This isn’t a lunatic. This is someone trying to make a point about companies thinking they can use AI to replace devs. Poe’s Law is on heavy display here in these comments.
Whether or not you have experienced it, there is currently a trend both in recruiting and in millionaire leadership dialogue toward dropping devs for AI codegen. CEOs that don’t understand how anything works (eg Salesforce) think you can just not hire devs because Google’s inflated AI stats that included basic autocomplete in their full AI codegen numbers indicate AI can code. Boards believe generative AI is capable of things it won’t be able to touch for decades. I have to deal with idiotic AI questions from Fortune 500 companies every fucking week.
From a hiring perspective, it’s becoming incredibly difficult to weed out AI bullshit. For every one qualified candidate I get, I’ve had to drop five or more in a fucking tech screen because, while codegen has given them enough to pass a basic hiring screen that used to weed out a lot more, there’s zero fucking ability to code without Copilot or critical understanding of the code it generates. When I was starting out, the same problem existed at university but got filtered out after graduation fairly quickly.
The non lunatic here is extending that to other disciplines because it’s a natural next question. He’s not exactly applying a slippery slope; it’s sort of there underneath.
Edit: valid criticism of the post is that you have to have a degree to code. That’s bullshit. After my first degree, I went back for CS and dropped out because it was a waste of time. It limited my job pool initially; this far into my career it really does nothing. I’ve hired some solid bootcamp devs. I’ve seen shitty bootcamp devs. I’ve also seen a bunch of CS masters who have no fucking clue how to ship production code but can wax poetic about algorithm design. Since I don’t run an R&D department, that doesn’t matter 95% of the time.
Edit: valid criticism of the post is that you have to have a degree to code. That’s bullshit.
Same. I didn’t finish even one degree, I’m entirely self taught. I have two prestige positions on my res. Breaking out is incredibly difficult under these circumstances, but once you have one good position that you’ve held long enough to prove you could do the job, education doesn’t matter. You’ll probably get at least a phone screening and if you know how to chat with people (not something that comes naturally to everyone), you should likely get a chance to prove yourself in real interviews.
Note: I bombed an interview to an embarrassing degree and got hired by one of the former interviewers when I applied again after leveling up.
He’s a lunatic because his position is that it won’t be a problem. You just train programmers enough that they’ll go into the workforce as senior developers.
From a hiring perspective, it’s becoming incredibly difficult to weed out AI bullshit. For every one qualified candidate I get, I’ve had to drop five or more in a fucking tech screen
God I’m so afraid to lose job now because I could never survive an interview these days.
I used to shine for things like takehome interview code problems and shit like that, where I had a chance to pause and think a bit and look up definitions and shit.
But those kinds of toy programs are actually the things that AI is actually good at, so now I can only differentiate myself by coding live in front of interviewers and memorizing trivia, both of which I’m terrible at, and don’t reflect actual work.
I don’t know anyone who is seriously stopping hiring and replacing with AI. Anyone announcing that is just using a hype train to cover poor financials.
It’s not that obvious. Corporations are investing heavily in automation in customer relations. There are metrics for how much work had to fall back to humans, because it couldn’t be processed by the machine. Managers are motivated to improve on those metrics, and make the humans redundant.
Of course, LLMs are just pure garbage that produce more work for everyone and achieve nothing. Especially in business, they are a great way to reduce efficiency. The users dumb down, believe any bullshit, drop all critical thinking, and the people on the receiving end of their bullshit have to filter even more stupidity than ever.
But you don’t understand this as a manager. A piece of code by AI, that produces the same result as a piece of code by a human, or close enough, seem equivalent. Potential side effects are just noise that they don’t understand or want to hear about.
Managers also don’t understand that AI doesn’t scale. If it can write a Python program to calculate prime numbers, it can surely also write something like Netflix, or a payment processor, right?
Then there’s exactly what you point out. Other managers claim they’re doing it. So there must be something to it.
Once they wasted their budget on renting this technology temporarily, cuts have to be made to ensure the bottom line.
Maybe AI isn’t replacing your job, but the stupid investment might cost you the job anyway.
It’s also important to realize that you don’t require quality work or a quality product to be financially successful as a corporation. The AI industry is the best example itself.
Yeah, people (especially on linkedin) tend to take such BS rather seriously. Facebook said something about replacing engineers with AI, and gumroad said they won’t hire anymore (but they don’t need a lot of people anyway)
As someone in sourcing who does a lot of “make or buy” decisions, people would be shocked at what people want to replace with AI.
We have a small team of essentially phone jockies that walk users through internal processes and troubleshooting for our janky in house software. They wanted to replace that team with off the shelf AI… No one else uses this software, a lot of information is proprietary, no way AI is going to be able to do that job without specific training.
That’s one of a dozen examples where someone tried to ram and AI peg into a square hole.
I don’t think this guy was ever a junior dumbass. I think he’s always been a senior dumbass.
I’m about to graduate with an M.Sc. in Computer Science - can’t wait to be hired as a Senior Engineer!
Lmao.
