If you're a regular engineer like me, there's no real upside to using AI in a company setting. They're boiling us. Of course, the HN elite (investors, execs, celebrities, and top-tier engineers) will say otherwise because "how can you be against innovation man?"
AI/LLMs aren't innovation the way TCP/IP, linux, or postgres were. To be clear: claude/codex/gemini/grok/whatever exist for profit, to squeeze the last drop of productivity out of you until there's nothing left, and then you're disposable (laid off).
If you like AI, use open source models, use them in your side projects.
1) The game is not ending, it's changing. AI can sling a lot of code but we still need engineers that actually understand what the hell is going on. That's always been the bottleneck. It could eliminate junior positions, but seniors are fine for now.
2) It's been a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm naturally a contrarian, but you are hired to do what management wants you to do. If you resist, your best bet is to hope they don't notice or care, but it's not going to change much.
If you eliminate juniors over the next few years, there will be no seniors for the future when the current seniors retire.
The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.
No, it's a "tragedy of the commons" problem, for lack of a less dramatic phrase.
If you ran a software company, would you want to train juniors who are slower than AI and much more expensive? Who would just jump ship in two years?
It wouldn't make sense to. "Someone" should do it: someone other than you.
I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?
Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they're familiar with but not think out of the box.
Hiring a mediocre senior is much worse than hiring a grad because they will never get any better, and it's very hard to know at hiring time that they're mediocre.
I'd also add that top-heavy engineering organizations are sometimes incapable of delivering anything useful because everyone wants to work on the hard problems, establish the frameworks, define the processes, and so on, and no one wants to operate the damn business. It's good to have a mix of perspectives in a team.
Fully agree actually. Not sure its a counterpoint at all really, but its a great point. My comment wasn't intended to be "juniors were never worth it", but instead "juniors WERE worth it before but not because they produced amazing ROI themselves, why does the introduction of an LLM change that?" I'm solidly against the narrative that now all of a sudden juniors aren't worth hiring anymore because a senior with an LLM = 100x engineer.
I 100% agree.
I’ve only had 1-2 juniors who “didn’t get any better” compared to the scores of senior engineers I wouldn’t trust to anything on their own.
Most juniors with investment from the organization and senior engineers will become competent quickly. That will eventually free up seniors.
> hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI
Yes, exactly. It's been a problem for a while, and it's worse now.
I'm worried it will go from "it's hard for juniors" to "it's nearly impossible for juniors."
People used to stay at companies longer than a couple years
Please go ahead and train juniors on your free time. Put your resources where your mouth is.
Yep, I'm a fan of the current crop of AI tools because they are incredibly useful to me, but I have deep concerns about the pipeline problem.
They're making the bet that seniors won't be needed by then. I think it's a bad bet, but it makes sense to follow through if 40% of the economy is already being occupied by this tech.
Then pay will go up again for those mid-level developers who still remain, and companies will again overhire and overtrain like we saw during COVID years. “We won’t have any seniors in ten years!!1!” is a handwringy problem that self solves by the free market.
Seems like the upside is that it makes the job way easier? What am I missing?
Im your CEO. I see you and the rest of your peers have doubled your productivity in the last 2 months because of claude. Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit.
Now of course, you may think you are such a good engineer that companies will kill for you… perhaps that’s true now, but its not true for 90% of the engineers out there. And as the pool of engineers gets reduced, the chances of you being not as good as you thought go up. So the real question is: can you (we all) still make a good living by not using llms. You know support each other and fuck the higher ups? No, we cant. Wwe are full of ourselves, full of elitism (this is HN). We are rational folks, we believe in numbers, in data; we know what we deserve. fuck the rest. The ones who win are the higher ups, of course, not us.
I understand and share your concerns but (without thinking I'm such a good engineer that companies will kill for me), I just don't share your conclusion.
To me, it's pretty simple. I have things to do. This makes it easier for me to do those things. Sometimes that means I can do more things, and sometimes it means I can spend less time on my work, and often both.
