▶️ Watch on 3Speak --- Turns out Senior Devs are still needed after all. You could argue its poetic justice of a kind, and it may be the case. But, I also think its part of the reality of the Bubbl...
Transcript
I don't know if you guys remember, maybe it was more than a year ago, where the news were filled with all these layoffs that Microsoft was doing, and actually not only Microsoft, Google as well, a bunch of big companies were getting good of people. Maybe the one that made the headlines the most was probably Facebook. It was also because of the failure with meta. Let's be frank. But the idea behind... the fear that was being spread out was that AI was here and I was going to take all the jobs and that was kind of true. As a matter of fact, my older brother, he got let go from the company he was working for because the bosses of the company, and I won't say what company was, but was a big blockchain company, decided they didn't have to pay those wages anymore. Basically, a senior dev is just too expensive. Obviously it depends on where you live, but a senior dev in the US can get up there. I know a few that make more than 250 a year. And some say that's not enough. But obviously it depends on the field, depends on how long that person has been a senior dev, etc., etc. So my brother got let go of that job, and soon after that happened, he showed me a tweet that somebody from that company had made. that they were basically replacing a lot of, a lot of people with AI. So, fast forward a year. Of course, where me and him are having conversations of the future of tech, the future of programming, what's going to happen with programmers, you know, about livelihoods and whatnot. And fast, fast forward a year, and there are people, again, knocking on... on his door. He's getting offers again. He's getting emails. And of course, because he's really good at what he does. And he's obviously not the only one. This is not to say there's not an unemployment on the developer world. Obviously, there is. A lot of developers are unemployed at the moment. But the idea that AI was completely going to replace all of them, I think that idea is completely out the door. So what seems to have happened is that these companies thought they could just grab AI models, you know, Claude or Chad GPT, whatever they use, and just hire a bunch of newbies, a bunch of junior devs, and continue the show, you know, have them finish the job, have them do all the quality controls and whatnot, because now they had these amazing tools. it's not working, hasn't been working, and that is because normally, new people, let's say normally, because obviously there's got to be exceptions, don't have the expertise, the experience to design good systems. So what ends up happening is you end up happening a lot of really sloppy code, a lot of really not great ideas being integrated into very critical situations on applications. that is starting to flip the switch. Now these companies are going back to the senior developers, the ones that they thought, you know what, we don't have to pay that much anymore, and telling them, hey, I need you to come back, I need you to oversee this group of juniors that are fumbling the ball big time. So I find that to be interesting for a few reasons. For one, it's because... It's almost like karma. I don't know, I guess that is part of it. But the other one is that, just like in many things in life, experience matters, and knowledge matters, and the ability for you to be able to make good calls, make decisions, more so because in software engineering, design is so important, is a lot more important than knowing how to code. I don't know how you would break this down, maybe knowing how to code would be, oh, I know the syntax, I can write code as if I am writing an email, but knowing how to design a system is a lot more important than that. Because with these tools, you don't even have to know the language per se to understand a program, to come into a team, to be able to, you know, opine and help with... the orientation with the direction of a certain project. For example, I've never coded myself in Rust, but if I could easily use an AI tool to help me understand syntax, ask it questions why something is, you know, the way it is, and then have an opinion, maybe a good one or a bad one, irrelevant, obviously, about what is happening and what something or an app should do. Now, that being said, And I use analogies a lot of times when I tell stories when I talk about this stuff, because it's the best way I know how to communicate. One of the things I've done, and I have a channel about this, and I've done for a really long time, is I've been building guitars. I love, I'm a musician, I'm a guitar player, I'm a bass player, really, but I play guitar too. And I make guitars. And I make guitars completely by hand, the old-school way, you know, handplanes, jizzles, and all this stuff. And then some years ago, my brother, because, you know, we are very, techie-minded, got himself a CNC, and we started using CNC, and we started designing guitars on the computer, and then using the CNC to cut them out, and getting more position, getting something that could be repeated, having better planning, et cetera, et cetera. And obviously, the instruments we were making were better. But it wasn't because we were being lazy. It was because we were trying to achieve a different level of efficiency. We were trying to achieve a different level of accuracy. And I find something very analogous to what's happening with AI. Obviously, just like in the CNC, if you have the tool, you don't know how to use it, it's going to be horrible. It's going to be a disaster. You're probably going to do a terrible job. You're going to waste a lot of material. It's the same with AI. If you don't know what you're doing, if you don't take the time to understand the tech stack, if you don't take the time to understand the needs of a project, then you're going to waste a lot of problems. You're just going to, you know, make the AI burn out tokens. But again, I'm happy this is happening. It also means that, but it also means that there's going to be a different expectation when it comes to hiring and performance from now on. So the way I see it, the path forward is, there's going to be two types of developers. The ones that are either the junior ones just starting, who are possibly getting paid peanuts and possibly live in a third world country. And I don't mean that to be insulting. It's just, it's just really how it's panning out, at least from where I can see it. And then there's going to be what I'm going to call the project leaders who are going to be maybe using AI tools to do quality insurance on the code, to coordinate tasks, and oversee absolutely everything, and have a clear sense of direction of where the project needs to go and where it is. But that means that that leader, the one that is directing all these things, has to now be a 10x developer, as the means now say. It has to be able to do so much. completely see, in the very new future, if it's not already happening, the process of hiring one of these new, let's call it, AI, empower developers to be a little more crazy, you know, to where, you know, I don't know, if you ever, if you ever done, if you ever been hired, it's a whole process. You have multiple interviews, and then you have an assessment, and they ask you, hey, yeah, here's an idea, go ahead and code it. So I, I could completely see this happening like this. You apply for a company, they're interested, your CD looks nice, they think you can provide a lot of value to their company, and then they tell you, yeah, use AI tools, use whatever you gotta do, but the assessment is, and they'll give you a crazy task, that's quite likely what's gonna happen, they're gonna be like, hey, I want you to make me, I don't know, a new blockchain from scratch, proof of work, you got 48 hours, something like that. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that it's happening already. I can almost bet money, but I'm not a petty man. Anyways, that's it for this food for thought. This video is for, this video is obviously for my friends who are developers, who are using AI tools. I'm interested to know if you think I'm making a good point if my idea holds water, or if you completely disagree. Well, that's it for now. Bye.