this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
340 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
76945 readers
3176 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
From what I see, the current is beginning to turn a little toward valuing senior devs more than ever, because they can deal with the downsides of AI. Junior devs, on the other hand, cannot, and their simpler coding work is also more easily replaced by AI. So we’ll see fewer junior dev jobs, but seniors might do fine. I’m not sure that’s good news for the profession as a whole, but its been an extremely long gold rush into software and online services so some correction probably won’t be the end of the trade.
Oh and yes senior devs are still hounded to use AI, because it will get them further, faster. And there are no more junior devs to help. In the hands of a skilled dev, AI tools can be powerful, and they can spare some toil, and help them find their feet in less familiar frameworks and in foreign codebases.
The problems in software still remain the same though:
(1) Bureaucracy
(2) Needless process
(3) Pointy headed managers
(4) Siloed teams
(5) Product people who have no idea what they want to build
(6) Shitty, poorly performing legacy code nobody wants to touch
Honestly, AI is just the latest thing that can boost your productivity at starting up some random app. But that was never the difficult part anyway.
This, so much this.
When I think about what limited my performance in the last year it was mostly:
And then they tell us to return to office and use AI for increasing efficiency.
It's all an elaborate play performed by upper management to feign being in control and being busy with something. Nobody is actually interested in producing a product, they all just want to further their own position.
The problem is the N+2 is in on it too. And so on. "It just works!"
We are pushing our product managers to communicate their requirements with live prototypes rather than PRDs and mockups. It forces them to actually think their ideas through, and even allows them to get some hallway feedback before even bothering an eng. This might help with #5. But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses. If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
Not all process is pointless, but needless process by definition is. There are also a shit ton of things that stop engineers from "striking out on their own".
The whole talk of "go[ing] it alone" kinda strikes me as "bootstrapping", libertarian non-sense.
I don't want to do marketing, sales, finance, investor, legal, and product bullshit myself. That's why I'm an employee.
Two things can be true at the same time, for instance, a company can have a lot of bloated, needless process that stifles people and still pull in enough money to be able to pay for their employees to live a life.
With the amount of market concentration there is in every sector as far as the eye can see, nearly every software-producing company has a cash cow of some sort, and then has a bunch of complete money losers that are subsidized by that cash cow.
So, it's completely possible that the company overall fully sucks and hasn't developed anything new of value to someone in decades, but the legacy business keeps the miserable employees from the bread line.
To return to the point, AI doesn't solve any of this or even help with it.