I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.
When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.
Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.
Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.
Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers.
Maybe this is North American thing because in Europe they never really got rid of human cashiers, they just had the automated systems alongside the human cashiers.
I don’t know of any store that went over to 100% self-checkout
I hate shopping at Lowe’s now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one “cashier” can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it’s just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I’m watch the death spiral in full swing.
Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe’s. It’s like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.
I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.
My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.
They also underestimated how lazy people are. Personally I will never use a self checkout if a have a bunch of produce (which is most trips to the grocery store). I can’t be bothered to slowly look up each item in their database.
Yep. When I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had every code memorized except some of the less popular bulk nuts. A human cashier is way faster than a self checkout.
It’s no guarantee. I tell you, the CEO position is like a poison to the brain. My company CEO is so hopped up on LLMs I’m highly suspecting that his slack messages are written by an LLM.
It could also be possible that AI doesn’t write code but becomes the new software. Hook it up to libraries, contractions, databases and pump it full of the verbatim ramblings from the client, sales guy and manager. Sure, it costs a magnitude more power to run but it’s up in no time.
Then hire a few consultants that used to be senior engineers for an outrageous amount to trace the weird hallucinations and replace the mission critical part with real code.
That’s the way it’s going now. People are making agentic stuff. Even in my company people are experimenting on something like that. Setup an agent, hook it up to the APIs and let loose.
Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.
So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.
You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.
I can share my experience with college, which it took me a while to appreciate but eventually I realized that while it wasn’t apparent at the time, it did make a difference. But of course, your mileage may wary, it’s just my personal experience.
I felt like I’m forced to go through a lot of bloat I’ll probably never need - why do I have to learn stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Smalltalk and other obscure languages that I’ll realistically never need? Why force so much in-depth math, I’ll probably never need to be able to formally prove the Big O of a Hashtable…
After spending few years working after/during college in offensive cybersecurity, where most of my colleagues did not have a degree, I’ve eventually realized what was the point of all these classes. I noticed that people kept reffering to programming as in “I’m a python programmer”, or “I’m a java programmer”, but I never really felt like that - when someone asked me if I can write something in any language, it didn’t matter what it is, I can just relatively quickly pick up the syntax and write anything I need in whatever you need, and I eventually realized that that’s exactly thanks to the college - the point was not to make me a Smalltalk or Prolog programmer, but to give me a PTSD from every different style of languages, from OOP through functional to whatever Prolog is, and while I do not remember almost anything, I still have the basic understanding of how does that style works, and when I look up any new language I need to use for the job, I’ve already seen and was forced to once learn and understand (well enough to pass exams) something with similar concepts.
And that’s a really big advantage that people without degrees don’t usually have (at least from my experience with my colleagues). It will teach you how to relatively quickly pick up different technologies and use new things, and that is a really valuable thing. And it’s the same about data structures and other math - you will probably not remember it, but the feeling that “wait a minute, this problem sounds familiar, isn’t there like a obscure tree-thing structure that solves exactly this efficiently?” or “wasn’t there some magic with stacking trig coeficients for this?” will stay with you, and give you a headstart in looking up the concrete details that would be pretty hard to find otherwise.
So I’m really glad I went to college. And in addition to that, it was amazing for networking - I had a masters in Gamedev and while that didn’t teach me almost anything new, it gave me a lot of friends and an amazing community of passionate people that I keep on making games with.
Last company I worked for and now contract for, explicitly set out to hire promising juniors over seniors. Reason being, they had to fire a guy with nearly a decade of experience because he was completely unable to adapt and learn new things, so his experience was all doing the same stuff over and over again.
A small company that has cash reserves will absolutely hire a bright grad who can hold a conversation in the interview, only trouble is the ratio between candidates and job openings.
Whether or not you’re wasting your time in college is only something you can answer. However, there definitely are jobs out there for junior software devs right now. If economic outlooks improve, I’d expect demand for juniors to rise also.
Anecdote: I saw stats shared on social media by a CS professor at my former college. Enrollment for their classes is way down this year, when “back in my day” they were packed. Make of it what you will, but it’s possible young people might no longer be seeing software development as an easy career to get into. That could make it a more attractive prospect for someone who’s in it for more than just money.
But the main benefits of static typing is in making the programming part easier. What do you gain from translating dynamically typed languages into a statically typed language?
I don’t see how that’s going to work out well. That’s asking to end up with a mess that you’re just going to have to rewrite anyways.
I do not even have a complete hatred for AI like a lot of folks do, but I don’t trust it that much (nor should anyone).
You’d be better off with an actual deterministic transpiler for that (think TypeScript -> JS but the other way around I suppose), not something with a ton of random variables like an AI.
I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.
When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.
Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.
Heh, that won’t stop a C-level from thinking that you just write code.
Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.
Maybe this is North American thing because in Europe they never really got rid of human cashiers, they just had the automated systems alongside the human cashiers.
I don’t know of any store that went over to 100% self-checkout
I hate shopping at Lowe’s now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one “cashier” can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it’s just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I’m watch the death spiral in full swing.
Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe’s. It’s like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.
I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.
I only know a single place with exactly two of them. The nearest Ikea. Other than those two it’s human cashiers everywhere.
My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.
They also underestimated how lazy people are. Personally I will never use a self checkout if a have a bunch of produce (which is most trips to the grocery store). I can’t be bothered to slowly look up each item in their database.
