People who are currently junior engineers (i.e. graduating class of 2024+) chose their majors in a ZIRP economy (2021 and earlier) that could not hire enough engineers fast enough, but graduated into an economy that was post-ZIRP and is still actively trimming software engineers from the work force (2024 and beyond).
LLMs only became a factor in hiring in the summer of 2025. But by then there was already a massive oversupply (relative to demand) of fresh CS graduates.
My personal opinion is that the market is not (yet) rough because of AI, it's actually mostly just rough because we're not in ZIRP anymore. AI is maybe making it worse on the margin, and is a convenient excuse, insofar as AI is both easier to scapegoat and reason about.
[1]: Software dev job postings on indeed in the US. Peaked in 2021, before falling off a cliff. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
[2]: % of CS grads relative to all college enrollments; which peaked in class of 2026 (enrollment as of '22). https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/social/computer-science-has...
And yes, when I saw the headline my first thought was "it's not AI, nobody is expanding their staff".
When interest rates are high, companies and investors don't take out loans, which means no capital for new projects.
AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.
But if I had to use AI for coding I don't think that it would take me very much time at all to get into the swing of it. I wrote code by hand for decades, so I know how to judge whether it's producing something that looks reasonable.
If your questions are sharp, probing for detail, and intelligent. Have you seen how people question AIs? It's as if they can't even conceive of the AI being able to supply specific detail.
For this kind of task, is linking to pastebin etc acceptable instead?
Either way thank you tstrimple for going in and looking!
One states that more junior people will excel. Younger people tend to be more hip to new tech trends, more natively immersed in changing times. And the contemporary AI tools eradicate any knowledge & wisdom gap that the seniors may hold over them. Thus, they'll be faster.
The other school states that the most important thing right now is the wisdom of experience. That the AI tools have made everything *but* the wisdom pretty much an afterthought. Thus, there's no point in having someone who doesn't have deep wisdom.
Which is right? Probably a little bit of both, depending on one's exact needs.
There is a reason why youngest developers are more productive. They accept everything Agent suggests. They don't understand or care. They rely on your review of the Agent output from prompt they copy-pasted from JIRA. So you spent your time reviewing it instead of your own work.
From study titled "The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers" https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116
>> Without building this solution, and instead just taking what ChatGPT generated, they had skipped crucial steps in the programming problem solving process, and were now lost
When you skip the problem-solving process and take the LLM's first output, you're not building the cognitive framework needed to debug or maintain that code.
We are a network tooling team, and now we think our next hire will be a young network engineer who probably will generate code that we will have to review carefully, but we have to do that anyway, because we can't really afford having our engineers stuck on a basic knowledge of networking issues.
In any case, thanks to AI everything have a SDK so we won't have to make in-house library to automate everything (thousand of hours making libraries for cisco, forti, zscalers and other lost, but to be honest, good riddance), so the demand for engineers in my situation will decrease.
It's high variance. A young person can move fast because they lack the accrued assumptions of a senior, but that also means they can quickly move in the wrong direction because they lack the wisdom to identify mistakes before they pile up.
"Use AI" isn't really a skill, getting an implementation is now as easy as google for an answer was for our generation. A senior can trivially learn this. But sniffing out the bullshit and knowing when you're going astray still requires a critical eye that not everybody is going to have.
So it seems reasonable to me that moving more slowly and being more cautious, letting the uncs use their knowledge to keep things from going too far afield, is a really smart idea.
Now the senior can use the AI instead of dealing with a junior.
Plus the biggest danger I’ve seen numerous times is the junior engineer can’t easily tell if the AI is wrong.
They either accept it as correct or spend more time trying to fix AI output with an AI in an area they don’t have the skills for.
> AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.
Is it Software or another problem domain? What problem are they attacking, what stack/method are they using?
Seniors will become more valuable as that knowledge is lost and AI isn't capable of full replacenent.
I use AI daily and it takes almost no extra brain power to use.
Because you can’t shortcut experience. And AI multiplies that.
I’ve seen what ai-focused good senior dev can do and it is scary.
Fortunately I have some unique skills that allowed me to land a gig.
