It’s amusing to me to see the top SV companies falling back to the status symbols of yesteryear for juniors: prestige of your alma mater. Feels like an admission that they have no real way to vet candidates otherwise.
A different take, and I'm not sure if this is controversial or not. The "prestige of your alma mater" is not just some empty signal. Of course it's not cut and dry, but yes, you tend to find much higher quality software developers graduating from the top of their class with a CS degree from MIT or Stanford than you do graduating from Codesmith. I'm honestly a little baffled this is even a semi-controversial take to begin with.
I've always felt like coding bootcamps were pretty much doomed to fail. I don't know why so many in the industry tried to denigrate the profession in the first place by pretending that a ~20 week bootcamp would suffice. It's like if the New York Philharmonic said "We're going to expand beyond the old stuffy prestige names of Julliard and Curtis, and instead start looking for non-traditional students who took a semester long 'Learn the Cello in 12 weeks' course."
But even then, the biggest problem with coding boot camps wasn't competition from AI, it was offshore competition. People in the US spent a ton to be trained in basic skills like front end web development when there are millions of people around the world willing to do that, at a similar or higher level of skill, for $20/hr or less.
I don't mean to denigrate people who took non-traditional routes to software development. On the contrary, some of the best programmers (and, especially, dev managers) I've ever worked with don't have CS degrees. Speaking of cello, for some reason an inordinate number of top programmers I've worked with have music degrees. But all of these folks just had a certain way of thinking - very detail oriented, extremely logical, extremely self-motivated, that is just not common among people at large. It's not surprising companies try to find talent where the pool is full rather than doing needle-in-a-haystack searches.
Companies want familiarity (repeatable processes) and “objectivity” (credentials). I always knew their spiel about “disrupting higher education” with bootcamps and free courses was just empty platitudes, and that once the party ended those who placed their faith in those schemes would be promptly abandoned in favor of the traditional Ivy League set.
alot of the success of FAANG is they stopped using this as a primary vetting method, and used leetcode to just filter on raw memorization/problem solving. filtered out so many bad candidates from prestigious schools
Junior developers are the equivalent of the draftsmen that used to work under architects.
Just like how CAD has almost entirely eliminated that line of work, the same thing will happen in software development. Only the “architects” will remain.
There is an implicit assumption made by the people concerned about junior devs disappearing that that’s where senior developers come from.
The reality is that almost junior developers never gain significantly better skill, no matter how their age or title.
I regularly work with people with decades of “experience” that still have no idea how to use a database engine. A real senior developer could write their own database engine from scratch. That’s the difference!
It actually doesn’t make sense when you think about it - the idea that entry level roles will be cleanly eliminated. Certainly there could be a period with drastically fewer entry level roles, but that logically can not remain the case.
AI is an entropy engine for everything it touches. It sucks out all the momentum for short term gain. Long term it brings decay. The foundations of entire industries aren't going to be renewed in order to realize short term savings. And once the savings are baked in, the expectation of them makes it nearly impossible to restore the lost investment.
There needs to be new kinds of juniors, with driving/thinking skills included.
Not sure if there is a single silver bullet to solve this, but one thing is all juniors could start building things only for fun and solving small problems they understand (ala YC advice), and once solved, allow room to build it better each time.
It's likely that the skills you'd learn as an entry-level engineer today will be mostly irrelevant to being a senior 10 years from now -- just as knowing how to write a program on punch cards is irrelevant to today's engineers.
Seniors will have to come from somewhere, but it wouldn't be through this pipeline, even if companies were still hiring at full rate for entry-level work.
For some just getting into the field, this could be a great opportunity -- if you can figure out where the puck is heading, you can skate directly there.
> Coding bootcamps have been a mainstay in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Now, as AI eliminates the kind of entry-level roles for which they trained people, they’re disappearing.
OK, so I think there is a fair chance it will play out like this: the younger generation won't study CS anymore / learn how to code. Instead, they'll all vibe code.
This will lead to a massive increase in demand for seniors to clean up the vibe code, which isn't working properly or needs maintenance.
This demand increase will be exacerbated by the fact that there will be no new seniors since no one learned how to code...
Google and friends hugely over hired during the pandemic and people are extrapolating that a medium term culling is the new normal.
Same after the dot com crash and outsourcing. Give it 5 years and hiring will be back to normal. Give it 10 and salaries will be even more stratospheric because the pipeline is bone dry now.
