Are Junior Developers Screwed?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ก.ย. 2024
- $1000 OFF your Springboard Software Engineering boot camp with my code ALIFEENGINEERED. See if you qualify for the JOB GUARANTEE! 👉 www.springboar...
💥 Continue the conversation on my Discord server with like-minded viewers. The advice section is *chef's kiss* - / discord
📈Transform your tech career with my free weekly newsletter - alifeengineere...
🙏 My TH-cam content will always be free of charge but if you'd like to support the channel, I'd be honored if you supported me on Patreon - / alifeengineered
BOOKS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
So Good They Can't Ignore You - geni.us/SoGood This book transformed my life when I read it for the first time nearly 10 years ago. It still guides the way I think about self-development today.
Deep Work - geni.us/ALE-De... The most important currency you have is your undivided attention. This book shows you exactly how to spend this currency in a manner that will lead to head-turning accomplishment.
SYSTEM DESIGN
Designing Data-Intensive Applications geni.us/DataIn...
Currently the best reference for contemporary for system design.
System Design Interview (Volume 2) geni.us/System... and geni.us/System... - For interviews, the best references are System Design Interview and System Design Interview Volume 2 by Alex Xu.
$1000 OFF your Springboard Software Engineering boot camp with my code ALIFEENGINEERED. See if you qualify for the JOB GUARANTEE! 👉 www.springboard.com/landing/influencer/alifeengineered/?
💥 Continue the conversation on my Discord server with like-minded viewers. The advice section is **chef's kiss** - discord.gg/HFVMbQgRJJ
📈Transform your tech career with my free weekly newsletter - alifeengineered.substack.com/
🙏 My TH-cam content will always be free of charge but if you'd like to support the channel, I'd be honored if you supported me on Patreon - www.patreon.com/ALifeEngineered
That is a MASSIVE point that companies don't understand. NO ONE ever starts as a senior engineer. They are made. They are the juniors and entry level that become senior engineers in the company. But that won't happen if these entry level and juniors aren't hired. It's going to hurt all companies a lot in the long run.
No, companies totally understand that no one starts as a senior engineer, yet they don't care. They don't want to bother dealing with juniors while they can employ seniors
@@bugra320Pretty much how I see it. Why care about a long term problem when your only incentive right now is to make this quarter better than the last. Sounds like a problem for the next CEO.
It doesn't matter to them. This is how you get people entering unpaid internships or paying out of pocket to be self-taught. Or they end up like the cybersecurity industry, massively failing and understaffed/overworked. They still don't care because the C-suite making the decisions get all the money with none of the work.
LLMs are just libraries 2.0 -- we had the same threats of libraries replacing all developer jobs then too and job growth exploded. LLMs are not the reason for junior dev positions drying up, access to cheap capital is since interest rates are so high.
I think you meant to say that access to capital goes down when interest rates go up
finally someome with a working brain, cheers to you dude, you are awesome!
If you are in it for the long game, you are fine.
my bills aren't in it for the long game
@@supermarkethobo9567Right? I need money. I need to move. I don’t have the luxury of just waiting this out
im suggle to live until that
COPE
In what? Unemployment?
Software developers are problem solvers that bring technology into existence.
AI simply can't learn on its own.
The only way the industry won't rebound is if you don't think that new technology will exist in the future.
Junior developers are the people that will take us there.
If you're looking to break into the industry, keep your sails up.
It's just a matter of time when the wind picks up,
and you can be there to catch it.
Thanks man!
As someone who just made a switch from civil engineering to software engineering and made it to Amazon, I 100% agree with what Steve said. The market changes and nobody can predict it, but if it's something you are passionate about, just go for it, don't think just do.
Passion ain’t gonna cut it.
Hi mate. I am civil engineering background wanting to make a shift to software. How did you do it
@@haha7571 Pessimism isn't going to either...
I'm also a former civil engineer looking to possibly switch into software, would you recommend it and why?
Why did you switch?
I loved the “If my grandma had wheels she would have been a bike” joke reference
caught that instantly 😭
Finally a voice of reason. Remember that the market won’t get better for a while, like he said now is a good time to go back to school or start a business. As long as you are advancing your knowledge and capabilities, you will come out the other side on top.
Hey Steve, around 5 months ago I managed to break out from a mid-level dev job cycle to a senior role because of one of your other videos. Thank you for your guidance.
it's nice to stay positive until you found out all the jobs that went to India are never coming back
Title should be "Are Junior Developers Cooked?"
🤷♀I don't see myself having any other career so I'll just work for free until I find paid work. At least I'll get experience.
