Junior Developers in the Age of AI

Summary

Little Girl in Blue Armchair - Mary Cassatt, 1878For a long time, we were all hand-wringing over the shortage of software developers. School districts rolled out coding curriculums. Colleges debuted software “labs”. “Bootcamps” became a $700m industry. Today, we have the opposite problem. Thousands of trained, entry-level engineers that no one wants to hire. Just as software finished eating the world, zero interest rates ended. Companies optimized for cash and slowed hiring. The market didn’t shrink, but stopped growing at the breakneck pace we all expected. The result: a glut of entry level talent groomed for jobs that never materialized. This would explain a more competitive entry level market. But it doesn’t explain the entry-level market shrinking, despite overall industry growth. Demand for senior talent is rising, but has fallen off a cliff for juniors. (If you’re a senior engineer struggling to find work: read this.)In short: demand for senior talent is rising, but has fallen off a cliff for juniors.AI didn’t create this trend - there was already a bias for senior talent pre-2022 - but it gave leaders a convenient justification to exacerbate it. In terms of speed, price, and quantity, juniors can’t compete with LLMs. Code is now a commodity. It sounds logical because it’s true, but it misses the big picture. Here’s the core misunderstanding:The job of software engineering is not “writing code”.Coding: translating a process into something a machine can understand and executeEngineering: sustaining and evolving interconnected, ever-changing systemsWhen we talk about “the code” we often actually mean the systems that contain code. These systems are complex. They include layers of interwoven dependencies that evolve unpredictably. Between unique technology choices, historical decisions, and company-specific processes, every system’s “code” is its own special snowflake.Fail to understand your special snowflake, and things break. Ex: If Apple makes an update, you c...