Just stay a few years for PhD, and you’ll start as a lead
Tap for spoiler
/s
Any statician worth it’s weight is using R, or at least Python (unless it’s like a really old statician using spss or SAS). As someone who did interviews for an actuarial intern position, I didn’t even asked the candidates if they knew how to use excel, because excel is fucking useless, I asked them about python and pandas.
pyMC3 ❤️
PowerPoint is turing complete in the animations.
You know, if you want to put an interviewee through hell.
This might be a bit controversial, but all those fields he mentioned do have younger people learning how to do the work. Doctors spend 7 or more years doing doctor work under someone else’s watch before they can strike out on their own.
You could call them junior doctors if you like
Nothing controversial there. That person obviously has no idea what they’re talking about, as they’ve clearly never stepped foot on a construction site where junior engineers work alongside senior ones.
The same goes for other professions.
I was first wondering why this even is a LinkedInLunatic, they gave examples that lead me to believe that they were FOR hiring juniors.
Lmao, love how he things linear regression is the epitome of statistics.
Man doesn’t think Residents exist, lmao.
So he’s saying that people whose entire qualification are they went through a 2 week boot camp or through a youtube tutorial aren’t qualified…? I think? I tend to agree if thats all theyve done, but to be honest a lot of my degree felt like it could have been a 4 hour YT tutorial.
People who get out of uni have no real world experience and should be treated as a juniors though. I’ve met a lot of people who have book smarts and no idea what to do after theyre in an org. They’re weird to work with because you can explain a concept, they’ll get it but not be able to apply it or fully see relevance. They’re intelligent but lack experience, which seniors provide.
The LinkedIn OP doesn’t write clearly, but seems to think junior roles don’t do real work. He clearly needs to work in a SOC role to see the difference between a junior and a senior. Lacking experience doesn’t mean no meaningful output.
Yeah… I’m a software engineer that came to it from a non-traditional path. I did finish college, law school, and practiced law for years before I switched careers.
But I was always a serious hobbyist in IT/programming since I was a kid. When I decided to switch careers, yeah I did a lot of learning (filling in gaps) on platforms like Udemy and YouTube. You can learn a LOT on those platforms if you do a little work and figure out who the reputable instructors are. I found it to be a lot of very practical instruction but also plenty of CS theory available too.
Turns out, it’s a lot like college - the experience is what you make it in many ways.
I have a senior engineer position these days and, sure, I still have a little imposter syndrome sometimes. But my co-workers who have CS degrees insist I’m not missing much and that they often forget I don’t have one until I make a self-deprecating joke about it.
I don’t get what point he is trying to make?
You should do linear regression in excel and call yourself a statistician, is the message, I guess.
We are going to run out of senior engineers because we don’t hire juniors.
I don’t think so. That was the premise he was arguing against. He seems to think junior engineers are all trained on YouTube and that people will go to university to become “real professionals”. I guess they skip the junior engineer level and go straight to senior… somehow. So, he thinks, you can safely replace juniors with an LLM.
It’s just a stupid and poorly written argument all around.
Oh I think I see it now. Yeah his rhetorical questions actually have valid answers.
Junior compiler writers exist. Junior engineers exist. “Junior” doctors exist. They are called interns and residents.
They don’t teach CLIs and git and debugging in uni. You don’t go out of uni knowing how to use every JS framework. You can’t have senior engineers without experience.
Junior compiler writers exist.
Not really? But we also don’t need a million compilers. Those projects are extremely specialized and there isn’t constant demand for new compilers.
It’s something like saying there aren’t junior screwdriver makers. I mean, yeah? That’s a specific tool that’s pretty much done. There are juniors in the wider fields of carpentry and mechanical engineering. Someone might invent a new screwdriver, but we don’t need to trim a bunch of juniors to make, specifically, new screwdriver designs.
Do you think that’s a question?
Have you just invented the regressive requestion?
There were and are always junior positions in all fields. The other fields are just less self indulgent about the years of experience.
In fields where a college/university degree is a requirement, people start their careers in some kind of junior position anyway.
I went to university and discovered that unlike that naive view he has of it it is mostly a course in how to tolerate a lot of bullshit from profs and for someone who already taught myself a lot before I got there it was mostly a realization how outdated that whole system has become unless the profs themselves are incredibly motivated (which is relatively rare), the system itself certainly encourages them to do the minimum possible to stay up to date with the material for courses they teach and instead focus on their research.
I have a much longer response, but I’ll try to make a short one. I think there’s a lot more a college degree does (should?) offer/signal, but over the last 50 ish years, that has largely eroded away to just being a professional training program or a gatekeeper to a job. Higher ed in society he mostly turned to social efficiency as its guiding principle instead of several other curricular philosophies. Combine that with the increasing and intense research pressure and it’s the exact situation you describe. Neoliberalism has pushed away long term thinking and risk from corporations, so that burden of risk is taken now by universities (and young people in the form of graduate students) which can be subsidized by government grants. This funding scenario pushes professors to focus on grants and research and to not care about their teaching. It’s not good.
Not sure if it was ever the way you describe but I agree that it should be focused on teaching more than just be a professional training program. However, it is not even a good professional training program at this point.
I feel that I have missed a golden opportunity
100% correct. If AI somehow replaces junior devs, someone will have to train them in substitute for paid real-world experience.
It’ll be unpaid internships and stuff like that.
