It’s a problem we’re seeing in parts of the engineering profession. We’re seeing a massive brain drain caused by retirement and there aren’t enough people with experience to take over. It is common to see people in their 40’s take senior leadership positions where that would be rare 20 years ago.
This might be a bit controversial, but all those fields he mentioned do have younger people learning how to do the work. Doctors spend 7 or more years doing doctor work under someone else’s watch before they can strike out on their own.
You could call them junior doctors if you like
Assuming Scrubs is accurate, they are literally called junior doctors.
Nothing controversial there. That person obviously has no idea what they’re talking about, as they’ve clearly never stepped foot on a construction site where junior engineers work alongside senior ones.
The same goes for other professions.
I was first wondering why this even is a LinkedInLunatic, they gave examples that lead me to believe that they were FOR hiring juniors.
all of those positions have junior roles. what is he talking about?
“junior doctors who learned to diagnose through youtube”, another litmus paper here: a person with no expertise or experience in a field making grand claims about it. this guy seems like full on bullshitter, perhaps out of all the professions he counted, he is the one most easily replaceable by LLMs
Yup, doctors need to go through residency and get their first job, just like a software engineer usually needs to get an internship and then their first job.
I’m about to graduate with an M.Sc. in Computer Science - can’t wait to be hired as a Senior Engineer!
Lmao.
Just stay a few years for PhD, and you’ll start as a lead
Tap for spoiler
/s
I don’t get what point he is trying to make?
You should do linear regression in excel and call yourself a statistician, is the message, I guess.
insert > scatterplot > click chart > + symbol > trend line > options > linear
ez clap
(this is a joke).
We are going to run out of senior engineers because we don’t hire juniors.
I don’t think so. That was the premise he was arguing against. He seems to think junior engineers are all trained on YouTube and that people will go to university to become “real professionals”. I guess they skip the junior engineer level and go straight to senior… somehow. So, he thinks, you can safely replace juniors with an LLM.
It’s just a stupid and poorly written argument all around.
Oh I think I see it now. Yeah his rhetorical questions actually have valid answers.
Junior compiler writers exist. Junior engineers exist. “Junior” doctors exist. They are called interns and residents.
They don’t teach CLIs and git and debugging in uni. You don’t go out of uni knowing how to use every JS framework. You can’t have senior engineers without experience.
Junior compiler writers exist.
Not really? But we also don’t need a million compilers. Those projects are extremely specialized and there isn’t constant demand for new compilers.
It’s something like saying there aren’t junior screwdriver makers. I mean, yeah? That’s a specific tool that’s pretty much done. There are juniors in the wider fields of carpentry and mechanical engineering. Someone might invent a new screwdriver, but we don’t need to trim a bunch of juniors to make, specifically, new screwdriver designs.
But there are junior compiler writers, they usually have Ph.Ds in compiler or language theory and work in a broader team that’s developing a new language or something. Building a compiler isn’t actually that hard, having it put out optimized code is, as is designing a language that maps well to compilers and is pleasant to use. It’s not a big field, but there are people across the experience spectrum.
Junior compiler writers exist.
You can have a junior write compiler code, but you won’t have a junior compiler writer. It’s a very specific niche topic which does not have the demand for this.
They don’t teach CLIs and git and debugging in uni.
Well, they do. Version control is extremly useful for doing projects especially in groups and debugging is a necessary tool for building systems. These are not the main topic of the courses, but they are taught and practically mandatory.
If you want to work on compilers, the general flow is:
- Get Ph.D in CS, in something relevant to languages and compilers
- Join an existing project on an compiler team and apply your research (usually hired by a company that uses said language a lot); you’re a “junior” here
- Work your way up to be a dominant force on the project, or switch to another project and become a lead (senior)
That’s not always how it goes (software is weird), but that’s a valid path.
Do you think that’s a question?
Have you just invented the regressive requestion?
I don’t know anyone who is seriously stopping hiring and replacing with AI. Anyone announcing that is just using a hype train to cover poor financials.
It’s not that obvious. Corporations are investing heavily in automation in customer relations. There are metrics for how much work had to fall back to humans, because it couldn’t be processed by the machine. Managers are motivated to improve on those metrics, and make the humans redundant.
Of course, LLMs are just pure garbage that produce more work for everyone and achieve nothing. Especially in business, they are a great way to reduce efficiency. The users dumb down, believe any bullshit, drop all critical thinking, and the people on the receiving end of their bullshit have to filter even more stupidity than ever.
But you don’t understand this as a manager. A piece of code by AI, that produces the same result as a piece of code by a human, or close enough, seem equivalent. Potential side effects are just noise that they don’t understand or want to hear about.
Managers also don’t understand that AI doesn’t scale. If it can write a Python program to calculate prime numbers, it can surely also write something like Netflix, or a payment processor, right?
Then there’s exactly what you point out. Other managers claim they’re doing it. So there must be something to it.
Once they wasted their budget on renting this technology temporarily, cuts have to be made to ensure the bottom line.
Maybe AI isn’t replacing your job, but the stupid investment might cost you the job anyway.
