There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers. Every company on earth is about to want one who can drive a fleet of agents with judgment — and almost nobody …

ETA: summary…

Author describes how agentic coding tools have disincentivized the developer training and mentorship pipeline that the software industry has implicitly relied on to produce seasoned developers, predicting that once the shortage is fully realized it could take years to reverse.

The solution proposed is for managers and senior developers to get ahead of this shortage by foregoing the immediate yet shortlived productivity maximization offered by the agent-multiplied-senior structure in favor of longterm sustainability by deliberately facilitating experience fan-out to juniors.

The methodology proposed is based on a successful nuclear engineering apprenticeship program carried out on active service naval submarines.

  • Riskable@programming.devEnglish
    7·
    5 days ago

    So their “solution” is for senior developers to keep giving work to junior developers… In order to prevent senior developer salaries from skyrocketing.

    • annoying_cyclist@programming.dev
      6·
      5 days ago

      …the same junior developers that management and the investor class have stopped hiring.

      Most seniors I know like mentoring newer engineers and would happily have more juniors on the team, but we don’t get to make hiring decisions. I don’t like that we have a glut of unemployed/underemployed new college grads and I feel bad for them, but I do not remotely care that management may have to pay me more than they’d like in 5 years because they decided they didn’t need a junior pipeline anymore. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
        2·
        5 days ago

        likely they are going to rely more on you or hire a smaller amount of senior devs, so they can avoid paying for junior or even entry level for fresh employees in the future.

    • Septimaeus@infosec.pubOP
      1·
      5 days ago

      Good point. I think most of the pitch here is to stakeholders and hiring managers, since they frame it explicitly as "buying senior-engineer futures at today’s price,” but I also think they’re wrong that “your seniors will hate it.” IMO that depends entirely on what kind of seniors you’ve brought onto the team.

      If they’re motivated entirely by money or personal accomplishment, or they don’t play well with other developers, like the type we’ve all met who are eventually siloed on smaller projects, then yes I’d agree. They’ll hate it. But they never wanted to mentor juniors in the first place. I’d call those mid-level engineers.

      None of the true seniors I’ve known could grind through repetitive agentic workflows daily without eventually hitting a brick wall of boredom. And I think most who gave it a little thought would realize this in advance. The emptiness and tedium of that work alone would be deal breaker. The only exception might be former seniors who are burned out and just want to retire ASAP, to do literally anything else.

      But otherwise I don’t think most seniors want this scenario to play out. At all.