The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life. The networking that actually gets people jobs is networks from people you've already worked with before, or your professor is on the board of the company or like.. your parents know the exec team really well etc. So new grads truly are disadvantaged.
Things are changing, so I can't make any guarantees. But don't get too discouraged. Pay attention to what is in demand like Python, PySpark, and PyTorch. Make sure that the next time it rains soup your son has a bucket.
There was barely any new construction going on for a couple of years and once it started anew, there was a gap as while people were retiring, new hires weren't replacing them.
I guess we're just going to shrink as a field until the market won't be able to handle it.
Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills/hard work. Big tech was and still is full of these people.
I'm not saying that was a bad thing at all, but it always felt unsustainable. CS salaries will decline and fewer people will want to be software developers, balancing the market. Then it may go back to where it came from with the geeks sticking around. No more coding bros. Maybe that's okay.
When I got my degree, I never expected more than a slightly above average salary. I do this because I love it and can't imagine doing anything else. I was lucky and I'm thankful for the luck I had.
When I was in high school, I lied to girls about what I was planning to major in just so I wouldn't sound like some antisocial nerd.
Nobody back then thought coding was cool. It was just the thing the weird kids did in the computer lab.
He's looking into pivots now and taking flight lessons.
I am a new father to a 3 month old son. I will be nudging him to be an electrician if he has no obvious career interests. Union, good pay, endless work and lots of opportunities to do your own thing. It’s scary to even consider what the job market will look like in 22 years.
I know a 2 of senior devs that got laid off from different times and one is approaching nearly a year of unemployment with no offers and another approaching half a year with few offers but elected to continue looking due the offered salary not matching their expectations.
Let him contribute to something, yes for free, so that potential future coworkers can see 1) who he is, 2) what he can do, 3) how he approaches people.
Fully remote, Full stack .NET in addition to AI/Python/data-science work
I'd side-eye that list as senior .NET dev full stack.
You're asking one person to do frontend/js/css, backend/databases/Redis/MQ, and Python with all that math behind data-science, but i doubt he can understand and review all of this
In other words shareholders and senior management are being shown the appearance of expectations about AI being met, whether or not it's working. Entry-level jobs are an obvious place to look things that can be cut to create an AI budget.
Now he gets asked: if a junior can do the work why aren't you using AI? So instead of opening the req he says to the team "we need to figure out how to make AI do more."
All of these executives are operating under the pretense that they won’t be held accountable when in 10-15yr their middle bench is a disaster, and they’re probably right.
Can’t wait to see what horseshit is next.
If everyone's middle bench is a disaster, there's no one that did it right to contrast their poor decision-making. They're hiding the evidence that will help them skip accountability.
As another commenter mentioned, they’ll all get their performance bonuses, and by the time the bills come due either they’ll be gone, or no one will know why in the hell they’re in the situation they’re in.
Middle bench decay is like some sort of complex immune deficiency. No one can quite put their finger on what’s wrong, but the org can’t pull its collective head out of its ass.
For many companies this happens naturally as it progresses from the dynamic operating environment of high competition to one of maintenance. Staff levels bloat and after a while no one has a grasp on the big picture and the institution forgets why it’s doing what it’s doing.
What’s amazing to me is that these companies that are lighting their hiring process on fire are willingly accelerating this process.
Kitchen potwasher, day labourer, apprentice welder etc none of these entry level jobs are affected by an LLM. But nobody on HN works in those industries.... connection maybe?
"An event study documents an accelerating decline in employment of 22–25-year-olds in high-AI-exposure occupations, reaching 5.5 per cent by early 2025 relative to less exposed occupations within the same employers"
[1] Same Storm, Different Boats: Generative AI and the Age Gradient in Hiring, Lodefalk et al, https://www.oru.se/globalassets/oru-sv/institutioner/hh/work...
but the entry-level job market has always been tough.
with AI, outside the big tech world, it is hard to justify hiring entry level engineers as the time to train them ( 1 year+ ) to be productive enough is such a drag on the seniors, when the agents deliver things more care and more edge cases.
That's not to diminish how much more difficult it's become since then but breaking into the industry has never been easy.
