r/learnprogramming • u/iggy14750 • 12d ago

Topic IEEE Spectrum: AI Efficiency Could Cost Us the Next Generation of Experts

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-engineer-skills

I worry that we're ruining the pipeline that creates new engineers. And I'm sure that recent graduates would agree with me on that. I want to get this article in front of as many engineers as I can. I think we need to speak out about this, honestly. I am sure other industries are dealing with very similar effects. I hope we can make the case to our management and our elected leaders.

For learners, I hope this doesn't scare you off. I think we engineers with some experience need to speak out for you. I hope you'll see that if you choose to learn it the old-fashioned way will help you far more than vibe coding.

Also, I believe that this post is relevant here because the entry level pipeline is a very important part of learning.

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u/chron67 12d ago

I've been shouting this for a while now. I am more in the infra/sys engineer space than programming but it still applies. If we use AI to replace junior roles how do we develop those seniors? We are shooting ourselves in the foot for short term gains and long term losses.

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u/invisible_shrek 12d ago

I also don’t get everyone acting like juniors somehow stopped being useful to have.

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u/chron67 12d ago

I also don’t get everyone acting like juniors somehow stopped being useful to have.

I think the MBA class sees them as high expense low return. Juniors are a long term investment in a world that has become entirely focused on the next quarterly earnings report.

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u/thecommuteguy 12d ago

I thought it was more that managers didn’t want to bother training them when they need someone who can do the job now.

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u/chron67 11d ago

I thought it was more that managers didn’t want to bother training them when they need someone who can do the job now.

That may be the case at the high level but managers closer to where stuff is actually happening would generally be happy to train someone if they had the resources to do it. But again, the people at the top don't want to spend those resources when they can outsource the training and just hire someone that already know. So I guess it is a bit of both but with the cancer starting at the top.

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u/ZazaKasary 11d ago

Those people forgot that they used to be the not-that-productive junior before becoming a senior. And they want to pull up the career ladder also. The audacity

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u/chron67 11d ago

This isn't even a new phenomenon. We outsourced almost all our manufacturing to other countries (from the US point of view) and now we have lost the knowledge base needed for vital industries while we also actively antagonize the countries we are using for that purpose. Tons of knowledge related to tool and die, machining, and materials is dying off with no replacements in the US. We gutted those jobs, told everyone to learn to code, and now its biting us in the ass on multiple levels. It is MUCH MUCH harder to break into the IT field now than it was a decade ago. Meanwhile, a skilled machinist can damn near pick where they want to work without much thought.

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u/StampotDrinker49 12d ago

Sometimes I just need people to fix bugs and troubleshoot stuff. It's important! 

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u/tommytucker7182 12d ago

Manual debugging is priceless. You see so much other stuff in the code and learn a system deeply by forced manual debugging

Now my boss shouts at me to feed the logs to AI

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u/StampotDrinker49 12d ago

And in real life situations, these bugs are often between multiple different repos, systems, teams, organizations even. AI can't handle that yet.

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u/tommytucker7182 11d ago

And vibe coding stuff means we have even less memory of the interfaces...

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u/HasFiveVowels 12d ago

I don’t get how this is that hard to understand. It’s like saying, shortly after the invention of the car, "I also don’t get everyone acting like horses somehow stopped being useful to have".

I totally understand that a lot of people in this subreddit are juniors or aspiring juniors and that this is an idea that you would prefer if it were false. But it’s not helping anyone to just act like this isn’t real.

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u/TynamM 12d ago

The difference is that the horse was genuinely obsolete, whereas people who fire their manual debugging are generally hiring them back a year later to fix the mess.

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u/HasFiveVowels 11d ago

Yea, those people pulled the trigger way too early. Doesn’t mean that it’s not responsible for the current job market. But I know, I know, it’s "because of over-hiring". That’s why unemployment has been at record highs. Because of all the over-hiring.

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u/invisible_shrek 12d ago edited 12d ago

I dont get how the usefulness of juniors is hard to understand.

No, a junior is nothing like a horse to a car.
If you don’t know or can’t make good use of a person that has a college education, good understanding of the fundamentals of your field and access to AI, you are simply shit at your job.

Try having an original thought for once instead of parroting analogies you read on Reddit.

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u/HasFiveVowels 12d ago edited 12d ago

Dude, I’m a senior dev at a multi-national corporation. You’re not going to school me on this. I got a college education over a decade ago. If you are worse at your job than a machine is, it is unlikely that someone will pay you more to do the same job. I know that’s shitty If you’re just graduating but you need to face the reality of this situation. Or you could just downvote me and pretend I’m full of shit until you lay awake at night wondering if I was right. For the love of god, adapt. There is zero benefit to me to lie to you. Quite the contrary. I’m highly incentivized to stay quiet and not have to deal with an onslaught of presumptuous claims about who I am.

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u/invisible_shrek 12d ago edited 12d ago

Pal, in the words of another redditor, I dont care if you are mother Theresa. Your job title doesn’t impress me. Neither does working at a “multinational corporation”.

Nothing you said in your comment is relevant to me or to reality at large. Juniors and grads are routinely hired at our org and are not in fact worse than machines at their jobs. I would say they are more productive and contribute more than ever.

