"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
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@tante And if anyone does remember they will have eyes rolled at them for being olds....
@tante Gawd this is good.
@tante heh - my wife, who (encouraged by our friend who did the same switch ~5/6 years ago) decided at the end of 2021 to quit her supply chain management career and become a developer (so we both could have remote jobs ant travel) - ignored the funeral and tried, and tired and tried till 2025, when she said fuckit and became qa engineer … just in time to train the machines 🤦♂️
“Cheaper” only because the industry is currently subsidizing subscriptions to the tune of 5 to 12 times the revenue they gain from the subscriptions themselves.
And we haven’t even started to talk about the debt service these companies have undertaken
There will be a place for juniors, I believe. Jevon's Paradox
@tante we might not need any human coder, when no senior is available anymore. It was similar with other professions.
@tante oh hey I wrote this! Thanks for sharing!
@stevendotjs it's fantastic! Thanks for writing it
@tante classic #LadderPulling will implode shit.
And the then-seniors will be able to charge big time for training their replacements…
This is fantastic and unfortunately 
true.
I am Sara, tunnelling under Mordor with a USB stick. I have attempted to document the cron job and institutionalize the periodic nudge it needs to run payroll... but then I get yelled at for not videcoding enough new featureslop. There are no juniors for me to explain the cron job too.
Perhaps the AI may one dayabsorb the wiki page about the cron job. Hopefully someone else thinks to ask the AI about why payroll didn't run.
@tante Probably the most literate summary of our times I've read. Nice work. Anyone that can wield natural language like this would have been a force with formal language(s) and context-free grammars.
You might enjoy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05280v2
I certainly am.
@tante Captainpalooza 2025... lol, good story!
@tante Yup. AI didn’t kill our jobs. Greed did. The same greed that outsourced everything to china and told us there’s be so much money ”trickling down” we wouldn’t need pensions..
Just a normal day in a neoliberal fiefdom called ”a democracy”.
@tante "The doll catches fire" is a perfect description of the state of product management over the past... 5 years. Maybe longer.
April 26 Fortune magazine quoted an Nvidia VP is some sort saying that AI costs for more than human workers.
Ed Zitron reported on the economic realities of the current subscriptions offered by big tech versus the actual cost, found in token usage. The ratio of income to token costs something between five and 12, depending on the subscription charges.
And this figure doesn’t take into account the debt these companies have to service as well.
That’s some kind of productivity increase
@tante I never imagined that I would become one of the fabled mythical elder engineers just because there are no juniors following.
I will tell stories of hand written code around the campfire ...
