[kmac_]

There's always a new tech frontier. Like, weaving machines replaced looms, cars replaced carriages, and now it's AI. Each time, we need a new kind of worker. We shouldn't worry about jobs changing or vanishing, but we should worry that we won't learn and teach the new stuff fast enough.

[scarface_74]

There is a huge difference.

If I am running a factory that use to create carriages and now creates cars, I need people who can create cars now. If I want to expand the number of customers I serve, I need to hire more people.

If I am a software company, I don’t need to scale the number of software engineers I hire to serve more customers.

Since gen AI has been a thing, I mostly pivoted to more strategy based cloud consulting than hands on keyboard software development. But before Gen AI, I would have needed a couple of junior developers to do the grunt work of implementing well defined implementations. Now I can do both the strategy and implementations in the same amount of time.

Even before Gen AI the entire reason that software engineers get paid so much because software development has high fixed costs but near zero marginal costs. No other industry has been like that historically.

[kmac_]

This is an assumption where competition (as a wide term) does exactly the same and focuses solely on AI. But in reality, competition will scale both in incorporating AI and hiring more to keep up with the market.

[scarface_74]

The article is about entry level jobs. If I brought in two entry level developers to do the current POC project where I did the discovery, design and architecture, it would slow me down as opposed to feeding in the requirements to ChatGPT and letting it spit out the technical simple code that I require where the complexity is in the orchestration and business requirements.

I have never once said “it sure would be nice to have a few more junior devs. That would really increase our velocity”.

As someone who is responsible for getting projects done on time, within budget and meets requiremenga, why would I push for hiring fresh entry level devs instead of hiring a mid level dev with experience for only 20-30% more? The spread isn’t that great for enterprise developers.

It’s even more true now that I can push for hiring a mid level devs working remotely in East BumbleFuck South Dakota for peanuts.

For what’s its worth, I am classifying seniority by the ability to work at certain “scope” and “deal with ambiguity”, not someone who “codez real gud” and can reverse a b tree on the whiteboard

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

And there is a diminishing return on new features. If Google fired every developer not involved in search and ads, they could survive another decade or so and probably end up being more profitable since they can’t produce new good profitable products to save their lives