I have no idea what the future will hold. But to me, it would be very odd to avoid using extremely useful tools for my current work, because of that uncertainty about the future.
That’s fine. Some people cannot (don’t want to) think about the more profound consequences of their actions. No one likes to stop for 10min and think deep about what they are actually doing. The easiest path is always to stay in “robot mode”: my boss pays me $ for my job… therefore I need to satisfy that contract. No time to think”
No, see, this is the disconnect. Whatever happens with this in the future is not due to "the more profound consequences of [my] actions". Whether I choose to take advantage of these useful tools, or not, has absolutely no bearing on the hypothetical future consequences you're suggesting may come to pass.
If you're proposing an organized boycott, I would certainly entertain that proposal. But for me, the bar would be high for both certainty that the hypothetical consequences are likely and bad and that the boycott would have a chance of being effective.
At this particular moment, I'm pretty skeptical on both counts. And I'm flatly against the kind of vibes and guilt tripping driven "boycotts" that you're attempting here.
(And I'm way more bullish on the normal legislative and regulatory processes. I think organized boycotts are something to think about if those processes fail.)
> Good job! Now since we don’t really need to go that faster, ill fire half of you so I and my investors friends can make more profit.
Is this a thing? Are there companies out there that don't want to go faster?
The market can sneeze and suddenly there's a wave of hiring freezes, sounds plausible to me.
In reality, I think it's more likely that the lay-offs will be when the marginal rate of growth slows down. Once executives see that growth doesn't change much when hiring, they stop hiring, and once they see that growth doesn't decrease much when firing, they start firing.
There's still an opportunity for engineers to eat their bosses lunch and just start their own company. It's never been easier to start a lower cost competitor.
Employment isn't a social law of nature: it's a transaction of money for "units of work", just like the business might have with other vendors. Governments should be making it easier to become a vendor.
So now your competitors go twice as fast as you. Good luck with that.
It seems like a lot of developers have philosophical disagreements with the direction of AI combined with fear of change and fear that AI makes them less competitive in the job market. I see people regularly boycotting or rejecting AI for a variation of these reasons, and it feels a lot like self-sabotage.
My biggest challenge is to look productive while still having some time and focus left to be a good expert. After all - we are just code reviewers now, and you are a no good reviewer if you never get any shovel time yourself.
The juniors are eliminated and the seniors indulge in cognitive surrender because it feels good.
Some of us still haven't figured out how to hold it right. So on average it doesn't make anything easier. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just fails. Net effort change for me is about a wash. I know this is different from most peoples' experience, and I don't know I suck at using it. But I'm not generally inclined to use it much as a result.
Yep I understand this. But what I don't understand is, "wow this is incredibly useful! ... but I'm not gonna use it".
There are a lot of potential reasons.
Here’s a thought: consider the potentially analogous case of performance-enhancing drugs for athletes. The drugs unambiguously make them better at their jobs, but the drugs have severe long-term health costs and wreak havoc on the fairness of the playing field. It’s easy to see why an athlete might choose not to use them, even when others are.
Of course, those negative factors alone are not enough to dissuade people en masse who want to get a leg up on their competitors, so the use of performance-enhancing drugs must be further restricted by institutional bans.
There are rules against using performance enhancing drugs in competitive sports, because ultimately the goal of the sport is entertainment, and the entertainment value increases with a rule based even playing field.
Business is not like this, because the value of what a business does is in its actual output, not in its entertainment value for spectators.
Of course there are other rules (legislative and regulatory) that apply, for other good reasons. But their goal is not to create an entertaining competitive environment, but rather to control externalities of what companies do.
I favor AI regulation, but I also don't think treating it like a performance enhancing drug would be a smart way to regulate it. Higher business productivity is useful to society in a way that breaking home run records is not.
It's not actually useful for me. But I still use it anyway.
The total opposite thing :)
Oh right. Along those lines sometimes I do long hand multiplication or division instead of using a calculator. I think it's a valuable skill. If I don't do it, I'll probably forget how.
