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This is a bit of a game theory problem. "Training senior engineers" is an expensive and thankless task: you bear essentially all the cost, and most of the total
by _bin_ 1y ago
This is a bit of a game theory problem. "Training senior engineers" is an expensive and thankless task: you bear essentially all the cost, and most of the total benefit accrues to others as a positive externality. Griping at companies that they should undertake to provide this positive externality isn't really a constructive solution.
I think some people are betting on the fact that AI can replace junior devs in 2-5 years and seniors in 10-20, when the old ones are largely gone. But that's sort of beside the point as far as most corporate decision-making.
- nopinsight 1y agoWith Agentic RL training and sufficient data, AI operating at the level of average senior engineers should become plausible in a couple to a few years. Top-tier engineers who integrate a deep understanding of business and user needs into technical design will likely be safe until we get full-fledged AGI.
- yahoozoo 1y agoWhy in a few years? What training data is missing that we can’t have senior level agents today?
- nopinsight 1y agoTraining data, esp interaction data from agentic coding tools, are important for that. See also: Windsurf acquisition.
- DanielVZ 1y agoOn the other hand I’m pretry sure you will need senior engineers not only for designing but debugging. You don’t want to hit a wall when your Agentic coder hits a bug that it just won’t fix.
- nopinsight 1y agoThere’s a recent article with experiments suggesting LLMs are better at bug fixing than coding, iirc. It’s from a company with a relevant product though.
- eru 1y agoWhy do you expect AIs to learn programming, but not debugging?
- ZephyrBlu 1y ago1) Debugging is much harder than writing code that works 2) AIs are demonstrably much, much worse at debugging code than writing fresh code Ex: "Oh, I see the problem! Let me fix that" -> proceeds to create a new bug while not fixing the old one
- eru 1y agoDebugging is harder for humans, too.
- al_borland 1y agoThat sounds like a dangerous bet.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoSounds like a bet a later CEO will need to check.
- _bin_ 1y agoAs I see it, it's actually the only safe bet. Case 1: you keep training engineers. Case 1.1: AGI soon, you don't need juniors or seniors besides a very few. You cost yourself a ton of money that competitors can reinvest into R&D, use to undercut your prices, or return to keep their investors happy. Case 1.2: No AGI. Wages rise, a lot. You must remain in line with that to avoid losing those engineers you trained. Case 2: You quit training juniors and let AI do the work. Case 2.1: AGI soon, you have saved yourself a bundle of cash and remain mostly in in line with the market. Case 2.2: no AGI, you are in the same bidding war for talent as everyone else, the same place you'd have been were you to have spent all that cash to train engineers. You now have a juicier balance sheet with which to enter this bidding war. The only way out of this, you can probably see, is some sort of external co-ordination, as is the case with most of these situations. The high-EV move is to quit training juniors, by a mile, independently of whether AI can replace senior devs in a decade.
- spongebobstoes 1y agoAn interesting thing to consider is that Codex might get people to be better at delegating, which might improve the effectiveness of hiring junior engineers. Because the senior engineers will have better skills at delegating, leading to a more effective collaboration.
- al_borland 1y agoYou’re looking at it from the point of view of an individual company. I’m seeing it as a risk for the entire industry. Senior engineers are already very well paid. Wages rising a lot from where they already are, while companies compete for a few people, and those who can’t afford it need to lean on AI or wait 10+ years for someone to develop with equivalent expertise… all of this sounds bad for the industry. It’s only good for the few senior engineers that are about to retire, and the few who went out of their way to not use AI and acquire actual skills.
- dorian-graph 1y agoThis hyper-fixation on replacing engineers in writing code is hilarious, and dangerous, to me. Many people, even in tech companies, have no idea how software is built, maintained, and run. I think instead we should focus on getting rid of managers and product owners.
- jchanimal 1y agoThe real judge will be survivorship bias and as a betting man, I might think product owners are the ones with the entrepreneurial spirit to make it to the other side.
- MoonGhost 1y agoI've worked for a company which turned from startup to this. Product owners had no clue what they own. And no brain capacity to suggest something useful. They were just taken from the street at best, most likely had relatives' helping hands. In a couple of years company probably tripled manages headcount. It didn't help.
- HideousKojima 1y agoProduct owners and project managers have the soft skills to convince the company that they aren't a drain on its resources regardless of what they actually are.
- gersh 1y agoYeah, but can they out-perform LLMs at soft skills? LLMs are really good sucking up, and telling people what they want to hear.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y agoit’s obviously intensely correlated: the vast majority of scenarios either both are replaced or neither
- odie5533 1y agoAs a dev, if you try taking away my product owners I will fight you. Who am I going to ask for requirements and sign-offs, the CEO?
- hooverd 1y agoI think it'll be great if you're working in software not for a software company.