alt Hacker News> Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.
It's worth considering how aggressively open the door has been for the last decade. Each new generation of engineers increasingly disappointed me with how much more motivated they were by a big pay check than they were for anything remotely related to engineering. There's nothing wrong with choosing a career for money, but there's also nothing wrong about missing a time when most people chose it because they were interested in it.
However I have noticed a shift: while half the juniors I work with are just churning out AI slop, the other half are really interested in the craft of software engineering and understanding computer science better.
We'll need new senior engineers in a few years, and I suspect they will come from a smaller pool of truly engaged juniors today.
This is what I see. Less of door slamming completely shut, more like, the door was enormous and maybe a little too open. We forget, the 6 month coding bootcamp to 6 figure salary pipeline was a real thing for a while at the ZIRP apex.
There are still junior engineers out there who have experiments on their githubs, who build weird little things because they can. Those people were the best engineers anyway. The last decade of "money falls from the sky and anyone can learn to code" brought in a bunch of people who were interested in it for the money, and those people were hard to work with anyway. I'd lump the sidehustle "ship 30 projects in 30 days" crowd in here too. I think AI will effectively eliminate junior engineers in the second camp, but absolutely will not those in the first camp. It will certainly make it harder for those junior engineers at the margins between those two extremes.
There's nothing more discouraging than trying to guide a junior engineer who is just typing what you say into cursor. Like clearly you don't want to absorb this, and I can also type stuff into an AI, so why are you here?
The best engineers I've worked with build things because they are truly interested in them, not because they're trying to get rich. This is true of literally all creative pursuits.