From what I see, the current is beginning to turn a little toward valuing senior devs more than ever, because they can deal with the downsides of AI. Junior devs, on the other hand, cannot, and their simpler coding work is also more easily replaced by AI. So we’ll see fewer junior dev jobs, but seniors might do fine. I’m not sure that’s good news for the profession as a whole, but its been an extremely long gold rush into software and online services so some correction probably won’t be the end of the trade.
Oh and yes senior devs are still hounded to use AI, because it will get them further, faster. And there are no more junior devs to help. In the hands of a skilled dev, AI tools can be powerful, and they can spare some toil, and help them find their feet in less familiar frameworks and in foreign codebases.
We are pushing our product managers to communicate their requirements with live prototypes rather than PRDs and mockups. It forces them to actually think their ideas through, and even allows them to get some hallway feedback before even bothering an eng. This might help with #5. But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses. If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
When I think about what limited my performance in the last year it was mostly:
Having to get 5 signatures before I am allowed the budget to install some FOSS software on my work PC that the corporation has already approved for use on work PCs
Spending 8 months working on a huge feature that was scrapped after 8 months of development
Being told that no, we cannot work on another large feature request (of which there are many in the pipeline) because our team said we can only fit that scrapped feature into this year and we are not allowed to replan based on the fact that the feature we were supposed to work on got scrapped by business
And then they tell us to return to office and use AI for increasing efficiency.
It’s all an elaborate play performed by upper management to feign being in control and being busy with something. Nobody is actually interested in producing a product, they all just want to further their own position.
From what I see, the current is beginning to turn a little toward valuing senior devs more than ever, because they can deal with the downsides of AI. Junior devs, on the other hand, cannot, and their simpler coding work is also more easily replaced by AI. So we’ll see fewer junior dev jobs, but seniors might do fine. I’m not sure that’s good news for the profession as a whole, but its been an extremely long gold rush into software and online services so some correction probably won’t be the end of the trade.
Oh and yes senior devs are still hounded to use AI, because it will get them further, faster. And there are no more junior devs to help. In the hands of a skilled dev, AI tools can be powerful, and they can spare some toil, and help them find their feet in less familiar frameworks and in foreign codebases.
The problems in software still remain the same though:
(1) Bureaucracy
(2) Needless process
(3) Pointy headed managers
(4) Siloed teams
(5) Product people who have no idea what they want to build
(6) Shitty, poorly performing legacy code nobody wants to touch
Honestly, AI is just the latest thing that can boost your productivity at starting up some random app. But that was never the difficult part anyway.
We are pushing our product managers to communicate their requirements with live prototypes rather than PRDs and mockups. It forces them to actually think their ideas through, and even allows them to get some hallway feedback before even bothering an eng. This might help with #5. But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses. If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
This, so much this.
When I think about what limited my performance in the last year it was mostly:
And then they tell us to return to office and use AI for increasing efficiency.
It’s all an elaborate play performed by upper management to feign being in control and being busy with something. Nobody is actually interested in producing a product, they all just want to further their own position.
The problem is the N+2 is in on it too. And so on. “It just works!”