I keep seeing this argument for a bunch of different industries. Nobody appears to have an answer for where all these more senior people are going to come from when we're replacing the juniors with an LLM.

People don't magically become senior engineers, they need to get experience of the basics. Traditionally that's done by being hired as a junior engineer and doing a few years of fairly dull work under the supervision of the more senior engineers, who gradually prod you into doing things well.

Bootcamps have been somewhat filling the ever increasing void for junior positions to some extent (in the process making the barrier to entry into the industry higher for people who can't afford to literally pay for the junior roles that used to pay them), but there's still a chasm between someone fresh out of a bootcamp program and a developer who you can let loose on a project unsupervised.

Agreed. The only thing to come true in the last decade about the death of software engineering from no/low-code systems is that there were more software jobs created to build no/low-code systems.

Also see "death of the sys admin by way of AWS and the like"

I remember when AWS was going to kill sysadmins. Instead it changed what the career meant really. Systems Administration work seems like it’s in a constant state of change anyways. Honestly that whole transformation from datacenter operator to what it is now (all the things!) is such an interesting parallel to what is happening now with general software engineering.

From your observation it seems the parallel to sysadmin -> multi faceted devops is software eng -> something close to "true full stack software and product implementation + possibly design" work. Wild.

I can kind of see that with contractors on the lower end fairly soon. If I put the same amount of effort into telling a programming specific GPT that understands requirements properly as I do with some contractors I don’t think that is a long way away from today.

For juniors - I want them to become eventually independent so I don’t have to worry about them and their tasks (and can give them vaguer tasks) so it’s a different goal.

> get good with AI coding tools can be performing at senior levels

No. They are orthogonal modes of thinking. That said, getting good at prompting LLM is already making people better communicators. That will be a big benefit to seniors as they can use their prompting skills to direct junior staff more efficiently. But better at thinking about the trade offs that senior devs need to think about, nope.

Respectfully, being able to explore different code paths quickly with the help of LLMs to generate scaffolding has done exactly that for me.

If I had a need I might but need is a relative thing. I didn’t need LLM last year. I want to need less not more.