I think that’s a completely different problem.

I’ve worked with two junior devs recently who are very good precisely because they’re trying to understand what they’re doing, rather than just producing code.

I’ve also worked with senior devs who basically gave up and stopped trying to understand the code. They became much worse engineers as a result. At this point I would much rather work with those 2 juniors.

They use it to explore things they don’t understand, ask me questions to clarify their reasoning, double-check assumptions. They generally use the tools available to increase their understanding.

The same thing happened to mechanical engineering decades ago when CAD came onto the scene. I have a family friend of my parents' generation who remembers feeling like his "superpower" in solving fluidics differential equations completely went out of the window once solvers could handle everything he was good at. He survived and had a good career guiding engineers into using CAD correctly.

The way the industry "solved" it was basically raising degree requirements across the board. I went to a top 5 engineering school and one of my undergrad roommates was a mechanical engineer. I remember having a pretty eye-opening conversation with him about how their undergrad program just teaches them what is already commoditized in CAD application packages and is considered table stakes. Industry hires had MS minimums, and plenty of MechEs ended up getting PhDs so they could work on more cutting edge stuff.

My guess is software will end up similarly. The bottom end of this stuff will become purely commoditized and cutting edge stuff will require more education.

I don't think I've seen any university teach anything but software table stakes. If even that. Fresh grads sometimes come to us having never actually written a program of their own volition.

It's true that developing junior devs is challenging (but it always was), but that's not what this is about: This is about the kind of not-that-good, mid-ass programmers who make up the silent bulk of the industry. The ones who have 20 years of experience, but who you still wouldn't trust to write fizzbuzz.

Those people are doomed. Which is fine in a lot of ways, but will be devastating for their economic prospects.

Talented people should still be worried, the problem is not the developers, it's the type of work the industry can support. There aren't that many jobs that require above average software capabilities, and you're competing with all those people who just got shafted out of their mid tier positions but actually had talent. Hopefully there will still be enough roles for all these excellent engineers.

In the same way there is only so much artisan hand crafted furniture to sell, you're a lucky craftsman if you can make a living doing that these days.

Yeah. Technology and social change has done this all over the economy. E.g. from my dad's field, there's not enough public health people with field experience to replace the folks who are retiring. We have plenty of entry level people who can't get a job, but then there's a gaping hole in the pipeline between them and the graybeards who are retiring.

It also ignores the effects of having a critical tool in the software pipeline controlled by a large corporation. That is an absolute sea change from the years when you could (and some of us did) run most of our software development on open tools.

Think about all the open source the world got from some random person in Finland or Sicily or wherever hacking on a cool idea. Will that still happen with a high (for someone who is not employed... maybe a student) monthly cost?

also who knows if prolonged ai development for years actually doesn't atrophy your coding muscles so to speak such that you are fully reliant on ai programming to get things done

We sort of already did that though. There is basically no mentoring in software, juniors have to teach themselves, seniors are often just the juniors who managed to get competent enough to do the job generally, and are probably not the ones you want mentoring.

The StackOverflow devs being replaced were never going to become real senior developers no matter how much time was given to them. There is an entire cohort of people who were told to go to college for programming because it was an easy way to make good money, who did what they were told while having zero interest in it and never touching a line of code outside of work/school hours. Those people were never going to understand actual programming, all they were doing was copy-pasting code for a paycheck. Does it suck for them that they're being replaced by automated copypasting bots, yep. But frankly speaking nobody should've ever been paid 6-figure salaries to copy paste snippets from SO and jam JS library legos together in the first place.

They'll become managers and PMs and TPMs instead.

I think that smart companies (don't laugh, a few exist) will still hire juniors. Fewer, more carefully selected, but still some.

> Kind of like the fortran crisis of the last decade or so....

I’m convinced the only reason there’s a Fortran crisis is because nobody wants to work on Fortran or make a career out of it.

Has nothing to do with willingness to hire juniors. Good luck finding promising juniors who survey their career opportunities and decide that Fortran is a good technology for building their resume.

Pay them and they will. The problem with many people bemoaning the lack of Fortran and COBOL developers is that they are not willing to admit that the code they "need" to maintain isn't actually valuable enough to be worth paying what that maintenance costs.

It's like complaining that no mechanics work on carburetors anymore. Well some do, but they are expensive and not worth it to keep your old hoopty running. Might be worth it if you have a show-quality 1960's era muscle car.