- Deep curiosity and ability to absorb new information quickly - Evidence of ability to wield and coordinate agents to the max - Ability to clearly communicate ideas
You have these skills, you can conquer the software world.
I've used vi and emacs and the number of their users that really 10x everyone else is vanishingly small. A large percentage of their userbases are people who wished they were the 10x but were much slower (or at best equal to) than the average Jetbrains tool users.
I have seen multiple cases that proves otherwise, some new programmers try to learn Vi because "All the cool haxxer on youtube use it"
We used to call this RDD - Resume Driven Development.
The difference between a junior and a senior is still very real. With agents, knowing what to ask them to do (or not do) is bordering on more important than it ever was. A curious junior might still go down rabbit holes for things that a person who had done this before. That’s what makes them a junior. Not everything we _can_ do we _should_ do
Wow, so you worked with recent grads who are producing 100x the slop? No wonder Anthropic doesn't hire junior engineers.
"People with no taste or experience mass generating code by copying tickets into Claude and pressing accept is the best!" Ohhhhkie dokie broskie
But there are so many people who make statements like his that maybe we should assume that some of them are not idiots or bots. If he's not an idiot it means that he's working in an environment where that kind of statement is paying off. So it could be, for example, that he doesn't really have profitable customers. His main 'customers' are investors who are clueless, or who know that they are clueless but don't care because they are going to move it on to a greater fool anyway. Or that because there aren't any customers, the only thing they can measure is 'productivity' in terms of 'number of unused, unprofitable and unsustainable features'
There is another option to consider. What if they heard someone else say it and they believed it.
Now they go around, like many insecure people do, shouting about their unfounded take. Begging the universe to correct them or give them a good reason why they arent informed.
Then what usually happens with people who suffer from this type of short ordered thinking is, they realize they can't walk it back without social consequences because of the shouting they have done. So they just double down on it and find ways to live with the cognitive dissonance. Anthropic, openai, etc make billions off of people like this.
Because they propagate the BS advertising to people who don't know better, and then spend more money to try to make it real.
If everyone does it, no one monitors it anymore, and quality degrades the only way out is more tokens.
All they really need to do is convince enough people to adopt lower expectations and accept worse software products. At that point, mission accomplished. They've annihilated the source of value originally provided by people who actually know how to do things.
I mean real profit, not "adjusted profit."
As long as there other companies scooping up the juniors (which we cannot assume will happen), this could be sustainable.
This is every industry - barring unionized trades with established apprenticeship pathways - over the past few decades. Either someone does the early-career job-hop dance, or they take on student loans to (maybe!) skip some of that. (And, you know, universities would prefer not actually to train anyone, either. If they can - "highly selectively" - find cohorts who don't need much mentorship then that's much better for their bottom lines.) Regardless, the entire cost and risk of training has been pushed onto individual employees.
Yes, this works well for a small minority of highly-motivated people - who are, of course, vastly over-represented on this board, so few here will object to it - but it prevents far, far more people from ever reaching their potential.
And you can't just poach either because in that case we wouldn't have had juniors to begin with.