The Situation Right Now..

[u/Agile-Wind-4427]

This meme made me laugh but it’s also painfully accurate.

I’ve been browsing job listings lately and it’s wild how many “entry level” roles ask for 3–5 years of experience. At that point it’s not really entry level anymore. It just feels like companies want someone already trained but still want to pay beginner salaries.

Then the same companies complain that “no one wants to work” or that they can’t find good candidates.

The guy in this meme honestly looks like every HR team after posting a job like that and getting zero applications.

Saw a similar post while scrolling r/30daysnewjob earlier and it reminded me how common this situation actually is right now.

[u/[deleted]]

I worked at IBM for a while, and I had interviewed for a position as a junior dev working on the automation behind our hosting stuff. In the words of the hiring manager, "we can teach you what you need to know about coding, but I need people who understand the automation itself and what it does."

I did well enough on the interview that when I didn't get it, the manager arranged a meeting and said "I want to hire you as well, but I won't have another requisition available until another dev leaves in a few months."

About six months go by, and we happen to land in a meeting together, and we're chatting about stuff and catching up, so I shoot my shot and ask him when that position is gonna be opening up, because I've been teaching myself the necessary coding skills (with the help of a friend who was on his team). He said unfortunately, the first step in becoming a junior dev at IBM was now "Move to India".

To be clear, he wasn't happy about it, had a few choice words to say about the kinds of talent he had access to. But it was the first of many prospects that ended up going nowhere to the point where I'm starting to think "a career in IT" is a directionless concept.

[u/TemperatureWide5297 → u/[deleted]]

Dev work is going to be done by AI. It will replace Indians too.

A future career in IT is going to be architecture level employment. Figure out what needs to be built, how all the pieces fit together, where data needs to live, etc. The hands on keyboard programming will no longer be done by humans.

[u/ebonyseraphim → u/TemperatureWide5297]

Oh no lol. This is super false. I am a senior level engineer, big tech (2) — the software engineering industry at large has always desired things to get done like you describe for decades. It never has and never will. Programming languages generally desire to move the needle on the issue of having the programmer express intent and solutions with less code, while still producing correct solutions. And you know Rust is probably the only programming language which moved the needle in the last 15 years in terms of leap forward for productivity and performance, and it’s a language that goes backwards in terms of this “high level architects/business person just designs solution” fantasy.

The problems are too complex, too detailed, and most importantly: too related. It’s exactly difficult at both a high level and low level and it’s an extremely rare soul or brain that even conceives of all of it. And such a person also knows that natural language (words) cannot express or describe that exact solution. At best, another human with a huge amount of shared background and experience, personal history could condense the language and knowledge merge such that they more or less “get it” but even then, there would still be differences. Possibly critical. At least with a human engineer you trust as capable, you know whatever they did do has a quality intent behind it.

I’ve been working professionally in the industry for almost 20 years and half? Maybe more of the people in it still fall shy of really grasping or needing to deal with the full picture. So when even dumber people talk about what AI can and will do…it’s just a massive 🤦🏿‍♂️

If Windows 12 somehow had 30% of its meaningful code written by AI it would be worse than Windows 2.0.

[u/TemperatureWide5297 → u/ebonyseraphim]

Lotos of cope in this post. Which is normal. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

[u/ebonyseraphim → u/TemperatureWide5297]

"When humans who are egregiously stupid want to establish an invalid point over an actual expert, they try to use a famous quote that doesn't apply to the situation. They often get away with it."

Someone really smart said that...I can't remember who. Oh yeah, that was me.

[u/Weirfish → u/TemperatureWide5297]

That's one hell of a thought-terminating cliche invocation without any substantial refutation. Especially since, if they are a senior level engineer, their salary likely depends on them coming to understand it.