ETA: summary…
Author describes how agentic coding tools have disincentivized the developer training and mentorship pipeline that the software industry has implicitly relied on to produce seasoned developers, predicting that once the shortage is fully realized it could take years to reverse.
The solution proposed is for managers and senior developers to get ahead of this shortage by foregoing the immediate yet shortlived productivity maximization offered by the agent-multiplied-senior structure in favor of longterm sustainability by deliberately facilitating experience fan-out to juniors.
The methodology proposed is based on a successful nuclear engineering apprenticeship program carried out on active service naval submarines.
Newly graduated computer engineer here. I find this whole thing extremely depressing. Rant incoming.
Look at this passage from the article:
I’m not sure what I imagined software engineers did before I graduated, but it wasn’t this. It is so soul crushing that even if I could get hired and accumulate experience to be a senior, the role I would have is to clean after LLMs. I like software development. I want to do the thing I studied to do.
It makes me wonder how these 5 senior engineers came to found a company that works like that. Do they not like writing the code? Do they have dreams of being rich? Do they believe the product they will produce is so essential that the process doesn’t matter?
Looking at their company (FlintAI), it makes a CRM with an integrated chatbot. The first result that came up when I searched FlintAI was another website named FlintK12 that makes an education oriented chatbot platform for teachers and students.
90% of software development jobs I see are for companies like these. Business gobbledygook software equivalent to the other 9999 business gobbledygook softwares. Job replacer 4000. Ai bot to do things that traditional software already do. Sell your knowledge to our ai bot. Help us steal information for our ai bot. Smart camera. Missile guidance system.
They all add 0 or negative value to the society, or that’s what it looks like to my baby brain.
Then there’s the obvious problem with the author’s proposal: Senior engineers aren’t something companies can sell. If they get rarer and more valuable, that value would be captured by the engineer. Which means the value of the experience that a Juinor earns from a job is also higher. So the value the Juinor provides to the company has decreased while the value they receive from the company increased. The only way I see this ending is Juinor wages plummeting and turning into unpaid internships or paid (the other way) ‘educational programs’.
Yeah part of why I posted it here was to avoid causing juniors unnecessary anxiety. It’s ultimately seniors who will need to have a plan in place to prevent this. And to be clear no senior worth their stripes wants this, because yes it would be soul sucking.
What would be the point? We’re already solving solved problems and reproducing known design patterns for someone else’s product. Money problems are solved pretty early in a developer’s career, so for most that motivation has diminishing returns. Meaningful work is harder to come by where the air gets thin, and developing people is where many of the best developers rediscover it. They won’t just give that up and spend every workday managing bots for nesting yacht riches.
Also new tools are just tools. Anyone who thinks they can replace human judgement needs to read more. Stakeholders will prioritize short-term profits because they’re free to be greedy shortsighted fools, but engineers who are any good at their jobs don’t have that luxury. They look ahead. They have a bench. Because that’s the job.
So i wouldn’t worry about this too much. If you want a takeaway from articles like this, something to give you an edge, maybe check out the new tools. Learn how to run them on basic local machines, how to train them, and understand what they can and (more importantly) can’t do. Even if it’s just to prove to yourself why they could never replace you.