alt Hacker NewsThis isn't the first time that the industry has foot-gunned itself.
The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.
Even before LLMs, there were periods recently where multiple companies had "senior only" hiring policies. That just inflated what "senior" was until it was basically 5 years of experience.
This time seems a bit different, however. There are both supply and demand side problems. The supply of students it tainted with AI "learning" now. Colleges haven't realized that they absolutely have to effectively crack down on AI, or the signal of their degrees will wither to nothing. The demand side is also low, of course, since the candidates aren't good, and AI seems to be a good substitute for a newly graduated hire, especially if that hire is just going to use the AI badly.
> The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.
So the irony here is that LLMs are actually going to be decent at COBOL by default. And other uncommon/esoteric codebases. For example I vibe-ported some Apple ii assembly to modern C/SDL and... it works. It's stuff that I just wouldn't even attempt at manual development speed. It may be actually an easier path than training someone to do things, as long as you have a large enough test suite or detailed enough requirements.