I’m an engineering manager and web development instructor. I agree with everything Steve (Steeeeve) says in this video. Including that now is the time to train new skills. Including how to work in tandem with AI.
Being a software engineer is great at this moment! Every six months, some company in California releases a groundbreaking product that possibly kills my career. That is a wonderful experience which never happens in any other area of expertise.
I'm this close to just changing careers to professional baker ... (and hobbyist gamedev)
I've seen companies realize that they cut more people than they should have, and then hire developers living abroad to reduce costs. So instead of rehiring one senior developer in the US, they hire three junior or intermediate developers abroad. I have seen it in a few companies now. Is that an industry trend we should be worried about?
My understanding as somebody who has worked in the hiring process in tech (as a technical interviewer, it's not my main responsibility) is that right now, companies want to have a bulk of senior/staff talent that can lead directives for offshore consultants/engineers.
This will fail in the long term. Staff engineers and managers will not want to be managing calls at 7 am and 10 pm in addition to their daily tasks, especially if they're also already working directly with on-shore customers durin those regular business hours. They WILL leave for a company that doesn't do that and has a normal 9-5 schedule only. There will be a massive drain of talent in companies that do this practice (which is most of big tech and F500 right now). I've seen it already happening massively at my own company where people will leave for startups that don't have offshore components yet. Not even for the pay or potential of the startup. It's insane, but people are leaving higher salaries for WLB and are finding it in startups of all places. This is backwards from what has typically been a funnel to FAANG for salary AND WLB.
Even if a startup has a short runway of only 1-2 years, engineers are job hopping in that time usually anyway, and they're banking on the fact that the market will stabilize and they can return back to big tech in 2 years when that happens.
@@TheLeaf1 thanks for the insight. I agree it wouldn't be sustainable long term
What do You think about hiring in LATAM, is the same time zone in most cases and the Engineering Quality matches North America
It happened and is happening in public accounting.
I worked for a company who did this. They are completely failing. the general opinion of using their services as opposed to others in the same industry, is that most people would rather not use it. Imagine using a service as a customer with a 10% chance of not getting a refund if things go bad, then also having a shit offshored team that doesn't even care about product quality and customer retention. They have gone through multiple layoffs and dwindling customer retention over the last few years. If they could hire domestic devs and customer service reps again, they probably would but they have tanked themselves into the ground I dont think they have the means to do that anymore. They're stuck with offshore workers who dont give a shit about their products or services, remote devs who sleep on the job and a dwindling barely surviving customer base.
As people says on Intel: "Thanks Steve! Back to you Steve!"
Dude, Junior developers are in a tough, tough place. I feel bad for them.
The only silver lining is that at least software development lacks standards and formality when it comes to credentials.
Meaning that a junior can self teach until they are good enough and don’t need a university degree to prove their worth.
Conversely, a comp sci major doesn’t necessarily make one a good programmer.
Only coding experience makes you a good programmer.
So at least a junior can grind to be good enough to be hireable.
That is really the only silver lining.
Thats actually a massive negative.... bc those standards are typically enshrined in law, so even if AI existed in a way that COULD replace humans, it would take legal changes to do so. This would bring negative attention to it (job losses) and politicians would be hesitant to sign off. Example would be truckers.
The threat is not LLM but outsourcing. Big techs are hiring more and more from Europe and India where engineers are much cheaper.
This video is trash if it doesn't mention it. Offshoring is EVERYTHING, AI is NOTHING at the moment.
This has been a thing since the early 2000’s and yet just two years ago companies couldn’t hire enough people stateside.
@@nathanaelhart8487 as you said this was 2/3 years ago
I needed this, I am going to study computer science next year. I really value your perspective as a principal engineer and I would not value any other perspective!
I keep getting more and more disappointed hearing this sentiment that "In the old days, anybody could get hired with a 300K salary" or something like that, like people are over-romanticizing the past into oblivion. There is no hope for people if you can't get over the past.
Yes, there was a lot more jobs some time ago. But so was the competition. Realize this, people.
don't do whataboutism
the argument wasn't 'in the old days, anybody could get hired with a 300k salary'
people is saying 'in the old days, anybody could get hired, even at the age of 35, as junior programmer'
reason?
people at corporate, at management, isn't yet driven by projected profit and the crunch of the economy the politician driven the country to, and nobody is spiking their butt with 'profits profits profits' for 'the money they invested, without the work put in themselves. example? chatgpt is one of the tools, used to create future factory workers, with little salary, huge workload.
