The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator
Hi all, it saddens me the sub that I put 4 years of my time into providing honest and from the heart advice in is dying. Coding bootcamps have been dead for months now. Codesmith's GitHub repos look like a ghost town. Launch Academy never came back from their 'pause'.
So I started written very thoughtful essays about what's going on and this one is particularly relevant:
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer)
**SUMMARY:**
* Entry-level software roles are disappearing because the “training work” (simple, bounded tasks) is increasingly automated or absorbed by senior engineers using AI, reducing the need to hire juniors.
* Employers now prioritize “judgment” (real-world experience handling failures, tradeoffs, and systems) but that judgment traditionally came *from* entry-level roles, creating a circular problem.
* The traditional pipeline (universities + bootcamps → junior jobs → experience) is breaking down, with fewer entry-level hires and collapsing bootcamp viability as demand shrinks.
* AI is shifting the bottleneck from writing code to making decisions about correctness, deployment, and system behavior... skills beginners haven’t had the opportunity to develop.
* In the absence of formal apprenticeships, aspiring engineers must self-train through unpaid, real-world projects, creating a more unequal system where opportunity depends on time, resources, and luck.
u/Mindless_Level9327 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yeah I’m at a fork in the road in my career decisions right now. I first did a bootcamp, no success. Then I started WGU’s cybersecurity program and got my A+ and Net+ certs, and somehow couldn’t land jobs with zero experience required. It just seems like tech by and large is shri
u/michaelnovatireplied·
What did you do before this? My advice is to try to go back to your old career and apply programming and AI so you can crush it and stand out and over time steer your job towards more and more programming.
u/ericswc wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Same thing in the dot com crash. Don’t learn to code, all the jobs are going to India…
Then 5 years later, demand and lack of supply started heating up.
Then coding bootcamps emerged to fill the gap.
Then zero interest rates went away and the data shows that companies were dou
u/michaelnovatireplied·
All past computer revolutions have resulted in code writing easier and more accessible. PCs, Internet, mobile, etc...
Now, engineers won't be writing code anymore at all.
We will be building stuff though, so the job will exist but with the rug pulled out from under you.... many will topple.
u/throwaway09234023322 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
As someone who uses AI every day for work, AI isn't taking junior engineer jobs. Let's be honest. It is outsourcing to India, south America, etc and high interest rates that is almost solely responsible for the lack of junior hires.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
There is more than one thing going on here.
Outsourcing is a short term market factor. AI is changing the underlying market.
u/ericswc wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
We are a long ways away from engineers not writing code.
Did you look at the Claude code source code? That shit is going to collapse under its own weight at some point.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Things have changed in the past 3 months FAANG friends who have never wanted to use AI now don't write code anymore.
The bleeding edge in public is saying the same thing.
If you are writing code by hand you have a skill issue with AI you need to fix.
u/ericswc wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
And yet, I watch it fuck up basic CSS on a daily basis.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Exactly, you are using it wrong if that's the case.
People don't just ask a 3rd tier LLM to do something and sit there and wait for CSS.
They are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in LLM tokens running top shelf models in complex ways to generate quality code and it costs less than their salaries to produce significantly more output.
u/ericswc wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Now, if you want to debate whether code quality matters at all at Meta, that’s an interesting conversation.
But no, it still isn’t writing code that I would put into someone’s pacemaker.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
That's like saying when cars came out they didn't have the torque to drive off road and you always need horses for that kind of terrain. Sure for some period of time for some cases.
u/Mindless_Level9327 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I have been a floor worker in warehousing, delivery driver for restaurants, and a cook. So nothing I have a ton of interest in. I am currently an assistant manager in a warehouse
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Maybe you can be a champion for ways AI can help make the day to day both more fun and more efficient, try things out, propose things that work up later, try to get GM support.
u/throwaway09234023322 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
You are using this short term market factor to support your thesis tho. You're saying junior positions are disappearing and attributing it to AI when AI is probably the least of the 3 major reasons for reduced junior openings.
Also, I feel like your prediction would only be a sh
u/michaelnovatireplied·
My argument is that AI is fundamentally replacing the work done by junior engineers. Permanently.
I discussed the argument you make in the essay. Basically my argument is that companies will eventually need to replace senior people but in the true capitalist way, because of lower demand of those jobs, they won't pay you to train you and you'll have to figure it out on your own hunger games style until a few people make it out the other side.
u/throwaway09234023322 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Why do you blame AI instead of other factors though? AI has really only became prevalent in like the last year?
You could essentially make the exact same argument but not mention AI at all and blame it on oversupply of labor. What makes you believe AI has more of an impact?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I count 5 factors impacting the market. But AI is taking an eraser to the job and not just shifting it.
