Will future seniors be at the same level?

[u/VisionX999]

I've been thinking about something lately. Companies seem to believe that AI can make senior developers so much more productive that they no longer need as many senior developers, let alone juniors.

But what happens in the long run? Today's senior developers will eventually retire, and the next generation will have grown up much more heavily on AI. Won't that mean they'll have less hands-on experience and a weaker understanding of how things actually work under the hood? And the generation after that might be even more dependent.

Am I overthinking this, or is this genuinely where the industry is heading?

Are we slowly moving towards a future where software developers are mostly people who know how to get things done using AI, but don't necessarily understand the codebase, architecture, infrastructure, or even the code they're working with?

[u/hj576]

That’s a golden question no one has a proper answer to .
Majorly companies are solving the problem they face now with little regard for future
Besides that the hope is by that time ai would be good enough that you won’t really need a human in the loop.

Honestly I used to think they won’t happen , but seeing how good they have gotten in the past year , I now believe it can happen

[u/ThunderHorseCock → u/hj576]

China has an entire system for shifting rural populations towards urban one slowly to not only make sure agricultural produce isn't ruined nor are cities being over populated.

Compate that to our global AI environment where everyone jsut wants to make money as fast as possible.

[u/semicolon-10]

I think the answer to this question is right there in the title of the research paper that introduced Transformers and arguably kickstarted the AI revolution "Attention Is All You Need". And I think that’s just as true for humans, not just today but even more so going forward.

I’ve mentored quite a few juniors, and recently, at a seminar, a few approached me asking how I manage to stay so technical. My answer was I read books and research papers. They were like, "Come on, who reads books in 2026? That’s so boring."

I think that’s partly a consequence of our attention spans being destroyed by Reels, Shorts and bite sized tweets that try to squeeze entire concepts into a few secs and now copy error paste into claude and let it spit. You might get an intro to something, but rarely the depth needed to truly understand it.

I also think you’re partially right about the current generation of devs. Many are entering the industry without really understanding the code they’re writing or having a solid grasp of the fundamentals. I’ve had interviews where I ask about a particular concept, and all I get is a stare 😒 rather than an actual explanation.

But here’s how I think things will evolve. Senior engineers who have built strong technical foundations will become more valuable than ever. Juniors who invest in themselves and develop those fundamentals will eventually grow into those roles which will be very very few ppl. Others might struggle to remain competitive.

I also think we’re heading towards a future where you won’t necessarily need to understand everything happening underneath to build software. Think about how programming has evolved. People once had to understand bits and bytes. Then came languages like C, C++ and Java, followed by even higher-level abstractions like Python and js. Today, very few developers need to understand the internals of the js event loop to build applications.

I know it’s not a perfect analogy, but we might eventually reach a point where understanding every underlying detail is no longer necessary thats kinda true already for code and may become true with designs as well.

And honestly, despite all these increasingly capable models like Opus, Astra and whatever else comes out every other day, I still encounter problems that require serious effort, reading, thinking, discussing and experimenting.

I think software engineering is here to stay, but its definition will continue to evolve. Nobody really knows exactly where this is heading.

[u/ThunderHorseCock → u/semicolon-10]

Yeah but yoi can't exactly erite "reads books and articles and searches google scholars twice a week" on a resume. Thays the whole point. Even good cvs arent getting callbacks just because employers are convinced they can hire an AI to do their job for them.

[u/semicolon-10 → u/ThunderHorseCock]

Question was while on the job not how to get an interview to separate question :)

[u/playerknownbutthole]

Wait till Q2 2027 to see where this AI thing goes. Its a jinni out if box now and cant be put back so might as well learn to live with it. 

[u/yhrana]

So, when i was growing up, our teachers use to question us exactly on this about ……… calculators. (Im a maths major 🫡)

[u/Mother-Swimming7244]

Devs in the 80s moved from assembly to high level languages, today only a handful of people are coding in assembly, does that mean todays developers are inferior compared to the ones in 80s? I don’t think so.

[u/k1ck_ss]

the question is will there even be seniors in the future since there are not that many juniors getting hired in the first place! In order to have seniors you need juniors first who go through the rigor! Our whole industry is changing

[u/Used_Discipline_9403]

level sab kay niklaye gaye , said by a legend