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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

This is just the start, just wait until most LLM can outperform junior devs on the quality of generated code.

The value of a junior dev is not the code they manage to produce. It’s their potential to become mid and senior later on.

What I’m trying to say is that LLMs don’t change anything here. Juniors are not hired for the work they can produce when hired.

To become a mid and senior one has to start as a junior.

The upcoming generation better learn how to start as junior architect.

I think they already can if you prompt well.

Might be waiting a long time. Just like self driving cars, the last 1% is the most crucial and the hardest.

Except of course LLM generated code is nowhere near the last 1%, and in any case very much misses what writing code is actually about - namely, communication with other humans.

That is what architects and business analysts do, so at least those jobs are safe for the foresable future.

The offshoring raw coding jobs, those will be outsourced to machines instead.

I really relate to aspects of both of these comments above. 1. There is a last 1% problem, heck it's probably more like 10% problem with LLM generated code similar to the last mile problem with driverless cars. 2. The bigger thing that will impact the job market is, everyone, at global scale, is being told to learn to code. Every middle schooler in the US is seemingly assumed a failure by their school if they don't "learn to code". There will be so much exponential growth in junior devs over the coming years. Looking outside the US, software engineer salaries aren't that great. Can the US economy create an exponential number of high paying engineer jobs to offset the global exponential rise in qualified engineers trying to get those jobs? Companies will offshore via third parties like Accenture who will skim off the top the livable wage away from those people outside the US who Accenture offshores to, so even those people outside the US won't be winning. Any way you look at it, I believe there will be massive world wide pressure on US engineer jobs.

We are just about there, if not past. Check out "Copilot for Pull Requests", "GPT Engineer", and "StarCoder LLM".

Friends and I have all been working to experiment with these sorts of things locally, to reduce the cost to basically zero.

I am sure we can guess what 1-3 years from now starts to look like, as technical project managers and sr devs are able to harness many of these tools (see langchain) and just write english unit tests.

Especially because every senior dev alive was once a junior dev.

I’d be more worried about mid-level devs that will be replaced by a junior++ armed with an LLM.

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