[laughing_man]

>When I look back at my career path, I remember how I actively steered myself to be at the most demanded role within boundaries of my interest. Each job change, voluntary or not, was a step up.

Yes, but here's the problem: Those steps behind you are being destroyed. It's not the senior engineers who are getting replaced; it's the people fresh out of college looking for their first job. And as AI gets better each step above that first job will disappear.

You'll be fine. Your job won't get replaced until after you're gone. But when you look around you're not going to see any young people.

[peterdemin]

I've seen this point a lot on the web, how people compare AI to junior devs, and bring up the idea of replacement. This is, of course, a pipe dream. In fact, I work with a few people just from the college, and I see how AI helps them get up to speed faster. Even senior engineers benefit a lot from AI coding. Their value to the company is not in how fast they can churn out new code, but in the deep domain understanding they build, and in the agency to drive the project they are responsible for. As for the "destroyed steps behind me", I wouldn't take the same steps if I were starting my career now. My point was to actively seek and learn what's needed by the industry.

[scotty79]

> Your job won't get replaced until after you're gone

Given the pace of AI development I don't think that's guaranteed. The game is to stay on top of the AI even if it means expanding your interests from programming to mostly product management.

[NitpickLawyer]

> I don't think that's guaranteed.

Right? The whole rhetoric around "it's just the juniors" is the most "4. bargaining <- you are here" thing that keeps getting posted all over the place. I don't get it. How can you look at the progress in the past 3 years (in a month now) since chatgpt was first released and say "oh, it's definitely just the juniors, all seniors are safe"???

[pjmlp]

Seniors are definitly not safe.

In the enterprise consulting space, I see myself increasingly working with more with low-code/no-code tools, AI agents, and being dragged into architecture activitivies.

Classical programming, the stuff to do in .NET, Java, Go whatever, from the ground up is eroding away.

Ready made products get acquired, integrations that were done via serverless/microservices, are now being tried with AI agents, and the only thing left as technical task is drawing diagrams, and letting the few coders that are still around where they should click, or a couple of MCP tools to be made available.

[peterdemin]

That's called a product engineer, and I can see how this role is becoming more commonplace.