The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

Digital technology has been gutting other fields for decades. For a few examples, we have lost the ladder that trained people as Linotype Operators/Typesetters, Photographic Lab Technicians, Legal Research Associates, Dictation Typists and Stenographers, etc. All which could lead to higher skilled and higher paid jobs.

We didn't care until the same process came knocking on the door for us.

Spot on. All those years of slinging code and debugging gave me and others the judgement and eye to check on all the AI generated code. I now wonder often about what hiring looks like in this new era. As a small startup, we just don't need junior engineers to do the day to day implementation.

Do we instead hire a small number of people as apprentices to train on the high level patterns, spot trouble areas, develop good 'taste' for clean software? Teach them what well organized, modular software looks like on the surface? How to spot redundancy? When to push the AI to examine an area for design issues, testability, security gaps? Not sure how to train people in this new era, would love to hear other perspectives.

I agree that the way that today's generation of seasoned programmers learned their craft is going away, and that we don't know how the next generation will learn. I disagree very much with the conclusion:

> They didn’t trade speed for learning. They traded learning for nothing. There was no trade-off. There was just loss.

I believe this conclusion is due to a methodological problem, a form of begging the question if you will. One thing I am certain of is that humans who set their mind to something learn something, and good programmers are among the most tenacious in setting their mind to something. With agentic coding, they definitely learn different things, and so I would expect syntax knowledge to be weaker, but debugging and review skill will increase overall. Why? Because there will be more code, and more breakage, and I still haven't seen any tooling that allows a non-technical person to be effective at this.

Programming knowledge has always had a half-life. The way I see it, this is a big sea change that will fundamentally change the job of software engineers, and some non-trivial percentage will either change careers or find a sheltered slow-moving place to finish out their working years. But for those who were not attached to hand-crafted code, AI provides power tools that empower technically minded people more than anyone else. I have full faith that younger generation still has the same distribution of technical potential, and they will still find ways to develop their craft just as previous generations of hackers have always done.

Kids growing up with PCs and learning by tinkering and making crap code reminds me of the Go (game) proverb: "Lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible." That time was so valuable.

Or, as I tell my students, "Every failure is a growth opportunity." I let them resubmit corrected projects for points, too. I'm desperate for them to get the reps in that they'd normally have had as juniors in the field.

We hired on a software engineer fresh out of college this January, and we are a very claude heavy shop. We have noticed and have explained to him that we still have to do the real engineering work: requirements decomposition, interface design, verification and integration. Claude is helpful but he is still responsible for his output. He’s been doing well so far! Theres still plenty of things for him to bang his head on and grow.

> I saw a LinkedIn post a week or two ago by a senior engineer with 25 years’ experience in the industry...

And how many years have we had capable AI? Maybe it's going to take a similar timeline for people to figure out how to be good with an AI assisted workflow (if not fully automated.)

Demand for software is large and as the cost goes down we'll want more of it, so there will be demand to keep training people.

I'm old enough to remember when people complained that we would never have competent engineers again because new hires are starting with higher level languages rather than doing "real" programming. AI or not, the profession will be fine.

This fits my bias so well, I'm skeptical but can't refute. So well that in fact the title reminds me of an SF story I always come back to when thinking about effect of AI on the society. The Plateau by Christopher Anvil.

> and those tasks were never just tasks. They were the mechanism that built judgment, intuition, and the ability to supervise the systems we now delegate to AI.

Bullshit. The busywork wasn't being done by low level engineers to train them up, they were doing it because it needed doing, it was undesirable, and they were lowest on the totem pole.

Jobs are self training. Sure doing other jobs may give you some intuition that can be applied to new jobs. Manually writing code and fixing your human created mistakes obviously carries over for debugging AI written code. But people who start their careers with AI written code will also learn how to debug AI code. You don't learn how to architect a system by coding a system somebody else architected. At best you might pick up some common patterns by osmosis, but this often breeds worse engineers who do things as they have been done in the past without understanding why and without regard to how they really ought to be done. True understanding of why A was chosen in this case and B works better in another comes from actually doing the high level work.

Indeed, if AI usage is like any other tool that has come before it, those who grow up using it will be much more adept at utilizing it in practice than those who are adopting it now after spending a lifetime learning a different skillset. We don't exactly lament how much worse software engineers have gotten since they no longer learn how to sort their punch cards if they drop them.

Even if you are of the opinion that the tasks junior engineers do, which now AI can do, are fundamental to becoming competent at higher level skills, that's no problem. You can train people without them doing value-added work. Have engineers code the old fashioned way for training purposes. It's no different from doing math problems despite calculators existing. This is a problem only for extracting underpaid labor out of junior engineers with the lie that they are being paid in experience.

We'll need a house for the feeble minded.

http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...

Haven't we been saying similar for all other aspects of software engineering too as they have changed over time? Writing code is just one responsibility amongst many.

I don't want code from someone/something that doesn't know the needs of the business, cannot find where to compromise effectively, does not understand the deployment environments their app will run in, would not know how to respond to an incident with their application in production, etc.

I don't think writing code with AI is relevant to career progress at all. What matters that I can hold someone accountable for the code we have in prod, and they'd better have answers or they don't have a job.

If they are dependable there, only then they can be trusted with more responsibility. That's all we're really talking about. You get paid to be accountable. You do not get paid to do one narrow thing well. It should not take you a decade to read and write code quickly and effectively. I'd argue that should have happened when you were in high school and college (how it was for everyone in upper management right now).

I feel like the quality of new hires has progressively become worse over the years, and we have made so many concessions to remedy it (AI included), and all it's doing is making the problem worse.

There's going to be very very very few engineers.

I feel like some of the data in this is horrendously out of date. They're referencing articles from the end of 2024.

There was a massive step-change in the capability of these models towards the end of 2025.

There is just no way that an experienced developer should be slower using the current tools. Doesn't match my experience at all.

The title of the article, though - absolutely true IMO

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