Wtf of course i don't, otherwise i would not apply for a junior role!
Even from a profit stand point, we need to invest in the entry levels to get mid- senior levels
They hope that some other moron will take up the costs and then they can poach the trained employee for cheap, while any corporation that does actually train feels like they should get the employee for cheap afterwards instead of compensating the employee at market rate.
Simultaneously the average corporation refuses to do something like have a contract with the employee for X years of labor at a set rate in the exchange for the training because they are also allergic to not being able to change their minds and lay off half their staff the next year.
This would be a place for the government to come in and force everyone to pick the good square on the prisoner’s dilemma, but yet again, our corporate culture is allergic to regulation or cooperation.
You can still get through a winter or two by eating your seed corn so I guess we’ll just continue barreling down this path.
Well, I say sure you can, but I'm not a contract lawyer. It just sounds identical to me. You're not forced to stay, but if you end the contract you have to pay.
I saw it once at the beginning of my career but that was nearly 15 years ago.
US companies are usually unwilling to enter into any contract with labor because they want the ability to renege on the deal at will, hence the at will states.
You see companies making contracts like this with other companies all the time, so I can only assume it’s a cultural value to never make a deal with labor.
The cohort that started during COVID were first knee-capped by remote classes and exams, and then they lobotomized themselves with ChatGPT.
Consider how we're actually not seeing much layoffs (some, but not much). So what were seeing in tech specifically is more like hiring freeze, so people with experience or in jobs aren't feeling much of the pressure, but new grads are hitting a wall.
Im posting this to resist the "ai is taking away people's jobs" narrative. It's definitely a factor but it's probably one of many and it's sloppy thinking to point fingers at ai and not other probably bigger factors.
* To their credit, the papers author's try to factor for zirp.
And the backdrop of an aging population that needs asset prices to keep rising to meet benefit and retirement obligations, so stagflation it is.
- directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails
- verification
- setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models
economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes
The other 3 you literally just get for free as models improve. The "state of the art" of "prompting" changes literally every week. It was loops, then graphs, now its harnesses (and self automating harnesses)? Why are these not just obviated by better models? These are barely skills, and are imo, just the tech equivalent of tabloids advertising 5 minute exercises or pills to get rid of stubborn belly fat. No amount of prompt engineering or graphs or loops could get your previous version of GPT to perform like Fable, and yet somehow Fable can do all of that and more without any random built in "ai engineering skills."
The labor chart for SWEs will look like a slope up as productivity with AI increases, and then past a certain point where AI is like 99% good enough, employment will fall off a cliff. We are already seeing this with junior hiring, and who is to say that AI will magically only ever be as capable as a junior engineer?
I noticed the newer batch of interns tends to have less mechanical coding skills but does well on understanding and planning on the design, DB design, etc.
The more senior the candidate the less they took advantage of the tools. Most commonly they would manually copy/paste error or syntax errors and then run out of time. One candidate only copy pasted his questions into google and used the AI overview
Junior candidates tended to be overly ai eager, a lot of them oneshotted the problem but were unable to explain any of the details
That being said I think 80% of the skills should come easily to a capable dev that is willing to put in the effort to learn and get used to managing agents. Building agents that perform work themselves is a lot harder (and still pretty unsolved)
As for building agents that perform work themselves, in my opinion it boils down to understanding the problem space, isolating the key business logic, and determining what the pertinent requirements are. Kinda sounds like looping back around to software engineering skills IMO.
building agents is just a completely different ballgame, theres a lot of infra and harness engineering around handling the nondeterministic behaviors that are nonobvious unless you've shipped agents at scale
And I don't understand why you would wave away needing to know anything about the codebase's underlying tech because "The AI can take care of all that, we don't need to look at code anymore" while also not believing that any competent developer could prompt AI to get a good setup within a week or two max.
If we apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to this disruptive technology, I do believe AI will hit a "slope of enlightenment" where an AI-assisted Analyst is properly understood in industries and can take productive roles. Conveniently, this will probably coincide with a lower interest rate where companies have funds for a talent acquisition spree/rapid growth.
