Those jobs aren’t coming back as-is, because AI isn’t going anywhere. Job markets change over time.
I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.
We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.
> I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.
A high-potential junior you can at least justify as an investment in the future.
The other people who are going to get squeezed are the later-career developers who are below-average in ability. (I'm not using "below average" here pejoratively - just noting that by definition, half of developers are below-average.) Outside of big tech, there are piles of organizations with devs who don't make big-tech salary and who are only marginally productive for what they're getting paid.
If you're an organization that only has the budget to pay non-junior devs $80k... you can see the implications of having the option to spend your dev budget on seniors + tokens instead.
I'm not seeing the reason why typical engineers can't vibecode. Non-coders can vibecode. I have read hundreds of posts claiming that senior engineers can vibecode but not a single one saying that juniors cannot.
I'm not saying they can't, but rather that with the time seniors then spend cleaning up their tricky bugs, architectural problems, etc. the seniors could have just done the work themselves.
It won’t work. I have nothing against taxation and funding education but the issue isn’t that type of education.
If you work in the industry in a well funded company (the ones who’d be paying these taxes), then you probably have more college-grad applicants than can hire. Probably more than you can hire from “good” schools, some with masters degrees, etc. Maybe education should be subsidized, but theres no lack of volume of people with the formal education today. Top schools (Berkeley, MIT, etc) today are reporting growing unemployment rates among their CS grads. We have more than enough students.
But that formal education isn’t the necessary skill missing. It’s understanding how to structure your work. Learning how to understand the complexity of a problem and estimate how long it’ll take. Learning how to spot future issues during code review (not just bugs and not just optimizations, but “one way doors”, future migration headaches etc). Learning architectural patterns and common prior-art. Even learning to show up on time, be polite in meetings, and navigate office politics.
There are just skills you need to see and practice to understand - you can’t teach them in a classroom. That’s why electricians have apprenticeship and doctors have residency, lawyers clerk and programmers had internships. The difference is that before AI, a young grad with an internship learned enough to answer basic bugs and learn on the job. But now that AI can fix bugs and small tasks faster than a person, the minimum skill threshold has exceeded the on-job training standards.
I’ve just started transitioning my career closer to management, so I develop/manage roughly 50/50. At this point, if I had to manage a tight budget, I’d rather have an entry level salary as tokens for a senior engineer.
We’ll need a way, as a society, to help new adults transitions from education to productive employee. But individual companies don’t have aligned incentives.