Solved 544 leetcode questions (328 medium + 178 easy + 38 hard) and still stuck in a customer service role where I'm not allowed to touch the code. Either this market is terrible or employers are extremely delusional.
what are your projects
did u really solve it or u just copy and pasted. Bceause i can tell u for sure, this is not possible.
its both
@@brendanbuchanan3543 projects dont mean shit to employers bro, hate to tell ya
@@KaiLunTan-i4q I literally solved most of them without looking at the solution and the ones I did, I redid like 10 times. Employers are just shallow and delusional.
Short answer yes, long answer, yes
software engineering is the only profession where someone at an interview is simultaneously expected to be an encyclopedia and supercomputer at the same time.
I appreciate your videos and channel Steve. Best wishes to you from Minnesota.
Guess what will solve business problems? humans.
Until we invent what we can call AGI, we're going to need software engineers.
And when we create the AGI, then you can find peace in the knowledge that it's not just software engineers that are going to be replaced. Everyone, every job will be replaced.
Engineers are the ones to take requirements and figure out ALL the tiny little details. So IMO engineers will be last replaced.
That said, junior engs who can only do their job when given PERFECT requirements will be easily replaced by AI.
@@hellowill Yeah, it means problem solving skills are going to be more emphasized as AI tools replacing writing simple code sequences.
Also, I believe deep CS fundamentals and domain knowledge will become more important. And only way to acquire domain knowledge quickly is to have good basic understanding in science and engineering.
We still need software engineers to maintain and build AGI features lol
Doesn’t matter, if you need 50% less engineers, that’s a lot of people out of work without AGI anywhere in sight.
This was inevitable. Do yall remember when Obama stood in front of the entire United States, and proclaimed that EVERYONE needed to learn to code? For the last 10-12 years we've been flooding the market with developers and so it follows any supply / demand curve... Employers have lots of options now, and they don't need to hire the junior javascript developer who has a degree in basket weaving that they got online.
people often neglect the fact that the FED interest rate is the KEY SINGLE cause for many `results` we are seeing nowadays.
This
this
tech industry entirely relies on fed cuts. or atleast the growth of this industry def depends on it. despite my love for this field I'll just prep for med school
I think they're on the verge of cutting rates now. They got spooked by the recent unemployment data.
No, stop raising peoples hopes and encouraging them to enter this field
AI and global trend of everyone learning to code means this field is no longer what it was for developers
Companies will replace many developers with AI tools, and offshore development to cheaper countries
The explosion of CS grads in Western countries mean that there are no longer enough jobs for the amount of people qualified for it
If people are just going into this for money, they should look elsewhere
Healthcare seems promising.....there is such a demand for nursing and doctors, it's crazy
A lot of companies have gone the "AI" route (Actually Indians). Been seeing a decent amount of offshoring pickup
You always have a top-notch analogy! Great content
The guy is delusional. If anyone gets replaced, tech will be the first, and might be one of the rare industries affected for a loooong time.
He is ignoring the fact most industries have heavy gatekeeping and regulations that will protect them. AI might be great at diagnosing from MRI and x-Ray, but radiologists will have jobs due to regulation no matter how good AI is.
Some hope! Thanks man
This was a very levelheaded, reasonable answer to what is happening now. None of the gloom and doom that I hear from most creators. 👍
Great video bro!!
Great video.
Not to mention, no company is going to say, "well, AI can now do devs jobs for 20% of the price and time, so we're firing all the devs!". That's just not going to happen. Instead companies are going to go, "cool, we can build 5 times more products for the same price as we are right now, let's get to work and dominate!". That's it, companies will just make even more products and services than they already have.
keep selling the delusion boys.
'we can build 5 times more products' -> more workload, same guy
'for the same price as we are right now' -> more workload, same pay
all in all, the message was, be prepared to be slave. your life, family, time? no. more productivity for investor get more bonuses.
WOW.
Wow, this is incredibly naive
Developers cost A LOT (at least in US). If companies can get rid of a couple, they will have saved millions
AI is at the point where it can replace a team of junior developers, imagine where it will be 5 years from now lol
And also, it's not just AI....there are many cheaper countries producing highly skilled developers at an astounding rate. India is one of them, but also South American countries are another
Signing up today!
Plot twist: The whole video was an ad
News is breaking today that Amazon is requiring employees to work in the office five days a week. Can you do a video about this? Do you think it's because the company thinks they will be more productive, or is it about control?
I wonder if OpenAI uses their AI to build and run their Web App.
I dont think so
😄😄😄😄
Feel like I’m dealing with this right now. I’m an engineer 1. Boss wants to move me up but no promotions available. I have the experience so I’m searching around. We’ll see how it goes
We are cooked, tell all your classmates too.
