with being naturally good at navigating interpersonal dynamics.
It is also something which is likely to be quite harmful, since it selects for people who are great at networking over people who have good technical skills. Obviously interpersonal communication is important, but how well a 20 year old in University performs at it should not doom or make their career.
And even people with bad social skills deserve to exist and should be allowed into their chosen career. Being someone who does good work and is respectful, but not overly social, should be good enough.
new grads will be fed to the meat grinder with no regards, its a closed shop unless you know someone
1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior.
2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume.
The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.
The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async induced offshoring.
Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new grad range have largely risen because having experienced developers really does matter and provides positive business outcomes.
State and local governments needs to play the same white collar subsidy game that the rest of the world is playing. This is why Hollywood shifted to the UK, Pharma shifted to Switzerland, and Software to India.
Building a GCC ends up costing around $60k-$100k per head in operating costs without subsidizes, and deploying vibe coding tools to fully replace an entire dev team end up in a similar price range.
I started in tech in the late 70s. I can say this break happened during the Reagan Years with a bit of help from the Nixon Years.
ChrisMarshallNY•42m ago
> The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer.
Mentoring is difficult; especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors.
For myself, I'm happily retired from the Rodent Rally, and find that LLMs have been a huge help, when learning new stuff.
pelagicAustral•35m ago
This kid would not accept seniority, would constantly and publicly try to divert from the stack we worked with, he would not take any input on his work without actively fighting the process and will crowd the conversation at team meetings with never-ending Reddit-tier takes that contributed to nothing other than fill his ego.
In the end I managed to convince my boss to get him out, and he now works in Cyber, which will probably cause even more damage in the long run, but at least I can now say "not my problem".
carlosjobim•27m ago
You should have stopped to think about why such a person was hired in the first place, while there are an endless supply of very talented, hard working, and honest young people who would never be given a chance at all.
But if I guess right, hiring is not seen as the responsibility of your company. And that's the core of the problem.
elric•32m ago
What world is this? This not match my experiences at all. Is this a common sentiment among your peers?
carlosjobim•31m ago
9 times out of 10 it goes the other way around. Most young people have only had very negative interactions with their seniors, which has been wholly on the part of the senior. The current young generation is very respectful towards older people.
ChrisMarshallNY•29m ago
This has not been my experience.
I worked for a company that prized seniority, and I regularly dealt with folks older than me, more experienced than me, more capable than me, and willing to help me out. I worked there for almost 27 years, and it was awesome.
In my experience, I'm usually written off as an "OK Boomer," before I've even had a chance to open my mouth to prove it (or not).
My fave, is when we have a really promising text-only relationship, then, the minute they see me, it goes south.
hiAndrewQuinn•12m ago