alt Hacker NewsSo, what does that leave for the current new grads? The LLM field hasn't even stabilized yet, we're still pretty far from a defined set of qualifications. Yet hiring has already stopped due to economical factors. By the time it swings back, the new grads of tomorrow will already be graduating with these qualifications that we won't get to learn or develop with real jobs.
And what if this results in the overall market size decreasing? If a company can use LLMs effectively, they may need far fewer people to do the job they're doing than they used to. This would result in an exodus of everyone - biased towards the lower end, no doubt, but it would still hit everyone else and greatly worsen working conditions due to an oversupply of desperate people looking for work.
The job of pure “programming” will shrink and become more academic in scope. Jobs in industry will shift towards industry specific applied roles. It won’t be good enough to blindly build CRUD forms anymore.
Before calculators you could just get a job just doing arithmetic. The job was called actually called “computer”. There are still plenty of jobs doing math, but most are now mostly an application of math in a specific field. This trend has already started happening with low-code/no-code tools, and that will accelerate now.
If I were a new grad, I would brush up on my other skills outside of programming and look for jobs that require soft skills, analysis, etc. Or pick a highly regulated industry.
The days of sitting in a cube all day and working Jira tickets stipulated by someone else is coming to an end.