How does the OpenAI O1 model change your narrative? It does have significantly more reasoning capabilities.
But it seems it's not from fundamental innovation. It's rather from using LLMs to mull over with continous promp cycles. It's more of optimization than innovation.
did you actually evaluate and validated the new capabilities?
yeah surely it is! it just cost >$50 billion of compute and uses 100k tokens for chain of prompt reflection inference. surely, this can scale infinitely and we won't hit an asymptote! we can hit grokking, we just need to you to give us all your data and compute!
It’s not an upgrade though, it’s the same fundamental technology just re-prompting itself. Yes it works better but it’s not a scalable upgrade.
This will age real bad real fast.
I thought the same thing
He gives terrible or generic advice at best. He’s not an expert in his field. He got really lucky to get into Amazon when it was easier to get in and ended up staying somewhere long enough where they gave him eventual promotion.
Who’s here as a Jr SWE?!!
if you think jnr devs are screwed you have a small outlook. as soon as credit becomes cheap again, the floodgates will open.. the roles wont look like it did b4, but if your a junior now then when that happens you will be well positioned
Not true, you don't seem to realize the number of roles that were offshored, and that are being offshored right now.
3:33 Amazon, Andy Jassy , announced that their internal AI tool, Amazon Q, is saving them $260 million annually and reclaiming 4,500 developer-years.
He lied to prop up the stock. Amazon AI is trash and that's why they don't have their own foundation model. They were caught off guard and that's why Adam Selipsky got the boot because he couldn't come up with a plan to catch up.
@@gameon551 wait you mean big corporations lie and manipulate the consumers? No, that can't be true! But AGI will be here soon right? just look at openAI o1 model, it can reason better than most cs engineers! it just took $50 billion dollars of compute and surely it can scale and we won't hit an asymptote right?
To be fair this says more about developer estimations. I have seen many cases where developers collectively estimate a project will take 6 months, when in my mind I am thinking it could easily be done in 1/4 the time if not less.
However because we want good WLB it is sort of a gentlemen's agreement to not negotiate less time.
@@aja23136 Developers may add project buffer to their estimated completion dates to ensure that if something goes wrong, the project can still be completed before the estimated end time.
Amazon also claimed to have AI tracking purchases in their grab and go stores that ended up being literal Indians watching cameras.
Seems like one of the biggest things Amazon has been developing in recent years is lies about AI.
He should have said, "My name is Steve, also known as the voice of reason"
great video
Yeah AI will assist us, just like IDEs and compilers.
So we can focus on even higher level. IMO that means junior devs are kinda fked if they don't figure out the higher level things like problem solving and system design.
No, that’s not accurate. There’s a wealth of community resources available to help juniors land jobs. This TH-camr is only sharing his personal experience, which may not reflect yours. While feedback can be helpful, don’t rely solely on TH-camrs to tell you what’s hard. Nothing is truly hard-it’s about how much time and effort you put into solving problems, rather than telling yourself that everything is difficult. There are countless resources out there to help you, with coding communities being some of the best for providing support. Don’t let someone else’s opinion discourage you-focus on solving the challenges in your own way.
AI is not going to replace you; it’s just a tool to help. AI won’t get paid, but you will.
Was this video recorded before the release of OpenAI's new 5o 'complex reasoning' model? Because that represents a colossal acceleration of the timeline to developers losing their jobs to AI, not a slowdown
Irrelevant.
"complex reasoning model" 🤣 Bro it just prompts itself nothing new
Don't worry you will lose your job mate, but not to AI ... to offshoring.
Video is actually very good, but I have to ask you: Do you really think it is easier to get a job as QA, SDET, TPM, Project Manager and Program Manager, than Junior Developer? ( 10:17 in video)
Dude did you consider o1 in this video?
Wife will be a car if she had four wheels…. Verstappen mentioned 😂
Just get a blue collar skill & certificate as a backup, while still pursuing tech (my idea)
Sr's (SDE3+) exist but there will be a demographics issue due to the size of the SDE2 cohort, as I have pointed out in my own videos on this topic. Not everybody who is a SDE2 is qualified to be a SDE2. Many of them should be SD1 or less. Most of them will never qualify to be an SDE3. I see so many Jr's that want to be more, but are not willing to put in the work, and that saddens me for our industry.
8:18 Bezos reference? 😊
"nice round number of 64 people".
I see what you did there
Everybody saw that.
@@zhaltys lol
Yes, juniors are fucked and things will only ever get worse. There is no more hope.
"everybody will be out of a job" -- except plumbers.
