As a (not so anymore) newly graduated computer engineer, this made me cry. Whenever I see threads like this the consolation thrown around is that someone with experience will always need to check the code and seniors didn’t used to write much code anyways. And juniors are all LLM jockeys anyways so who cares.

Well fuck me I guess, the last train to break into the industry departed 3 years ago when I thought I was learning my profession. A couple months ago I felt principled, I wanted a job where I wouldn’t be forced to vibe code. Now I’ll take anything.

At this rate even if I do manage to get hired, and even if by some muracle I’m allowed to write code there; the experience I gain from it wont be valued the same as someone who started working before LLMs became widespread. I’m a part of the slop generation now.

Makes me wonder what answer pr people want when they ask if and how I use ai. Do they want me to use them or not? If I use them, I accept that I have no place among the senior developers of tomorrow, if I don’t I’m missing on the one skill that companies looking to hire me expect me to have for the sake of something likely to be obsolete.

Maybe I shouldn’t have made being a developer a part of my identity while still in university. Is it time to let it go? Accept that I’ve spent years on something I wanted and believed would lead to a good life for it to just not pay off? That the safest most sensible fucking life choice imaginable just left me unemployable?

Maybe it’s for the best, as they say “Don’t turn your hobbies into a job”. But it breaks my heart to let go. Where would I even pivot here?

Sorry if this was rambling. This is a cry for help

I hate winner mentality. Competition is an artifact left over from our evolution and society has historically reinforced it because it resulted in better outcomes for the in group to the detriment of the whole. Eventually we’ve reached a point where people can compete against each other on unimportant things for no reason other than competing, which was also celebrated as a spectacle. Now we’re at the point where people are applying the same “competition for competition’s sake” attitude to things that do matter even to the detriment of the in group and themselves. And it is still celebrated because competition and winning has such a strong association with betterment in our culture. We will not improve as a society until we start viewing the desire to win as antisocial behavior.

Newly graduated computer engineer here. I find this whole thing extremely depressing. Rant incoming.

Look at this passage from the article:

There’s a terrific writeup from the folks at FlintAI — their team is now 5 devs and 45 agents, all living in Slack. Nine agents per developer. The agents take roles — triage, deploy, review — the human steps in for the two decisions that actually matter (code review, release approval), and they report something like a 3x productivity bump.

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’.