[bradchris]

Isn’t that what everyone said about outsourcing too?

My view is LLMs will compete with outsourced developers (and contractors/consultants for one-off jobs), where job context and project scope is already subject to a communication gap.

A big role of full time employees is not just to code, but to interact to various degrees with PMs/Sales/Customers/the rest of the company stakeholders to varying degrees.

Ultimately someone has to know enough of the technical side of both the product and company to actually _know_ what to prompt/review for.

Sure, if the entire industry becomes agents selling agent-developed products to other agents and providing agent-on-agent support, then… yeah. But that is a shell game.

[scarface_74]

> A big role of full time employees is not just to code, but to interact to various degrees with PMs/Sales/Customers/the rest of the company stakeholders to varying degrees.

That’s true the further you get up in your career. But most of the time, it is:

- junior developers get tasks where both the business problem and technical solution is well defined and they need a lot of handholding and supervision

- mid level developers get tasks where the business problem is mostly well defined and they use their own judgement to create the technical solution. They should be able to lead work streams or epics

- Senior developers are responsible for leading major deliverables with multiple work streams, epics and are over seeing mid level developers and juniors. This is usually the first level where you spend the majority of your time dealing with strategy and “ambiguity” and with the “business”.

- staff - strategy involving many large implementations.

AI can already do a creditable job as a junior level developer and is rapidly moving up to being able to do the work of a mid level developer.

No matter what your title is, if you are just pulling tickets off the board with well defined business cases, you are doing mid level developer work. My definition is what I’ve seen, heard and read about from every major tech company.

[bradchris]

Ok, except I guess I would say your definition of mid-level and junior both fall under what I would consider “junior”— maybe I would call what you define as “junior” as “intern” ?

I don’t see how LLMs completely eliminate anyone who is doing anything more than simply pulling well-defined tickets off a board

[scarface_74]

While I’ve spoken to people at other BigTech companies about their leveling guidelines, the only one that is still in my personal possession after I left is Amazon’s :).

But this is a high level industry summary.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

[sdesol]

> LLMs will compete with outsourced developers

I guess the question is whether the person you are replying to is potentially living in a country where most of the work is currently being outsourced, as this could significantly impact their career path.

It is interesting that you bring up outsourced work, as I strongly believe that a lot of the bad code generated by AI is the result of not feeding it enough information.

When you outsource work, you are usually forced to document things more thoroughly to work around language and domain knowledge. Basically, clarity is a requirement and maybe outsource companies will experience the most impact.