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.

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.

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.

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

by then we'll have an mfc, instead of trying to get llms to write code our prompts will compile and execute efficiently. after that inversion "programming" becomes "using language to describe some processing" it's just writing. knowing a computer language of old helps but not necessarily

> 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.

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?

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

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.