People were saying this about coding bootcamps just a little while ago! "All of these bootcamp coders don't really know what they're doing and us seniors will have to clean up after them". Same with outsourcing before that. Most people (seniors included) suck at coding. AI is already better than all but the the very best. It will continue to improve.
There's going to be so much vibe coding to clean up, that I'm gonna have a fever and the only prescription is, more vibe coding! (throwback to SNL More Cowbells skit...)
On a serious note, can't wait to see what salaries I command as a senior dev in a few years...when junior dev pipeline dried up and other older seniors left the industry.
I'm hoping I can escape being laid off for long enough for them to come around again and realize they need me to clean up the slop. And then I can capitalize on it.
More likely, they'll lay everyone off and with some luck start hiring them back at same or lower salaries and tell us we're lucky to even have a job, and we'll have no choice but to accept...
Coding bootcamps might teach you how to design algorithms and how to code them but developing software is so much more than that. Often you get very vague requirements from the customer and there are many phases of refinement after that, often in a loop. The customer often does not know what they need, though they have a problem to solve.
Those skills you don't fully develop at school or university, let alone a half year of bootcamp. I believe you have to have a developer's or engineering mindset in some way, early on in life, to be good at it.
My point being, if you choose a career swap, or suddenly realise you were studying something you are not passionate about, you still have a very big leap to make.
The only thing it’s upending is sane engineering practices in my experience. I just reviewed a python flask app which was basically “vibe coded” by a couple people speed running a checklist of features. I open up the auth.py file to find it is integrated with an idp using oauth. Whether the caller has the correct scopes is never checked. I grab client credentials for a completely unrelated app. Hit /admin using my bearer token. Sure enough anybody with a valid set of client credentials could have had full admin access to this app for a year. But hey, at least when I asked how they tested the app they were quickly able to generate thousands of lines of pytest.
"“This is the story of one graduate out of over 4,000,” the company said, adding that 70.1% of those enrolled in its full-time program secured in-field employment within a year of graduation."
Sounds like it's the story of 1200 graduates, actually.
This expectation about AI taking away the software jobs is utterly ridiculous for me. What AI Will take away if eventually delivers on the promises is the existence of software development as business.
Don't forget that a software company is bunch of software engineers in coordination, if those software engineers can be placed with a graphics card or AI service provider they just go ahead and start your own software company and just use this services to undercut the software companies that no longer need software engineers.
If AI is actually able to code like a real software engineer then people that are not software engineers and were laid off from software companies should just get an AI subscription and take away the business from the company that they were fired from.
Maybe it's not that graduates are not able to get jobs because AI is replacing them but because the focus of the capital at this time is no longer on speculating over software projects, therefore on the companies that are actually making money are able to actually hire. Today if you want to work in a company that exist thanks to speculative capital and pays huge salaries like in the day when software was eating the world than you need to be in AI.
It’s cyclical. Always has been, likely to continue being so until an equilibrium is reached.
Leading up to the dotcom bust was a strong demand for technical talent. Talent that graduated in the midst of that bust got hosed, though were able to pick up work again as the economy realized that despite the bubble, technical expertise was still sorely needed.
Then came the 2000s, and the demand for technical talent skyrocketed on the back of Web 2.0 and the Digital Transformation of Business. Every college and grift was churning out the thinnest credentialed junior technologists to fill vacancies. Then the global recession happened, and suddenly every business started getting onboard the outsourcing wagon, thus crippling domestic technical roles and long-term IT careers. Except when ZIRP happened, suddenly everybody wanted software developers out of this notion that they could automate their way out of any conceivable problem with code.
Now LLMs are here, trained on the past and reducing the need for Juniors in those fields. The glut of C and D “bootcamp” students are superfluous as the business world re-orients around (comparatively) expensive debt and interest rates, and as technological revolutions effectively stagnate outside of a few, narrow fields (Quantum Computing, Cryptography, etc). AI coding tools built on LLMs are likely to decrease the roles of Juniors in orgs except for those high-quality candidates who work predominantly in newer languages or technologies LLMs can’t be effectively trained upon due to a substantially thinner corpus than, say, Javascript or C++.
Those of us who lived through prior cycles already see what’s coming next: refusing to hire Juniors ultimately cripples the pipeline of Senior talent, and educational institutions aren’t effectively training Seniors out the gate (since that requires both learned knowledge and lived experience). Seniors will likely appreciate in value in the short term (especially if LLMs prove my doomerism wrong and stick around/remain popular), followed by a business panic as they realize they footgunned themselves in the labor department by failing to hire, mentor, and train Juniors into Seniors. Combined with population growth declines, increasing retirement of older workers, and rising Nationalism clamping down on immigration or outsourcing, and you’ve got a perfect storm of sorts where companies will need talent but will have a lack of supply to pull from.