Wait, you guys don’t have scanners to scan your items?
Never had to look anything up in a database while shopping.
Your produce has barcodes printed on it?
Yep. When I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had every code memorized except some of the less popular bulk nuts. A human cashier is way faster than a self checkout.
That’s why the best places to work tend to be the places where your CEO has had your job before.
It’s no guarantee. I tell you, the CEO position is like a poison to the brain. My company CEO is so hopped up on LLMs I’m highly suspecting that his slack messages are written by an LLM.
That’s a good analogy, I will use that.
Full self driving… NOW.
See. It can turn the steering wheel on is own. Feature complete!!
The problem is that the CEO who believes he just writes code probably believes all a bus driver does is turn the steering wheel.
Is that because they themselves don’t do much work all day either?
That’s the same people that never figured out using blinkers or speed limits so that sounds about right.
It could also be possible that AI doesn’t write code but becomes the new software. Hook it up to libraries, contractions, databases and pump it full of the verbatim ramblings from the client, sales guy and manager. Sure, it costs a magnitude more power to run but it’s up in no time.
Then hire a few consultants that used to be senior engineers for an outrageous amount to trace the weird hallucinations and replace the mission critical part with real code.
The future is going to be wacko.
That’s the way it’s going now. People are making agentic stuff. Even in my company people are experimenting on something like that. Setup an agent, hook it up to the APIs and let loose.
It won’t automate your job, but isn’t it already replacing junior devs via team downsizing?
Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.
So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.
You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.
So I’m not wasting my time in college then?
I can share my experience with college, which it took me a while to appreciate but eventually I realized that while it wasn’t apparent at the time, it did make a difference. But of course, your mileage may wary, it’s just my personal experience.
I felt like I’m forced to go through a lot of bloat I’ll probably never need - why do I have to learn stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Smalltalk and other obscure languages that I’ll realistically never need? Why force so much in-depth math, I’ll probably never need to be able to formally prove the Big O of a Hashtable…
After spending few years working after/during college in offensive cybersecurity, where most of my colleagues did not have a degree, I’ve eventually realized what was the point of all these classes. I noticed that people kept reffering to programming as in “I’m a python programmer”, or “I’m a java programmer”, but I never really felt like that - when someone asked me if I can write something in any language, it didn’t matter what it is, I can just relatively quickly pick up the syntax and write anything I need in whatever you need, and I eventually realized that that’s exactly thanks to the college - the point was not to make me a Smalltalk or Prolog programmer, but to give me a PTSD from every different style of languages, from OOP through functional to whatever Prolog is, and while I do not remember almost anything, I still have the basic understanding of how does that style works, and when I look up any new language I need to use for the job, I’ve already seen and was forced to once learn and understand (well enough to pass exams) something with similar concepts.
And that’s a really big advantage that people without degrees don’t usually have (at least from my experience with my colleagues). It will teach you how to relatively quickly pick up different technologies and use new things, and that is a really valuable thing. And it’s the same about data structures and other math - you will probably not remember it, but the feeling that “wait a minute, this problem sounds familiar, isn’t there like a obscure tree-thing structure that solves exactly this efficiently?” or “wasn’t there some magic with stacking trig coeficients for this?” will stay with you, and give you a headstart in looking up the concrete details that would be pretty hard to find otherwise.
So I’m really glad I went to college. And in addition to that, it was amazing for networking - I had a masters in Gamedev and while that didn’t teach me almost anything new, it gave me a lot of friends and an amazing community of passionate people that I keep on making games with.
Last company I worked for and now contract for, explicitly set out to hire promising juniors over seniors. Reason being, they had to fire a guy with nearly a decade of experience because he was completely unable to adapt and learn new things, so his experience was all doing the same stuff over and over again.
A small company that has cash reserves will absolutely hire a bright grad who can hold a conversation in the interview, only trouble is the ratio between candidates and job openings.
I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you, I don’t think a computer science degree is a waste.
Whether or not you’re wasting your time in college is only something you can answer. However, there definitely are jobs out there for junior software devs right now. If economic outlooks improve, I’d expect demand for juniors to rise also.
Anecdote: I saw stats shared on social media by a CS professor at my former college. Enrollment for their classes is way down this year, when “back in my day” they were packed. Make of it what you will, but it’s possible young people might no longer be seeing software development as an easy career to get into. That could make it a more attractive prospect for someone who’s in it for more than just money.
Could AI allow you to write code in python, and then turn the python into a static language with static variables at least?
But the main benefits of static typing is in making the programming part easier. What do you gain from translating dynamically typed languages into a statically typed language?
Well that can’t be true, why would anyone have ever made a dynamic typing system?
That’s also to make programming easier. Different programmers have different needs.
I don’t see how that’s going to work out well. That’s asking to end up with a mess that you’re just going to have to rewrite anyways.
I do not even have a complete hatred for AI like a lot of folks do, but I don’t trust it that much (nor should anyone).
You’d be better off with an actual deterministic transpiler for that (think TypeScript -> JS but the other way around I suppose), not something with a ton of random variables like an AI.
A language to do what?
That is just programming with extra steps
Well python is slow due to garbage collection and dynamic types, if AI could fill those in it would make programming far easier at least.
You could write low level drivers in python.