Yep! But if I were doing my job as an accountant, I would not spend time doing any of that work using long hand division, I would use a spreadsheet. To me, it's a professionalism thing. If I'm doing a job, I should use the best tool (for me) for that job. (edit: I'm absolutely not suggesting that you are unprofessional! It sounds like AI tools are not the best tool for the job, for you. But they are for me, at the moment.) If I'm doing a hobby or personal development in general, then I can use whatever tools I want for that.
It's interesting though, for a long time I said that if I were going to do a personal programming project I was excited about, I would write all the code by hand, because I do really miss doing that, and I also worry about forgetting how to. But now I'm not so sure. I find my daydreaming about personal projects to be a lot more focused on the outcome than the process, lately. More like "wow, I could do so much in an hour or two a day now! think of the possibilities!" than an excitement about writing code and creating pleasant abstractions.
If it really does make your job easier that's great for you, but if it isn't making you more profitable then the company as a whole is wasting money and some people will have to go until your job is about as stressful as before.
I think if companies feel that AI usage turns out to be wasting money, with negative ROI, then certainly nobody has anything to worry about here! Companies will definitely turn off this spigot the moment they think it's a net negative to their bottom line.
The revealed preference is very far in the opposite direction at the moment.
What do you do all day at your job?
Serious question. I think the reason that there's such a disconnect among AI-for-work users about whether it's a panacea or bullshit accelerator is that different software developers have massively different duties and conceptions about what their job is or should be.
1. Communicate with people about what to build, fix, or improve, and about our progress with current ongoing work.
2. Figure out what components already exist and what new things we need to build and how things should be integrated.
3. Actually build the things according to what was figured out in the previous step.
4. Review my own work and other people's work.
5. Release things and make sure they work.
6. Respond to emergent issues in things that have been released.
I find the current generation of AI tooling to be very useful for all of these tasks. Less so for task #1 than the others.
What are other people doing that is different?
There’s an engineering story of being abused by capitalists, but from an Executive perspective the whole thing strikes me as insane except for ‘next quarters bonus’.
Anyone remember what SCO did to the industry as it went under?
The part I still don’t get is where Enterprises are dumping internal ‘secrets’ (code, processes, customer needs, internal politics, leadership dreams), into the hands of startups and untrustworthy conglomerates. MS used to be famous for NDA and deal abuse.
I don’t believe for a second the LLM giants would be shy about training on corporate materials and lying about it. And if they start going under? This gold rush might have a long, ugly, tail.
What is sco?
Oh yeah, it's hard to find now. [Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation)
They're not innovations like TCP/IP, Linux or Postgres, they're innovations like compilers, syntax highlighting, and IDEs.
This is a really bad take, many on hackernews have a very skewed idea of what a CEO thinks about its employees it seems, or why firings happen in the first place.
Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, if you're doing this you're quite literally just putting yourself in scope.
Just read coinbase today. They are culling those who are not adopting the future because they get in the way of progress. They don't help, they don't push things forward and they hold back those who do.
"Quite honestly the firings that are happening are the ones who are not adopting the technologies, "
And there is why the hate exists. You as the CEO know nothing about how your business works. You neither actually try to understand nor do you have the technical background to understand. So you substitute gamed numbers. And in doing this, you setup your company to tank the industry that props up the world economy. And then act like you are the rational one while doing this. There is nothing rational about how most CEOs act. There is a reason why companies do better under dev founders than any other circumstance. There is a reason why dev CEOs do better than non-dev CEOs. Yet despite this, you will tank both your company and a substantial part of the industry just so you can get yours. That's why you are getting the hate. Ignorant indifference is just as objectionable as the caricature of a CEO you see in these posts.
>You as the CEO know nothing about how your business works. That's too broad of a statement and quite honestly, in my opinion and experience, wrong. There may be some who this does apply to but the vast majority that I know, it does not, and when you get to companies that are actually doing firings based on this its even less.