If I were a technologist whose background is bootcamps or vendor certifications, I’d be seriously worried about immediate and short-term prospects. Even if they hallucinate consistently and reward hack frequently, LLMs can supplant the kind of low-quality talent who normally take these roles in larger companies (at least for now). My advice is to start building more complex skill sets instead of relying on drills and rote memorization; contributing to FOSS isn’t enough when you’re competing against LLMs and thousands of randos for commit recognition, you’re going to have to make your own projects that solve problems or demonstrate your specific capabilities.
A and B-tier talent will have a rough few years as well, but they’re likely to soldier onward relatively unscathed unless I’m wrong and LLMs somehow lead to the Singularity. If you can’t get into that sort of quality, you shouldn’t pin your career hopes on a bootcamp or certification alone.
[+] [-] fjd|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|7 months ago|reply
I've always felt like coding bootcamps were pretty much doomed to fail. I don't know why so many in the industry tried to denigrate the profession in the first place by pretending that a ~20 week bootcamp would suffice. It's like if the New York Philharmonic said "We're going to expand beyond the old stuffy prestige names of Julliard and Curtis, and instead start looking for non-traditional students who took a semester long 'Learn the Cello in 12 weeks' course."
But even then, the biggest problem with coding boot camps wasn't competition from AI, it was offshore competition. People in the US spent a ton to be trained in basic skills like front end web development when there are millions of people around the world willing to do that, at a similar or higher level of skill, for $20/hr or less.
I don't mean to denigrate people who took non-traditional routes to software development. On the contrary, some of the best programmers (and, especially, dev managers) I've ever worked with don't have CS degrees. Speaking of cello, for some reason an inordinate number of top programmers I've worked with have music degrees. But all of these folks just had a certain way of thinking - very detail oriented, extremely logical, extremely self-motivated, that is just not common among people at large. It's not surprising companies try to find talent where the pool is full rather than doing needle-in-a-haystack searches.
[+] [-] stego-tech|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mikert89|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] grunder_advice|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggawatts|7 months ago|reply
Just like how CAD has almost entirely eliminated that line of work, the same thing will happen in software development. Only the “architects” will remain.
There is an implicit assumption made by the people concerned about junior devs disappearing that that’s where senior developers come from.
The reality is that almost junior developers never gain significantly better skill, no matter how their age or title.
I regularly work with people with decades of “experience” that still have no idea how to use a database engine. A real senior developer could write their own database engine from scratch. That’s the difference!
[+] [-] joshdavham|7 months ago|reply
It actually doesn’t make sense when you think about it - the idea that entry level roles will be cleanly eliminated. Certainly there could be a period with drastically fewer entry level roles, but that logically can not remain the case.
[+] [-] _DeadFred_|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|7 months ago|reply
Not sure if there is a single silver bullet to solve this, but one thing is all juniors could start building things only for fun and solving small problems they understand (ala YC advice), and once solved, allow room to build it better each time.
[+] [-] xena|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] GMoromisato|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LtWorf|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelnovati|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bl0rg|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] RivieraKid|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jonas21|7 months ago|reply
Seniors will have to come from somewhere, but it wouldn't be through this pipeline, even if companies were still hiring at full rate for entry-level work.
For some just getting into the field, this could be a great opportunity -- if you can figure out where the puck is heading, you can skate directly there.
[+] [-] baxtr|7 months ago|reply
OK, so I think there is a fair chance it will play out like this: the younger generation won't study CS anymore / learn how to code. Instead, they'll all vibe code.
This will lead to a massive increase in demand for seniors to clean up the vibe code, which isn't working properly or needs maintenance.
This demand increase will be exacerbated by the fact that there will be no new seniors since no one learned how to code...
Fun times ahead.
[+] [-] noosphr|7 months ago|reply
Same after the dot com crash and outsourcing. Give it 5 years and hiring will be back to normal. Give it 10 and salaries will be even more stratospheric because the pipeline is bone dry now.
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|7 months ago|reply
Before a big shift: “What could possibly go wrong?”
After a big shift and facing unintended consequences: “How were we supposed to know?”