So Steve is incentivized to tell you this but let’s examine the facts:
1. AI is currently showing signs of reasoning especially with open AI’1 o-1 model. There’s some very smart people trying to solve all the current shortcomings of AI, and he falsely claims that we don’t know when the next breakthrough will be, but breakthroughs are happening every other half of a year. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. The industry has fundamentally changed forever. And while it’s not quite the end of Junior devs, the demand is never going to grow as fast as it used to. That I can say for sure.
No point to be a SWE now if you’re not going to be among the best
yeah i regret taking computer science
Would data engineering be considered an adjacent role?
I want to be a carpenter 😆
This man takes any wack ass sponsor lol
Nobody knows what will happen.
Most of the 1000s of applications are just AI applications. Its like 50 indian people applying automatically to every job in existence.
AI is now better than Junior devs 😂
The biggest issue is the software engineer mentality where many people teach them to quit their job as soon as they can to get a pay bump. Companies are not willing to hire Jr. Developers because they spend a bunch of money training them, then when they finally know what they're doing, they quit to find a higher paying job.
took you long to mention it
it's the opposite. Juniors benefit the most from current generation AI. it gives them a repertoire of skills where otherwise they'd have none. Seniors are the ones that are seeing their skills matched or exceeded by laymen at a fraction of the effort.
I disagree. Both seniors and juniors benefit from the AI, so the people who are seniors currently are the ones who's reaping the benefits, since they have freedom of choice, meanwhile juniors have no choice at all, hardly even any chance, when you need to complete 4-6 months course on things and be the best out of the people in the course to even get a job interview in which you will eventually get rejected to a lack experience. How can I get experience if I cannot get experience? I'm pretty sure that my skills are decent enough to land a job to me, but most of the HR's dont want to employ people with no job experience, even if you had many internships, bootcamps and an university degree for that.
@@user-ux9lz2cc1v you're describing a phenomenon of the US IT market that long predates AI
I'm starting to notice this trend. These LLMs are able to make everyone seniors where the human will just be overseeing the process while the AI does the grunt work.
I agree, years of coding experience matter less and less. Anyone with the right framework in mind can and will figure out a way to do something without getting stuck for ages.
This is backwards. The seniors are who benefit from AI - the junior is no longer needed. LEADERSHIP are what juniors don’t have and it will show.
1 senior with LLM can eliminate the need for a junior in a company. Win win situation for the two. Losing situation for the junior.
I have sooo much work I wish I could sell off to junior devs but they gotta learn the ai architect stuff I need to hand off, that's why I am making these little courses cuz the stuff I am doing is for smaller businesses, not chasing the big tech dreams. Great video, btw, and to see AI replacing devs- did it myself at my own business as did other people working closer to the internet...just sayin...I can't believe people are still building AI that hallucinates, it's an easy fix to avoid that... kinda wild this is a top developer at big companies but not surprising...just sayin, definitely not experiencing that at all
St-Yves is almost Yves 👌😂 (only makes sense in Swiss german, sorry)
Unemploy grad seeing the title 😢🤬😢
nerd
Self taught 😂
yes. Nothing wrong with being a plumber. One of the last jobs to go.
LLMs really fancy auto-complete.... Hello OpenAI o1! Steve, what do you think?
This guy quit amazon to make content so do you really think he is going to tell you the truth about the end of coding?
The reality is ai is going to end most swe jobs.
This guy has missed the point entirely. LLMs in 5 years is going to end the careers of most software engineers.
My company have already stopped recruiting junior swes because they are no longer needed.
It's over.
poorly timed video, with o1 dropping
LLMs are a lot more than a autocomplete
Americans are still so detached from reality i see :D , still living in the virtual world rather than solving real life problems like poverty
Why would you predict the future based on current and short-term limitations rather than trends like the exponential rate of improvement? Why even post this AFTER the release of o1? You did little to no research about what's coming.
o1 is nothing
Read carefully the paper that OpenAi shared on o1, how it was was trained and what they used to measured performance. It was trained for 3 specific tasks: Code competitions, math competitions and PhD science questions.
These are all well defined, scoped and understood problem spaces with a very limited set of valid answers. None of these tasks can replace software development. Will there be another great leap in performance in the near future? Maybe, but it’s more likely that it will be another tool for competent software developers and not a replacement.
The hardest job in the world has now become the easiest job in the world. Software engineers will soon be as irrelevant as the title of desktop support.
4:20 strawman
oh please
Yea bro. From the get go that cost of cloud nonsense is outrageous. No profits for a long time. On prem LLMs are the only way to pierce the vale…
If Uncle Steve can be self-taught and make it to Principal at Amazon,
I now have the motivation I need to do anything.
Wow.