I assume so. Obviously there are very different concerns if you're managing an organization with countless moving parts versus you want to build something for the user quickly.

1) The game is not ending, it's changing. AI can sling a lot of code but we still need engineers that actually understand what the hell is going on. That's always been the bottleneck. It could eliminate junior positions, but seniors are fine for now.

2) It's been a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm naturally a contrarian, but you are hired to do what management wants you to do. If you resist, your best bet is to hope they don't notice or care, but it's not going to change much.

If you eliminate juniors over the next few years, there will be no seniors for the future when the current seniors retire.

The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.

No, it's a "tragedy of the commons" problem, for lack of a less dramatic phrase.

If you ran a software company, would you want to train juniors who are slower than AI and much more expensive? Who would just jump ship in two years?

It wouldn't make sense to. "Someone" should do it: someone other than you.

I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?

Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they're familiar with but not think out of the box.

Hiring a mediocre senior is much worse than hiring a grad because they will never get any better, and it's very hard to know at hiring time that they're mediocre.

I 100% agree.

I’ve only had 1-2 juniors who “didn’t get any better” compared to the scores of senior engineers I wouldn’t trust to anything on their own.

Most juniors with investment from the organization and senior engineers will become competent quickly. That will eventually free up seniors.

People used to stay at companies longer than a couple years

Please go ahead and train juniors on your free time. Put your resources where your mouth is.

Yep, I'm a fan of the current crop of AI tools because they are incredibly useful to me, but I have deep concerns about the pipeline problem.

They're making the bet that seniors won't be needed by then. I think it's a bad bet, but it makes sense to follow through if 40% of the economy is already being occupied by this tech.

Then pay will go up again for those mid-level developers who still remain, and companies will again overhire and overtrain like we saw during COVID years. “We won’t have any seniors in ten years!!1!” is a handwringy problem that self solves by the free market.

Not to defend the bill, but if I read the article right it only applies to websites subject to the state's age verification laws.

So you're saying it's an Edge case?

Fwiw you can prompt it to respond differently to you.

It's always a matter of finding the happy medium. Don't be completely drab, don't be goofy, be balanced.

> The main pattern I follow is to break the pattern and make a joke, be sarcastic respectfully or give a compliment

I'm having to learn this about online dating too. My online dates traditionally don't go anywhere because typically they've been about just exchanging information, which is frankly boring to both parties.

You have to (gently) riff and tease a bit or it's not going to go anywhere. If you're talking about your jobs, nothing is going to happen. Establishing that rapport is everything.

> If you're talking about your jobs, nothing is going to happen.

That reminds me of when I first moved out of California and away from the tech scene after being immersed in it for some 10-odd years. People just don't talk about their jobs! They'd much rather talk about their interests, hobbies, friends and family, ... literally anything else. Their job is just not an important part of their identity. Was quite the change in perspective and honestly and took some getting used to.

Depends what your job is.

It's ok to sort of passively want things, everyone does, but the real problem is when you try to try to subtly force an outcome that isn't natural. That's when people get uncomfortable.

If a stranger is light and friendly and asks to hang out, no problem. If they start getting subtly frustrated about your response, your spider sense goes off.

It's unfortunate that we treat all books like that as suspect. The goal isn't to manipulate people, but to connect with them! Give them what they want for a more mutually beneficial end result.

People are forgetting how to socialize but being social is more or less a straightforward formula. Sometimes people need a guide. It's not evil or manipulative.

Complimenting people was my college party trick. I'd be a little inebriated and I'd just compliment people/say friendly vibey things. "That's a cool hat" or "that song is awesome" or "where did you get that??"

Your comment reminds me of advice I once got as a young person: small talk is an invitation to talk, and if you don't get traction with small talk, you're not ever going to get deep talk. So, hopefully the friendly vibe was a good start to build on!