[+] [-] bbqfog|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fma|7 months ago|reply
On a serious note, can't wait to see what salaries I command as a senior dev in a few years...when junior dev pipeline dried up and other older seniors left the industry.
[+] [-] joshdavham|7 months ago|reply
Assuming you find cleaning up vibe (legacy) code fun haha
[+] [-] 8n4vidtmkvmk|7 months ago|reply
More likely, they'll lay everyone off and with some luck start hiring them back at same or lower salaries and tell us we're lucky to even have a job, and we'll have no choice but to accept...
[+] [-] bgwalter|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nuancebydefault|7 months ago|reply
Those skills you don't fully develop at school or university, let alone a half year of bootcamp. I believe you have to have a developer's or engineering mindset in some way, early on in life, to be good at it.
My point being, if you choose a career swap, or suddenly realise you were studying something you are not passionate about, you still have a very big leap to make.
[+] [-] mberning|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] victor9000|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 8n4vidtmkvmk|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 8n4vidtmkvmk|7 months ago|reply
Sounds like it's the story of 1200 graduates, actually.
[+] [-] mrtksn|7 months ago|reply
Don't forget that a software company is bunch of software engineers in coordination, if those software engineers can be placed with a graphics card or AI service provider they just go ahead and start your own software company and just use this services to undercut the software companies that no longer need software engineers.
If AI is actually able to code like a real software engineer then people that are not software engineers and were laid off from software companies should just get an AI subscription and take away the business from the company that they were fired from.
Maybe it's not that graduates are not able to get jobs because AI is replacing them but because the focus of the capital at this time is no longer on speculating over software projects, therefore on the companies that are actually making money are able to actually hire. Today if you want to work in a company that exist thanks to speculative capital and pays huge salaries like in the day when software was eating the world than you need to be in AI.
[+] [-] crinkly|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] biglost|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] baal80spam|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stego-tech|7 months ago|reply
Leading up to the dotcom bust was a strong demand for technical talent. Talent that graduated in the midst of that bust got hosed, though were able to pick up work again as the economy realized that despite the bubble, technical expertise was still sorely needed.
Then came the 2000s, and the demand for technical talent skyrocketed on the back of Web 2.0 and the Digital Transformation of Business. Every college and grift was churning out the thinnest credentialed junior technologists to fill vacancies. Then the global recession happened, and suddenly every business started getting onboard the outsourcing wagon, thus crippling domestic technical roles and long-term IT careers. Except when ZIRP happened, suddenly everybody wanted software developers out of this notion that they could automate their way out of any conceivable problem with code.
Now LLMs are here, trained on the past and reducing the need for Juniors in those fields. The glut of C and D “bootcamp” students are superfluous as the business world re-orients around (comparatively) expensive debt and interest rates, and as technological revolutions effectively stagnate outside of a few, narrow fields (Quantum Computing, Cryptography, etc). AI coding tools built on LLMs are likely to decrease the roles of Juniors in orgs except for those high-quality candidates who work predominantly in newer languages or technologies LLMs can’t be effectively trained upon due to a substantially thinner corpus than, say, Javascript or C++.
Those of us who lived through prior cycles already see what’s coming next: refusing to hire Juniors ultimately cripples the pipeline of Senior talent, and educational institutions aren’t effectively training Seniors out the gate (since that requires both learned knowledge and lived experience). Seniors will likely appreciate in value in the short term (especially if LLMs prove my doomerism wrong and stick around/remain popular), followed by a business panic as they realize they footgunned themselves in the labor department by failing to hire, mentor, and train Juniors into Seniors. Combined with population growth declines, increasing retirement of older workers, and rising Nationalism clamping down on immigration or outsourcing, and you’ve got a perfect storm of sorts where companies will need talent but will have a lack of supply to pull from.
If I were a technologist whose background is bootcamps or vendor certifications, I’d be seriously worried about immediate and short-term prospects. Even if they hallucinate consistently and reward hack frequently, LLMs can supplant the kind of low-quality talent who normally take these roles in larger companies (at least for now). My advice is to start building more complex skill sets instead of relying on drills and rote memorization; contributing to FOSS isn’t enough when you’re competing against LLMs and thousands of randos for commit recognition, you’re going to have to make your own projects that solve problems or demonstrate your specific capabilities.
A and B-tier talent will have a rough few years as well, but they’re likely to soldier onward relatively unscathed unless I’m wrong and LLMs somehow lead to the Singularity. If you can’t get into that sort of quality, you shouldn’t pin your career hopes on a bootcamp or certification alone.