Hacker News Reader

Comment by OuterVale | Hacker News Reader

As obvious as it seems to say, with no new juniors there will be no new seniors.

The future seniors won’t be people defined by strong technical knowledge. They’ll be the ones with “autonomy and judgment” as Anthropic puts it (read: highly social; good at climbing the corporate ladder; strong educational/professional pedigree).

These people won’t necessarily need to be trained in CS, because in 10 years no one will need to know what a data structure is. So they can come from other fields (law, business) or just from other roles within the company.

Note this is basically how it already works in every non-technical field where there’s no clear definable “skill” on which to evaluate people.

How does one develop strong judgement without strong technical knowledge?

Via lived experience and social connections. Having done something similar or being able to ask someone who has.

The point is that judgment won’t be needed on technical aspects. It will be more soft decisions like how to manage the agents.

i already can see such people saying: "I saw google have done it. So we should be doing this too"...

With the right kind of social skills, saying things like this is exactly the way to get promoted.

massive enshitiffycation incomming

Incoming? Literally everything in the world from chocolate to housing to software has gotten worse / smaller and costs more over the last 5-8 years.

Maybe this is the bottom and things only get better from here. I’m hopeful.

Are you living in La La Land? Do you think people designing bridges or cars or ships have "no clear definable skill"?!?

Software, surprisingly, is a technical skill. Stop comparing it with poetry, sales or dancing.

Not for those that call themselves Software Engineers, without a proper engineering degree validated by the respective country Engineering Order, possibly with a professional title exam.

Since we are talking about bridges, cars and ships, that is.

We don’t have professional exams for software engineers, nor anyone would want it. But it is still a professional practice.

"We" depends very much on which country we are talking about, and yes plenty of us are perfectly fine with them.

awesome, when do the leetcode interviews go away?

They probably assume they won't need seniors either by the time that's a problem

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!"

Thanks for reminding me to rewatch Event Horizon for the N-th time.

Not Back to the Future? In Event Horizon they weren't going to need eyes to see. Whatever, I'm going to rewatch both!

If we can believe Zager and Evans, it's the year 4545 when the need for eyes dwindles.

Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see the roads because the cars will be self-driving, and we won't need roads because the cars will fly!

They are pretty up front about that when they hire from what I was told by someone who went through it: that you have to “be okay” with your job not exisiting in the next couple of years

If they said that to me I'd assume they mean because the company will run out of cash and collapse.

That too

> Anthropic reportedly screens job candidates with a culture interview testing whether they would put the company's mission ahead of their future wealth. One applicant was asked how they would feel if a safety decision sent Anthropic's stock to zero.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/anthropic-...

How many steps till they become a full on revenue generating cult?

Who says they aren't? They wouldn't be the first and they were founded in the US, so it comes with the territory, see the book Fantasyland.

the cult exists already, it's called capitalism.

Ah boy have I been caught out by questions like that.

You're supposed to say, 'of course I'll put the mission ahead and send the stock to zero', but then when you're in the position, you can never allow that to happen, it'll make your manager look bad. The joys of corpo life

The test is kinda simple, if you look at it from the right perspective. They want you to do whatever is best for the company, but never admit it verbally if it could put the company in bad light.

Thinking about it more, I think it's more complicated than just what to say - you have to act and pretend-believe that you'll send the stock to zero, changing your public actions to look like you'll act in accordance with that belief. When push comes to shove, however, you have to do what's best for the company. Kind of like any kind of 'company values' - you can't just 'accept the values', you have to always publicly state your belief and support in the values, pledge your allegiance.

Until adherence to the values may lead to a loss in share values, at which point you have to quietly abandon them. It's a tightrope to walk, especially if you're not neurotypical.

Do they also have some kind of breakfast gathering round where everyone chants the company mission in unison? /s

Nah thats Walmart

That's hilarious considering they are aiming to IPO at a 2 trillion dollar valuation.

Automating away the tedious parts of your work is something sysadmins and programmers have been doing for a long time. For example see:

https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/

I’ve been doing this job for two decades, you don’t have to tell me that. But programming isn’t the tedious part of the job to me.

As obvious as it seems to say, if AI becomes smarter than humans in 3 years, this will not be the problem.

The parent comment didn't require a load-bearing "if".

A Company with only C level executives.

Isn't there a Golgafrincham Ark for that?

Even they can be replaced. They probably won’t even be last to go.

C-suite are there to protect the owners so they don't get in trouble if their company breaks the law. That makes them the most important position. Being a good manager is just a bonus.

Seems obvious to me that jobs which primarily require research and thought will be the first to go. The job of a good exec is basically: 1) research the market, 2) make presentations, 3) make high level decisions based on research and input from others and have leaders below you work on those. Ok, 4) is schmooze and maintain relationships but you have an org to do that too.

So they are the ones who have to ship their own code? I have heard of it since 1960s with COBOL

My concern is what does “smarter” actually mean? If it means producing more functioning code faster across a broader spectrum, fine. LLMs are based on training over existing data (i.e. examples) to produce output. As LLMs produce more output, they are training on their own data whether it be good or bad. Without technically skilled humans in the loop who know design patterns and best practices, what keeps LLMs from continually degrading the quality of their output? Therefore, less smart.

> My concern is what does “smarter” actually mean?

I mean the thing you imagine I don't mean.

The riots on the streets might become the problem, it won't be only about housing and life cost.

If that will ever be a problem (it will not), they have enough money and clout to take seniors from other companies.

This doesn’t seem like a real problem for companies since they could start up internship programs if they need to.

It could follow that we simply need fewer seniors. Hard to quantify now, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com