[_bin_]

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.

[dorian-graph]

This 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]

The 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.

[CuriouslyC]

The people who will come out the other side are domain focused people with the engineering chops to understand the system end to end, and the customer skills to understand what needs to be built.

[odie5533]

As 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?

[eru]

> I think instead we should focus on getting rid of managers and product owners.

Who says companies aren't doing that with AI (and technology in general) already?

[QuadmasterXLII]

it’s obviously intensely correlated: the vast majority of scenarios either both are replaced or neither

[nopinsight]

With 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]

Why in a few years? What training data is missing that we can’t have senior level agents today?

[DanielVZ]

On 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.

[hooverd]

I think it'll be great if you're working in software not for a software company.

[al_borland]

That sounds like a dangerous bet.

[_bin_]

As 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.

[skatanski]

I’m curious about other aspects of this: - leverage of countries who can host such AI over countries who can’t, will there be a point when countries can’t allow themselves not to have access to „emergency” talent in case they can’t use AI? Recent „choose european”, tariffs show that much of the high end stuff is concentrated in US and China. - outages happen, does the company stop because the cloud is not working? - highly regulated companies still can’t use copilot to its fullest because of „can’t show answer because it’s matching public code” - is replacing all talent safe - in terms of operational or national safety?

[SketchySeaBeast]

Sounds like a bet a later CEO will need to check.