With that being said, today's graduates are stuck in an awful market with a lot of charlatans selling crappy online courses and bad ideas.
The rest of society unfortunately have to work "real" jobs where they have to turn up early to do things like stocking, cleaning, cooking, harvesting, assembling.
When a robot can be a drop-in replacement hire for these roles it's apocalypse time. It is coming.
They’d better pray that we see automation gains above and beyond what we’ve seen so far or else we’ll be paying the price in a single generation.
Not a psychologist but my take on most of the wealthy people in the world is they are essentially narcissistic hedonists. They only care about growing wealth as a means to the end of maximizing the amount of fun they can have and to keep their egos happy that they have the most.
They don't seem to care about the future at all
I have moneyed acquaintances now that I never would have had before. For some of them the mere hint of their income being reduced in any way is enough to send them into spasms. These are people with enough money for their next 3 generations to live off of. Luxuriously.
I just don’t get it.
I have a rough idea of how much it would cost me to retire immediately and maintain my life in a way I'm happy until I am 100 if I lived that long
I see executives get bonus packages yearly that are more than that number would be for me. Their bonus nevermind their actual salaries.
And yet they act like their lives are hard and their jobs are hard.
I don't get it either
Imagine if even one billionaire dedicated themselves to be a modern “patron of the arts” on a more down-to-earth level. Imagine if people started to run “adopt-a-student” type frameworks for individuals. If fresh grads found it easy to get “grants” for things. And so on.
The first job is often a bit “take a chance on me” in its paradigm, but companies these days don’t want bets, they want sure things. Unfortunately this is to some extent unrealistic, but also it’s true that cutting out entry level roles entirely does cut down on uncertainty. It cuts down on upside too, but that’s more invisible.
I think they will have big problem finding people who will actually train those juniors by then.
For example - at first ATMs created more jobs in banking because employees could move to more complex services. But banks are back to downsizing after further advancements streamlined those services too, aiui.
A lot of people may have to transition to careers that people do not want to have AI do, like nursing. The earlier you start such a transition the easier it is because you still have resources to make moves.
Becoming bum or going off the grid would be way more attractive to me than working my ass of in stressful conditions for meager pay so some motherfuckers can buy yet another yacht
Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wainwrights transitioned to auto mechanic or carpentry work. Not all of them, but for most the skills were portable. Several of the carriage-making businesses transitioned to automobiles. Studebaker and Oakland (which became Pontiac), for example. I'm sure the most experienced people lost big, of course, and we shouldn't minimize the damage done to people's livlihoods.
Unless you mean taxicab drivers, which was the term for them before the automobile. Taxicab = taximeter cabriolet, and a cabriolet is a style of horse-drawn carriage.
It really was the horse people that lost out the most. That's why the idiomatic reference is for buggy whips, not so much for buggies themselves.
I mentioned it to my daughter. She said, "Rich people are going to keep having horses." I'm pretty sure she's not wrong.
But there's still a lot fewer farriers than there used to be...
maybe they became taxi drivers. But that too will be gone soon.
Can't beat capitalism + technological innovation.
I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.
We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.
The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.
If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.
Be realistic. Would you start a business and risk it's viability giving away free training to the public? No, and neither would anyone else.
maybe govt can tax ai companies and use that money to prearm juniors with tokens that only they can use.
If we do not pursue the common good of humanity with AI, we will destroy humanity with AI.
While it sucks to have blown a lot of money and accept they've been duped to get a degree in something that is now "worth" a small fraction of what it once was, time is on their side. There is plenty of time to go back to school, or apprentice, or learn a trade or go to trade school in something else with better long term career prospects.
On the opposite side of this, senior level devs should (hopefully) be on target financially and theoretically should be fine, especially if they make adjustments now (lower COL, layoff preparation, prepare for accelerated retirement timeline).
The folks who are really going to suffer are those early to mid level developers. Not as much of a network, not enough traditional expertise, not enough savings, not as much time to invest and pull the trigger on a career change.
Im mostly speaking about software engineering, but the "juniors" I've seen be hired now are basically the equivalent of mid (maybe even low senior) levels of yesteryear. AI is most certainly raising the bar.