What is going on right now?

I’m scared for what happens ten years from now when none of the junior folk ever learned to write code themselves and now think they are senior engineers…

Dude, you're basically describing my career - no LLMs necessary!

Hopefully theyll all become plumbers or schoolteachers or something.

There's a glut of junior dev talent and not enough real problems out there which a junior can apply themselves to.

This means that most of them simply arent able to get the kind of experience which will push them into the next skill bracket.

It used to be that you could use them to build cheap proofs of concept or self contained scripting but those are things AI doesnt actually suck too badly at. Even back then there were too many juniors and not enough roles though.

Ten years? They'll be staff, obviously. Three years of experience is senior now, did you get that memo?

that's of course because nobody wants to hire junior and every job posting wants senior, so now everyone is "senior"

This trend started long before AI. Everybody needs 10+ years experience to get a job anywhere. As an industry we've been terrible at up-leveling the younger generations.

I've been fighting this battle for years in my org and every time we start to make progress we go through yet another crisis and have to let some of our junior staff go. Then when we need to hire again it's an emergency and we can only hire more senior staff because we need to get things done and nobody is there to fill the gaps.

It's been a vicious cycle to break.

I can second this cycle. Agentic code AI is an accelerant to this fire that sure looks like it's burning the bottom rungs of the ladder. Game theory suggests anyone already on the ladder needs to chop off as much of the bottom of the ladder as fast as possible. The cycle appears to only be getting.. vicious-er.

Vibe coding as a concept started out last December. That was only 9 months ago. I doubt any people will be writing or maintaining code in a couple of years.

There will always be software written by people who know what they are doing. Unless LLM generated code is perfect, there will always be a demand for high quality code.

There's a glut of "talent", but most of them are attracted by the inflated paycheck and aren't actually talented. In the past, they would either get promoted to middle management where they can't do any damage, or burn out and find another career. Now they can fake it long enough to sink your company, and then move on (with experience on their resume!) to their next victim. Things are gonna be really ugly in 10 years.

I'm fairly confident there's going to be no shortage of work for programmers who actually halfway know what they're doing for the remainder of my career (another 20ish years, probably), at least. So that's nice.

Though cleaning up garbage fires isn't exactly fun. Gonna need to raise my rates.

> Though cleaning up garbage fires isn't exactly fun. Gonna need to raise my rates.

This is what I did way back when I was a professional web designer. Cleaning up nasty "tag-soup" DreamWeaver and MS Word websites for folks cost extra compared to my normal rates for just building them a fresh "from-scratch" website.

Seriously? Actually writing code and all that entails is the most fun I have during the day. The AI can attend meetings for me instead.