Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Not really a sneer, just wondering what to make of it, if it doesnāt belong here please remove.
The Financial Times goes with a study which ostensibly demonstrates that ca. half a million of potential coding jobs were directly eliminated by AI, not any other factors or general industry slowdown. The idea is itās mainly junior positions which arenāt tightly ābundledā with other domains or just years of programming experience & intuition which are harder for AI to replace. So is AI really fully replacing juniors in the hundreds of thousands, or is there more going on?
One idea Iāve read about (heavily developed by Ed Zitron, but also a few other news sources and commentators have put it forward) is that SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses were heavily over invested in expectation of basically infinite growth over the past decade. SaaS growth was āexponentialā in its early days, but then various needs of the market were basically saturated, so SaaS companies squeezed more growth out cutting cuts or upping how much they charged, and now it is finally catching up to them.
The AI hype means almost everyone tries to interpret everything the lines of AI causing it. The recent price correction in many SaaS companies was (mis)interpreted as the threat of vibe-coded replacements forcing them to cut costs. The SaaS companies trying to cut costs and going through layoffs is being misinterpreted as AI successfully replacing junior devs.
And seniors obviously grow on senior trees (assuming that this take is actually true)
that looks like a heaping pile of correlation, without mentioning the general downturn
Big āDonāt mention the warā energy
There is no cost-cutting in Ba Sing Se
So I donāt have time to read the full paper and I probably donāt have the background to make an informed critique of the methodology once I do (not that thatās gonna stop me). But I feel like the challenge here is in mapping the distinction between junior and senior coding roles. To what extent do the senior coders get treated like a distinct job as opposed to being junior-but-seasoned?
Based on a quick amateur read of the abstract it looks like theyāre assuming the first option, that junior and senior developers are separate roles that can be largely disentangled. But if the other option is true, then in the event of a general industry downturn (say, after over hiring during recent periods of unsustainable growth) then it might make sense to look at the cuts to junior roles as simply removing the less efficient and effective people from the development role, rather than specifically cutting the juniors because theyāre uniquely exposed to AI replacement.
I donāt know which model is more accurate to how the industry treats these roles or whether it varies by organization or what, but thatās what seems like the most likely alternate explanation for the observed shift towards a very senior-heavy workforce.