alt Hacker NewsThis is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by
a) getting really good at clarifying requirements
b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.
This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
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> learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.
This sounds almost word for word like The Onion’s classic: Secretary Of Labor Assures Nation There Still Plenty Of Jobs For Americans Willing To Outwork Robots
[0] https://theonion.com/secretary-of-labor-assures-nation-there...
> when the bottleneck is communication + taste
That was the bottleneck in the industry when it was in growth phase, it's a mature sector now and it's all about efficiency and profit now. Speed to market and product iteration speed isn't the most important thing anymore, there's not a lot of innovation taking place. Outside the actual novel AI specific companies out there, of course, there are a few other spots of growth and exceptional companies but largely the kings have been crowned.
Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees).
I'm genuinely curious.
I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand.
Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output.
From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now.
We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
>Junior engineers can fight back against this by
Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue.
>This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas:
This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%.
And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.