I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.
When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.
Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.
Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.
Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers.
Maybe this is North American thing because in Europe they never really got rid of human cashiers, they just had the automated systems alongside the human cashiers.
I don’t know of any store that went over to 100% self-checkout
Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.
So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.
You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.
Last company I worked for and now contract for, explicitly set out to hire promising juniors over seniors. Reason being, they had to fire a guy with nearly a decade of experience because he was completely unable to adapt and learn new things, so his experience was all doing the same stuff over and over again.
A small company that has cash reserves will absolutely hire a bright grad who can hold a conversation in the interview, only trouble is the ratio between candidates and job openings.
I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.
When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.
Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.
Heh, that won’t stop a C-level from thinking that you just write code.
Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.
Maybe this is North American thing because in Europe they never really got rid of human cashiers, they just had the automated systems alongside the human cashiers.
I don’t know of any store that went over to 100% self-checkout
It won’t automate your job, but isn’t it already replacing junior devs via team downsizing?
Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.
So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.
You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.
So I’m not wasting my time in college then?
Last company I worked for and now contract for, explicitly set out to hire promising juniors over seniors. Reason being, they had to fire a guy with nearly a decade of experience because he was completely unable to adapt and learn new things, so his experience was all doing the same stuff over and over again.
A small company that has cash reserves will absolutely hire a bright grad who can hold a conversation in the interview, only trouble is the ratio between candidates and job openings.