alt Hacker News> "With so many companies worldwide faced with upheaval due to AI in software development, I believe this program will become a template for rapidly leveling up new developers across the industry."
This seems cognitively dissonant with the AI upheaval resulting in the industry needing fewer developers. Maybe they want cheaper developers?
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Is there evidence that overall software developer positions are declining relative to other jobs? It wouldn't surprise me if Jevons paradox applied here.
It feels like it's all senior developers now and nobody new. At some point they will want someone new and won't be able to find them.
Your comment completely misses the point. AI is fully capable of replacing shitty developers that cannot program and cannot write original code of their own. This is not a technology problem, missing skills problem, or even an AI problem.
It’s a problem of missing training and missing mentorship coupled with weak leaders who would rather throw their people to the wolves armed with crayons and coloring books until they just figure it out.
Before AI was a thing once a large organization hired too many shitty developers you could occasionally clean house by laying some off and ordering the rest to own more responsibilities. Once AI starts replacing the weakest among us the scapegoats are gone. Then what? Eventually the finger pointers can only point at themselves once there is nobody else to point at.
Based on posts by people involved like Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich, this initiative is a direct response to the long-term threat of AI completely replacing junior developers, and thus cutting off the pipeline of experience that turns junior developers into senior developers, who are still needed to leverage AI effectively.
There is of course the possibility that AI gets good enough that even senior engineers won’t be needed, but at this point it seems unlikely. My reasoning is that even expert humans make mistakes, which is why we need other humans to collaborate and check each others’ work (which, if you think about it, is a source of a lot of the processes and bureaucracy at companies; trivial example: code reviews.)
So even if AI gets to the level of human experts, this dynamic will not change... unless we hit ASI, where the AI far exceeds human capabilities. At which point we’ve hit the singularity and all bets are off.
Short of that, however, human experts will be needed, which is why programs like this are needed: to future proof against the short term economic pressures to minimize junior workers which will impact the long term pipeline that produces senior experts.