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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
Do you think that’s a question?
Have you just invented the regressive requestion?
I don’t think this guy was ever a junior dumbass. I think he’s alwaays been a senior dumbass.
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.
Man doesn’t think Residents exist, lmao.
Lmao, love how he things linear regression is the epitome of statistics.
I feel that I have missed a golden opportunity
Any youtuber 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.
pyMC3 ❤️
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
In fields where a college/university degree is a requirement, people start their careers in some kind of junior position anyway.
This isn’t a lunatic. This is someone trying to make a point about companies thinking they can use AI to replace devs. Poe’s Law is on heavy display here in these comments.
Whether or not you have experienced it, there is currently a trend both in recruiting and in millionaire leadership dialogue toward dropping devs for AI codegen. CEOs that don’t understand how anything works (eg Salesforce) think you can just not hire devs because Google’s inflated AI stats that included basic autocomplete in their full AI codegen numbers indicate AI can code. Boards believe generative AI is capable of things it won’t be able to touch for decades. I have to deal with idiotic AI questions from Fortune 500 companies every fucking week.
From a hiring perspective, it’s becoming incredibly difficult to weed out AI bullshit. For every one qualified candidate I get, I’ve had to drop five or more in a fucking tech screen because, while codegen has given them enough to pass a basic hiring screen that used to weed out a lot more, there’s zero fucking ability to code without Copilot or critical understanding of the code it generates. When I was starting out, the same problem existed at university but got filtered out after graduation fairly quickly.
The non lunatic here is extending that to other disciplines because it’s a natural next question. He’s not exactly applying a slippery slope; it’s sort of there underneath.
Edit: valid criticism of the post is that you have to have a degree to code. That’s bullshit. After my first degree, I went back for CS and dropped out because it was a waste of time. It limited my job pool initially; this far into my career it really does nothing. I’ve hired some solid bootcamp devs. I’ve seen shitty bootcamp devs. I’ve also seen a bunch of CS masters who have no fucking clue how to ship production code but can wax poetic about algorithm design. Since I don’t run an R&D department, that doesn’t matter 95% of the time.
He’s a lunatic because his position is that it won’t be a problem. You just train programmers enough that they’ll go into the workforce as senior developers.
But that’s not how any of the professions he mentioned works:
- doctors - residency (like an internship) followed by a first job (probably accompanied/watched over by a senior?)
- plumbers - apprenticeship (like an internship) followed by first job, usually accompanied by a senior
Software engineering works the same way, you get an internship, then a first job, and both are usually under a senior. In fact, it’s not until about 10 years in that I’d consider you an actual senior, and there are levels above that as well.
There’s pretty much no industry where you pop out of school at a senior level, there’s a reason experience is expected for most roles. I’ll only ask about it if you put something interesting, like a relevant project or whatever.
From a hiring perspective, it’s becoming incredibly difficult to weed out AI bullshit. For every one qualified candidate I get, I’ve had to drop five or more in a fucking tech screen
God I’m so afraid to lose job now because I could never survive an interview these days.
I used to shine for things like takehome interview code problems and shit like that, where I had a chance to pause and think a bit and look up definitions and shit.
But those kinds of toy programs are actually the things that AI is actually good at, so now I can only differentiate myself by coding live in front of interviewers and memorizing trivia, both of which I’m terrible at, and don’t reflect actual work.Yeah, it sucks.
What’s worse is that we ask a bunch of OOP questions at my company, but I actually hate OOP. I try to work in some FP questions, but those are really hard to ask without using similarly academic language (e.g. describe closure/thunk/partial application and what differentiates them). A lot of people don’t know the terminology while knowing the application, because we only cover the terminology in one class in the middle of the curriculum (for OOP; FP was an elective for me), and it’s not useful in actual work.
I just want to know if you know what you’re doing, and unfortunately, a live coding session usually does the best non at that. Yeah, we’re probably missing out on some great devs that just can’t perform in an interview, but we’re also not having to fire bad devs as much.
Then you should probably have a portfolio of projects.
Edit: valid criticism of the post is that you have to have a degree to code. That’s bullshit.
Same. I didn’t finish even one degree, I’m entirely self taught. I have two prestige positions on my res. Breaking out is incredibly difficult under these circumstances, but once you have one good position that you’ve held long enough to prove you could do the job, education doesn’t matter. You’ll probably get at least a phone screening and if you know how to chat with people (not something that comes naturally to everyone), you should likely get a chance to prove yourself in real interviews.
Note: I bombed an interview to an embarrassing degree and got hired by one of the former interviewers when I applied again after leveling up.
