Was at a conference dinner a while back and one guy said "The future is AI. It doesn't replace senior developers, but no more need for juniors."
To which i replied:
"Where do you think senior developers come from. Straight from the womb?"
He went quiet, then wandered off to a different huddle.
To which i replied:
"Where do you think senior developers come from. Straight from the womb?"
He went quiet, then wandered off to a different huddle.
Reposted from
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Yesterday it was a middle aged woman in my gym doing the same thing. Talking a young man’s ear off about how much chatGPT helps her do her work. Charts and writing — “i’m not good at that and now i don’t need someone in the org flow to do it”.
Comments
Not looking forward to the time when important financial or safety decisions are made based on a "short summary" because someone can't be arsed to read the report.
Who do you think wrote the ones it's modelling from? Do you want to be part of a stagnation of the entire concept of education?
Higher level strategic design will likely survive and even thrive in an AI era, but if more mundane tasks get taken over by marketing managers with “smarter” tools how do junior designers learn?
I recently attended a conference where a guy did a very breezy presentation on A.I.-- "See, you can just tell A.I. to write code for you! and then have A.I. test it! and then if it's broken, tell A.I. to fix it!"
I asked how we were supposed to trust it. He said "It's faster!"
Most CEOs think "i will fire every single human being of my company and my clients will still have all the money to hire me" and it don't work like that because your client or their client will be fired using the same mentality
Because the computer cant be flawed. Its the computer.
The pain of your code not working, & having to figure out why, is one of the most crucial learning experiences when you're starting out
Like, "Put the password in plaintext in your code" level mistakes (it has done this more than once, & I've not even used it that much)
We could end up with serious problems in 5-10 years 😬
I'm just gonna remain super chill about this and not freak out like we're on the Titanic but we can see the iceberg or anything
It’s not replacing any staff, any time soon, and certainly not any of us ‘systems guys’
If anything, we’ll end up employing more staff to fix the AI (and its cock ups)
Replace the C-suite with LLMs. Nobody'd notice the difference.
I had a leader once put her hand in my face and shush me because I was poking holes in whatever she was on about and she wasn't accustomed to being questioned
AI always agree with them
The reply was: “Hope there’s no need to revise curricula in the next 30 years…”
And some people definitely seem to think senior people aren’t made, but actually are a class of people with innate abilities.
Step 1: allow free adoption for whatever use.
Step 2: after a few months, see who is "outsourcing" a third or more of their job to LLMs. Get rid of them.
Completely ignoring how actual artists develop their skills and that those are artistic specialties in their own right
*stares blankly in concept artist.*
we're fucked, aren't we. :/
But the idea you can use it to cut out entry level skills isn't just anti-society. It assumes expertise just appears. It doesn't. You get good at a thing by learning less complex stuff first.
Mind you, this is an engineering course
"Talent pipeline? Not my problem, I'm doing great!"
Same attitude you see around climate change, immigration, higher education, and just about anything requiring any care for the future.
I stopped doing that because I didn't have enough time. (But it did help a bit with my understanding of coding.)
Similar to the legal issue in a UK court this month where an AI, when asked to give case law examples to support a particular legal argument in court, actually invented them.
But again that's not the point.
The point is that unless you phrase your AI question very, very carefully the answers it gives you can be horribly misleading
https://davidallengreen.com/2025/05/a-close-reading-of-the-ai-fake-cases-judgment/
I could hire hundreds of them if i wanted for less money already. And none of them would require a lake's worth of water to do it. Just a fridge full of Monster.
"You could use jQuery for this..."
😬😔😆
Can remember someone making a macro in a system, leaving it for 8 hours, then someone (me) pointing out the decimal error throughout.
How many rows should there be?
How many rows are there?
I don't trust AI to tell me the truth, only to interpret what people ask it.
Reaching for the macro became a learning experience just as reaching for AI will be also.
I know the long process of my dad losing his programming job started with junior employee jobs being outsourced to India
This was years ago, and it was done by outsourcers. The guy that ran the company thought he was saving money.
And he was selling the software as a franchise. Without calling it that.
It irritates me to teeth-grinding on a low level, because I don't like working with an entity that can't ever learn.
This isn't a gotcha, they know the logical conclusion to their ideology but seem to think they are the exception to being rolled up and exploited.
Sorta analogous to corporate hyper focus on quarterly returns at the expense of the past or future.
Is the ‘long run’ still a thing?
Or can no one see beyond the hubris of their immediate circumstances anymore?