1. end of ZIRP
2. AI
3. outsourcing
4. end of DEI hiring
5. oversupply of CS grads from learn to code
u/angedell wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
So what's the end game here?
Only the children of the current senior software engineers will be able to become SWE?
Are we sinking into middle age this bad?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I think a privileged few who grow up with technology and have the space to explore at a young age will make it through as SWEs.
BUT I think that if you are a career switching your game plan is to not switch careers and look at bootcamps and education as a way to bring programming into your old job. All jobs will become more computer related and you can win in your old job by embracing that.
u/throwaway09234023322 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I suppose we will see as time goes on, but I feel like you give AI too much credit.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I've never been a hype person and I'm usually like on the slightly early side of early adopters but definitely not a a bleeding edge user of new things.
my job as a product engineer is actually to recognize which things are across the chasm and which aren't and that's actually the judgment and taste I've built up
and from where I stand it's absolutely undeniable what's happening right now and I believe what Karpathy that anyone who is not seeing that benefit it has a skill issue with AI (that is totally addressable) and it is not an AI issue.
u/Conscious-Secret-775 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
No idea what you mean by the “end of ZIRP” but I would say 4 and 5 probably have had the most impact on hiring people for junior roles who do not have a CS degrees. If you can hire a CS major why would you take a chance on a boot camp grad.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
ZIRP = zero interest rate policy, which resulted in companies getting loans with no interest to invest in things that were rational if they returned anything at all whatsoever, hence when interest rates shot to 5% it was an economic dampener on smaller companies.
u/Conscious-Secret-775 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I think you have bought into the AI hype. There are real problems with AI accuracy and reliability. Blaming the user is what all vendors of defective products do.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I'm not trying to sound arrogant here but I'm building AI, I'm friends with many of the Facebook execs, Open AI has poached 3 employees from my small company, like I'm **100% BIASED** but not from hype or headlines, from what I see.
You can do you if you want, I'm just trying to help.
u/throwaway09234023322 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'm not anti AI at all. I think it is disruptive, but unless there is exponential growth going forward in its ability, I just don't see it replacing so many tech jobs. Maybe it is just my perspective as someone who works on the infra/devopsy side of things.
What do you think abo
u/michaelnovatireplied·
My stance is the same as Karpathy's anyone who is not seeing huge productivity gains has a skill issue and not it's not an AI issue. If you think it's an AI issue you have a skill issue.
That's not meant to be mean or condescending, it just means that you haven't developed the skills yet to wield AI and you should be aware of that, rather than being in the group of people that could lose your job not being able to use it effectively.
I had an executive at a very large well know FAANG (I can't say which) just tell me that their legal people had pushed back on a 2 month long infra/SRE project and then there was a very bad site incident that would have benefited from that project, someone built the entire project with AI in two days - properly, security vetted because of the emergency, and legal allowed it and it saved the day entirely and fundamentally changed the view of AI.
This is recent, you won't hear the details publicly, but yes.... it's not just disruptive but it's fundamentally changing absolutely everything in FAANG-level SRE/dev ops.
u/Conscious-Secret-775 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
So you are building and selling AI products?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I'm:
1. building AI products
2. using AI tools
3. not selling AI tools themselves, but incporating AI in more broader products
4. seperately we offer prep for AI interviews, AI upskilling, and other AI-content related things.
u/Conscious-Secret-775 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
So I would place you in the vendor category.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I think I have a number of biases.
Our core business that we make money for is 'interview prep' and that doesn't have anything to do with AI (other than preparing people for AI-related interviews)
We use AI in the product to make it better than what humans can offer by themsevles.
u/rmullig2 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
The first programmers in industry came before Computer Science departments existed. They were trained by their companies to write code, typically simpler COBOL applications for payroll systems and similar usage. They did not know a lot about computers but had strong domain knowle
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Agreed, domain knowledge will now be leveraged 10X because AI will help people with domain knowledge apply that to things that previous required product marketing -> product manager -> designer -> engineer to turn into a product to do. They will be able to go straight to the output and lose less of the signal from playing telephone.
Engineers are going to have to built the tools and the glue to make that possible because LLMs alone can't do it.
u/LittleBlackBird0191 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Once I saw the em dashes in the article I gave up reading, as many of you might instinctually do now. The intro felt genuine enough so I'll comment on what felt genuine. I get that employers want new hires that are ready for the heat from dealing with real situations. That comes
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Of course I used AI to edit the work. I reviewed it like 10 times manually, and a couple times each with 3 different AIs. I tighten things up to try to shorten it with AI. I had AI reword 3 different sections.
That's how people write now. Embrace it.