It’s also important to realize that you don’t require quality work or a quality product to be financially successful as a corporation. The AI industry is the best example itself.
This kind of logic never made sense to me, like: if an AI could build something like Netflix (even if it needed the assistance of a mid software engineer), then it means every indie dev will be able to build a Netflix competitor, bringing the value of Netflix down. Open source tools would quickly reach a level where they’d surpass any closed source software, and would be very user-friendly without much effort.
We’d see LLMs being used to create and improve rapidly infrastructure like compilers, IDEs and build systems that are currently complex and slow, rewrite any slow software into faster languages etc. So many projects that are stalled today for lack of manpower would be flourishing and flooding us with new apps and features in an incredible pace.
I’m yet to see it happen. And that’s because for LLMs to produce anything with enough quality, they need someone who understands what they’re outputting, someone who can add the necessary context in each prompt, who can test it, integrate it into the bigger scheme without causing regressions etc. It’s no simple work and it requires even understanding LLMs’ processing limitations.
LLMs, by definition, can’t push the limit. LLM’s can only ever produce things that look like what they were trained on. That makes them great for rapidly producing mediocre material, but it also means they will never produce anything complex.
Yeah, people (especially on linkedin) tend to take such BS rather seriously. Facebook said something about replacing engineers with AI, and gumroad said they won’t hire anymore (but they don’t need a lot of people anyway)
As someone in sourcing who does a lot of “make or buy” decisions, people would be shocked at what people want to replace with AI.
We have a small team of essentially phone jockies that walk users through internal processes and troubleshooting for our janky in house software. They wanted to replace that team with off the shelf AI… No one else uses this software, a lot of information is proprietary, no way AI is going to be able to do that job without specific training.
That’s one of a dozen examples where someone tried to ram and AI peg into a square hole.
Any statician worth it’s weight is using R, or at least Python (unless it’s like a really old statician using spss or SAS). As someone who did interviews for an actuarial intern position, I didn’t even asked the candidates if they knew how to use excel, because excel is fucking useless, I asked them about python and pandas.
Idk, my brother used a ton of excel as an actuary. He used other things too, but excel was absolutely part of it, and he made it to VP level in the insurance industry.
There’s a still a lot of excel out there being used, but you can’t really do a lot of “real” jobs in excel with is 2^20 maximum rows. I don’t have a lot of experience myself (I got my degree on 2022), when I interned we used a lot of excel and SAS and I hated it. After that I landed a job where I had the opportunity to write everything from zero in python, and excel is only used to send the results to other teams or clients. In the company I work now, I’m not part of the actuarial team, but in accounting and from the interview it was clear that I was being hired to re write everything from SAS to Python. Sometimes I pass by the actuarial team and I can see them doing chainladder triangles on excel and is kinda sad, because there’s a fantastic Python library for that. I’m planning to stay here until everything on the accounting department run on python and then looking for a senior position on the actuarial team to do the same there.
PowerPoint is turing complete in the animations.
You know, if you want to put an interviewee through hell.
PowerPoint is turing complete in the animations.
I promise to only use this knowledge for evil
Thank you.
Hmm. Maybe i should go and volunteer for giving computer classes.
pyMC3 ❤️
in school you learn how to do 2 + 2 and understand why it is 4. its not the actual answer that is the goal, its the understanding of why it is so and how the steps are applied to get the answer. knowledge layered on knowledge happens over years of learning, but eventually you know some stuff about things that people already learnt before you. as the saying goes- this isn’t rocket surgery, people!
There were and are always junior positions in all fields. The other fields are just less self indulgent about the years of experience.
Man doesn’t think Residents exist, lmao.
In fields where a college/university degree is a requirement, people start their careers in some kind of junior position anyway.
I don’t think this guy was ever a junior dumbass. I think he’s always been a senior dumbass.
100% correct. If AI somehow replaces junior devs, someone will have to train them in substitute for paid real-world experience.
It’ll be unpaid internships and stuff like that.
I went to university and discovered that unlike that naive view he has of it it is mostly a course in how to tolerate a lot of bullshit from profs and for someone who already taught myself a lot before I got there it was mostly a realization how outdated that whole system has become unless the profs themselves are incredibly motivated (which is relatively rare), the system itself certainly encourages them to do the minimum possible to stay up to date with the material for courses they teach and instead focus on their research.
I have a much longer response, but I’ll try to make a short one. I think there’s a lot more a college degree does (should?) offer/signal, but over the last 50 ish years, that has largely eroded away to just being a professional training program or a gatekeeper to a job. Higher ed in society he mostly turned to social efficiency as its guiding principle instead of several other curricular philosophies. Combine that with the increasing and intense research pressure and it’s the exact situation you describe. Neoliberalism has pushed away long term thinking and risk from corporations, so that burden of risk is taken now by universities (and young people in the form of graduate students) which can be subsidized by government grants. This funding scenario pushes professors to focus on grants and research and to not care about their teaching. It’s not good.
Not sure if it was ever the way you describe but I agree that it should be focused on teaching more than just be a professional training program. However, it is not even a good professional training program at this point.
Lmao, love how he thinks linear regression is the epitome of statistics.
