The Next Two Years of Software Engineering

The author has a bizarre idea of what a computer science degree is about. Why would it teach cloud computing or dev ops? The idea is you learn those on your own.

On the junior developer question:

A humble way for devs to look at this, is that in the new LLM era we are all juniors now.

A new entrant with a good attitude, curiosity and interest in learning the traditional "meta" of coding (version control, specs, testing etc) and a cutting-edge, first-rate grasp of using LLMs to assist their craft (as recommended in the article) will likely be more useful in a couple of years than a "senior" dragging their heels or dismissing LLMs as hype.

We aren't in coding Kansas anymore, junior and senior will not be so easily mapped to legacy development roles.

I have been telling people that, titles aside, senior developers were the people not afraid to write original code. I don’t see LLMs changing this. I only envision people wishing LLMs would change this.

The points mentioned in the article, regarding the things to focus on, is spot on.

> Junior developers: Make yourself AI-proficient and versatile. Demonstrate that one junior plus AI can match a small team’s output. Use AI coding agents (Cursor/Antigravity/Claude Code/Gemini CLI) to build bigger features, but understand and explain every line if not most. Focus on skills AI can’t easily replace: communication, problem decomposition, domain knowledge. Look at adjacent roles (QA, DevRel, data analytics) as entry points. Build a portfolio, especially projects integrating AI APIs. Consider apprenticeships, internships, contracting, or open source. Don’t be “just another new grad who needs training”; be an immediately useful engineer who learns quickly.

If I were starting out today, this is basically the only advice I would listen to. There will indeed be a vacuum in the next few years because of the drastic drop in junior hiring today.

The outlook on CS credentials is wrong. You'll never be worse off than someone without those credentials, all other things equal. Buried in this text is some assumption that the relatively studious people who get degrees are going to fall behind the non-degreed, because the ones who didn't go to school will out-study them. What is really going to happen generally is that the non-degreed will continue to not study, and they will lean on AI to avoid studying even the few things that they might have otherwise needed to study to squeak by in industry.