u/michaelnovati replied ·
Maybe look at how OpenAI hires engineers themselves.
They've hired 3 employees away from my company now and all three had 15 years of industry experience and no AI experience.
Building a really good product hasn't been automated yet. Debugging super complex production issues involving multiple systems hasn't been automated yet. The creativity and expression of a design system that represents the company's values hasn't been automated yet.
They need the world's experts in these areas to help build AI that remotely has a chance of progressing beyond spitting out code for solved problems.
Now bootcamp grads who did 12 weeks of standard materials... it's more arguable that AI agents are closer to those people skills wise. And the lack of experience means there is less extra value you can bring to the table as a SWE.
What bootcamp grads could do are jobs like AI trainer and Prompt Engineer. These aren't SWE jobs and they will likely not be long term jobs but they might be good starting places. If you can do a job like this and moonlight shadowing engineers and getting some shadow experience, you might be more valuable as a SWE.