AI Workforce Is Already Coming for Junior Developer Jobs on Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

AI Workforce Is Already Coming for Junior Developer Jobs on Wall Street

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22 pointsmagden34 comments

Am I missing some demos of LLM’s producing jr. Dev level work, because from my experience this seems implausible.

AI is making developers more productive, although I doubt that will cause a shortage in jobs

Could. Also might not, depends on a lot of things. But I have to say, there are a still plenty of horse and buggy drivers today, weavers, typewriter manufacturers. I'm sure they'll still be many programmers with AI advances.

AI has enabled my team to essentially all become polyglots. It's really amazing to be able to jump between languages, using the best tools for the domain.

* JS/TS - FE

* Ruby on Rails - Most of our business logic

* Python - Doc and LLM specific code

* Misc. other languages - niche features that make the most sense in specific languages.

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Previously, we'd spend a lot of time on dumb little things. Things that you probably take for granted in your primary language, but can become super frustrating in a new language.

Agree, I can easily see a team of a dozen developers shrunk down by half and still maintain the same quantity and quality of output.

It’s wild how people never seem to say “wow, now our team of 12 can be twice as productive. Think about how much less stressed they’ll be and more productive we’ll be able to be for the company!”.

Because if you start making more widgets then now your support, marketing, sales acquisition et al costs also have to scale. But that needs foresight... And until the AI workforce comes for those too, it's easier to claim short term victory.

Great answer that addresses the business incentives. Scaling is hard (perhaps impossible in some markets) and possibly expensive, while cutting labor costs has an immediate benefit to the bottom line.

Then why not make a solid argument for it higher up in the chain?

Instead of a reaction to a comment further down.

That’s what ends up happening in practice. Who has actually been fired because of AI? GitHub Copilot has been out forever

In my experience, the return rate for improved productivity is usually targeted at around 99% to the company, 1% to employees.

any example use case for ruby on rails?

I still can't think the use case of using ai to help me code my ruby on rails project

> AI is making developers more productive, although I doubt that will cause a shortage in jobs

It appears to have already led to layoffs and hiring cutbacks.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/tech/ai-tech-layoffs/index.ht...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-pause-hiring-plans-re...

It's not that the AI is autonomous as a coder. It's more like a senior dev going without the junior trainy for menial tasks. Both needed supervision and handholding, but one is substantially cheaper.

How this will impact the developer ecosystem remains to be seem.

This is profoundly unrealistic. There’s no way the current crop of AI tools are independently executing at the level of even a junior programmer. If there’s any truth to the story, it sounds like someone changing the open job just based on spitefulness. A high level engineer handholding an AI to write some JS code is a huge waste of that person’s time.

Absolutely. If you're junior only created greenfield js apps and thay was the entire role, then fire that principal the entire team isn't setup right.

A week is far too little time to really validate if an AI replacement is suitable.

As far as I can tell, the current commercially available LLMs context windows are too small to fit the context of a real life codebase.

On top of that, there is no time to see how well it maintains code in a week’s time.

It’s cool as an assistant, and I’ve used LLMs to rewrite front-end code, but this is jumping the gun a bit.

> He started using the AI model as a front-end engineer. He would talk to the AI the way he would talk to the resigned front-end engineer, giving tasks, iterating on the React UI, and making final changes in the source code before pushing it to production. After a week-long pilot, he asked headhunters to use the opened position to find a UI/UX designer for the team instead. He no longer needed a front-end engineer.

Wait lemme get this straight — AI didn’t eliminate a job; it changed a job to something higher in the abstraction chain. Isn’t this actually the very best case outcome?

Low level language dev -> high level language dev -> designer

Hear ye, hear ye.

The state of technology and business is changing very quickly now. The slope is almost vertical relative to 10-20 years ago. What exists now will seem like very old news one year from now. Take heed, stay agile, learn more and please don't underestimate tech growth.

Humans can't really compete with vertical. Moreover Gen Z already knows they're worse off than their parents, who were worse off than their respective parents. The real world is looking less appealing, which is probably why so many people are dropping out of it.

The code I get from LLMs is only as good as StackOverflow and will often send you in the wrong direction if you don't know what it's doing.

The part of programming LLMs solve is the easiest part.

The sad thing is this is going to be to the detriment of those trying to learn, we are going to wind up with a new glass ceeling, programmers that can code without these tools and programmers that are reliant on them.

The latter will have very short careers (dangerous prediction, I know)

Analogous to this, I'm already seeing a new generation that doesn't know how to (and has no curiosity to learn to) get around a server or know what's going on in one because all they know how to do is run a container.

I, too, remember when Mac and windows came out and an entire generation would never use Unix because all they know is point and click.

Doing everything from a terminal is cool and all and makes me feel like a hacker or something, but it's far easier to just click around tbh, and then have the option of using the terminal if I want to.

Of course it's easier, that's why it's the most popular form of computer interface, however what it gains in ease of use it sacrifices in efficiency and precision. Conversely, a CLI is completely opaque to the uninitiated, but it is far more efficient than clicking around an arbitrary sequence of windows/tabs/menus.

To be fair in the early days of NT4 and part of NT5, there was very limited cli support. Especially for management of features such as Active Directory

The same was said about developers relying on search engines, now google-fu is generally considered an essential skillet for the modern programmer.

How big are your prompts?

I've found LLMs are incredibly when you prompt with a comment for the next 1 to 5 lines.

I look forward to a copilot trained on custom code bases to pair program with. Also one that can write test cases and documentation.

> Also one that can write test cases and documentation.

That’s precisely what LLMs have provided amazing value to me for. Though the documentation can’t really know the business-related “why” part, you have to add it in.

Do any of these articles have details or specific examples? The claimed ease and casualness just don't ring true, and the stories are always via a "friend", or a "CTO I met recently at a conference", or some other anonymous person.

What a lazy take. Let's see AI actually own the position reading jiras doing maintenance upgrading debugging deployments.

Yes AI will change the jobs. Replace is way to blunt and lazy a term to describe the potential change that is coming.

Beware of what you ask for.

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