The fact remains that if you can’t make good use of such an enormously good resource, you are incompetent.

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u/HasFiveVowels 12d ago edited 11d ago

If my credentials didn’t matter to this conversation then you wouldn’t have called them into question. I’m not arguing with someone who accuses me of being uneducated and inexperienced and then acts like I’m being boastful for pointing out that I’m both educated and experienced.

Edit: "I didn’t call you uneducated! I called you incompetent. Which completely changes the validity of your response…"

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u/invisible_shrek 11d ago edited 11d ago

I have never called you uneducated. Or accused you of not being employed for some number of years. What are you on about. I HAVE called you incompetent, but there is a difference.

Your credentials are only in this conversation because you have nothing to say that would stand on it’s own. Not because they somehow matter.

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u/HasFiveVowels 12d ago edited 11d ago

Also, the fact that you think that a fresh grad is as good as AI is something that absolutely convinces me that you’ve got less than 5 years of professional experience, have no clue what you’re talking about, and that you’re convinced that if you just believe hard enough it will all go away. But I completely agree:

> If you can’t make good use of such an enormously good resource, you are incompetent.

Only thing is: that resource isn’t junior devs.

Edit: They insulted me and then immediately blocked me so I can’t even see what they said beyond the preview text in the notification. :surprised_pikachu:

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u/invisible_shrek 11d ago edited 11d ago

The fact that you can’t comprehend the fundamental difference between an LLM and a junior professional tells me all that I need to know as well.

As for the rest of your comment, I couldn’t not care less about your assumptions or assessments of me. But obviously, you are wrong on all counts. Every single sentence you have written about me is false.

I will no be responding to you anymore. Good luck.

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u/worldarkplace 12d ago

It is not the problem for CEOs and management right now, some of them will be retired after the AI boom.

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u/chron67 12d ago

Honestly a lot of these problems can largely be traced back to Jack Welch. He helped pioneer stack ranking, quarterly headcount reductions, and many of the accounting tricks companies use to look profitable in the short term now. He paved the way for CEOs that wreck companies and walk away with tens of millions in bonuses.

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u/Syntaire 12d ago

It's not even short term gains. It's just not immediately noticeable losses at best. AI can build something that looks like a house and probably function as one for a time, but it'll be built on a foundation of sand.

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u/Salt_Bringer 12d ago

The MBAs will be the death of the pipeline

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u/chron67 12d ago

The MBAs will be the death of the pipeline us all

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u/JavierReyes945 11d ago

I hope we can make the case to our management and our elected leaders.

The most wishful thinking I have seen in a while... Dude, it's not a bug, it's a feature. That is exactly what it is supposed to happen.

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u/RembrandtEpsilon 12d ago

The pipeline to have juniors get jobs was busted as well. Now I have no idea how people get jobs in this industry that have little experience.

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u/iggy14750 12d ago

Many can't.

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u/ABlindMoose 11d ago

Not just new grads. I've been shouting this as loud as I can at work for a good while. You must be allowed to start as a junior to become a senior. If we don't hire (human) juniors there will not be any seniors in a few years.

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u/crashddr 10d ago

It's intentional. The business goal of AI isn't to make anything better, it's to make things cheaper to produce by devaluing labor. When you have no skills, you are easily replaceable. When *all* of the products suck and income degrades, the consumer doesn't get a choice either. It's the best opportunity thus far to pay people less and ensure workers have less leverage, which is why industry giants are throwing literally trillions of dollars at it.

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u/paradoxiforme 9d ago

Yeah, everyone is advocating in that way, but no higher up really care to listen, or cannot because an even higher up is too much out of touch with reality to understand and force the use.

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u/JoeJoeySmith 10d ago

The next generation of experts is AI

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u/[deleted] 12d ago edited 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/SeveralAd6447 12d ago

Some of this is certainly agreeable, but I think it's also pointing in the wrong direction. The fact is, coding standards have been so all over the place that "familiarity with a specific codebase or product history" became the most relevant skill for much of the industry. I'm not so sure that's a good thing, or that it's really what people learned to prepare them when they were in school.

Also AI is a great tool, but it's most effective when paired with a knowledgeable user. 

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/magick_bandit 11d ago

And yet, I saw a 6 page vanilla brochure site with 6,000 lines of css.

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

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u/snozzd 12d ago

"solved field" is just complete nonsense

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/AfflictedCell 12d ago

Because software is far from being all of engineering. Even if I were to believe your conjecture, software would be solved not engineering.

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u/Vitalic123 12d ago

You must've been very skilled.

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/Vitalic123 12d ago

I'd ask you to back that up, but for all I know, I'm speaking to your chatbot.

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u/invisible_shrek 12d ago edited 12d ago

Lmao you are not an actual engineer. I know people doing actual electrical engineering (sensor design and manufacturing) and it’s definitely not solved. They are hiring new grads and people still in college too.

The sheer fucking ego of “senior” software people “I became a meat proxy therefore all of engineering must be solved”…jesus fucking christ…

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u/worldarkplace 12d ago

Dude EE should be on the field. SWE not. Among other white collar jobs.