Read the article.

Okay, but what is meant with experience though. I didn’t read the entire article, did it say he was in the “industry” for forty years or that he has been programming for as long, which is very believable.

I’m giving him shit about trying to claim experience back to 11 years old, since he’s 51.

What the hell are you taking about?

That last paragraph echoes my recent experience of dealing with LLMs at work (we've finally been told to use it despite my objections).

The code works, I guess, for whatever immediate things the person told the LLM, but there's A LOT of code and it's rife with strange architectural decisions. It's taking me forever to get through reviews and I've become a bottleneck. I see something strange in the code and now I have to go through and try to reverse engineer the decision myself, because the person who opened the PR lost sight of the details.

Maybe I'm worrying too much about the details now since the next iteration of LLM output will just pave over it. Maybe code quality doesn't matter on an LLM driven team, but it sure does make review difficult.

This whole thing feels like we are sacrificing the future for perceived short term gains. Or maybe those gains or real, I really don't know anymore.

I can't shake the feeling that this whole thing is like building a bridge without actually verifying the members. It might seem ok now, but is the bridge going to collapse in a few years because of an improper joint?

If “Adam Thornhill” wants to claim 40 years in the industry, they should use an author photo that isn’t 40 years old.

My hypotheticals got you to think about more than just money,

Sigh, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I had already thought though all of those before.

which is my point: there’s more to a job than money.

I'm perfectly aware of that. You're getting close to my ultimate point, which ultimately is: There's more to life than a job

If I could get a wage to live a minimally comfortable life with the occasional semestral luxury and the job were a dream, you couldn’t pay me enough to work at any shitty employer.

Sure, but those jobs/employers are increasingly rare, and when the need exist to find a replacement like that it is even more rare. Unless you're within perhaps 5 years of retirement right now, the likelihood you're going to find your described desired job that will last for the rest of your working life looks very unlikely to me. If that's your plan, I wish you luck.

With that out of the way, since your hypothetical is purely about money and nothing else, no job satisfaction, no evil deeds of the employer, no questionable ethics, no seeing the kids for 1-2 years, no functional relationship for the same amount of time, no work life balance, no travel distance, no in office mandate, no sense of belonging with my current employer, nothing but money and I somehow fell on my head to ignore all of that…sure, I’d be a selfish capitalist pig and switch jobs.

That isn't what I asked. You're changing the hypothetical I posted, then answered your changed one. With our handful of interactions, I believe I have a good understanding of your thought process and how you approach an issue now. I have heard what you believe and you have heard a part of my argument. Thank you for conversing up to now.

My hypotheticals got you to think about more than just money, which is my point: there's more to a job than money. If I could get a wage to live a minimally comfortable life with the occasional semestral luxury and the job were a dream, you couldn't pay me enough to work at any shitty employer.

With that out of the way, since your hypothetical is purely about money and nothing else, no job satisfaction, no evil deeds of the employer, no questionable ethics, no seeing the kids for 1-2 years, no functional relationship for the same amount of time, no work life balance, no travel distance, no in office mandate, no sense of belonging with my current employer, nothing but money and I somehow fell on my head to ignore all of that... sure, I'd be a selfish capitalist pig and switch jobs.

Great hypothetical that doesn’t translate to the real world, so I’m not sure why I should consider it.

Its not supposed to be a real world example. Its an exaggerated hypothetical to prove a point. You should consider it because its an exercise in isolating one specific element to measure your own response to just that element without distraction of other (possibly relevant) points.

I can make hypotheticals too. What if the dickish employer leads to burn out 80% of the time that most people take years to recover from. Would you take the chance?

If you're extending my hypothetical, hell yes I would! I would work 2 years earn enough money to never have to work again. The future "years of recovery" would be doing whatever I wanted.

I think you may be making the assumption that if you didn't take the dickish employer position, that you'd be guaranteed 20 years of non-dickish employer employment. If you've been watching the job market over the last 10 years, I think you should know that isn't likely.

The result of staying with non-dickish employer is that you may be 6-8 years tops at non-dickish employer getting simple cost-of-living raises, but never advancing beyond your position, and possibly not allowing you to save enough for retirement at the lifestyle you want to live. Then some year in the future your non-dickish employer gets bought out by private equity or put out of business by a competitor multinational company. So then you're back in the job market with a very high likelihood of only having dickish employers to choose from for future employment for the next 8-12 years.

Meanwhile, your former co-worker worked for dickish employer for 2 years, cashed out, and travels the world with his wife studying history while his wife paints because thats what they like to do with their time.

What if 2 year is guaranteed to give you a lifelong trauma. Would you take the chance?

Depends on the definition of trauma in your specific hypothetical. I'd argue all employers cause some level and type of trauma. So it would be a discussion of degrees and how it manifests.

Or hey, what if working at that employer means you have to do things like write code that kills humans and they are then used in your country? What if earning 10x means your kids will never know privacy again and you contributed to it. Worth the 10x?

That doesn't meet my definition of dickish employer. What you're describing here is far worse. You're proving my point with my original hypothetical that was isolating just pay.

I've answered your hypothetical would you like to answer mine now?

Great hypothetical that doesn't translate to the real world, so I'm not sure why I should consider it.

I can make hypotheticals too. What if the dickish employer leads to burn out 80% of the time that most people take years to recover from. Would you take the chance? What if 2 year is guaranteed to give you a lifelong trauma. Would you take the chance?

Or hey, what if working at that employer means you have to do things like write code that kills humans and they are then used in your country? What if earning 10x means your kids will never know privacy again and you contributed to it. Worth the 10x?

We built an AI tool where I work, that looks at the stories that get written for us and complains until the story has a meaningfully good quality. I really like that kind of AI use.

We still write our code almost fully by hand.

It makes me wonder how these 5 senior engineers came to found a company that works like that. Do they not like writing the code? Do they have dreams of being rich? Do they believe the product they will produce is so essential that the process doesn’t matter?

I started programming when I was 14 years old, and turned 34 this year. That makes about 20 years.

Figuring out the syntax of a new language, the satisfaction of getting something to compile, and getting the "perfect" dev environment on my Arch Linux install was a lot of fun. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything, but at this point I've gotten all the fulfillment I'm going to get from it.

Even before AI agents came along, I had already moved on to caring about the impact of the software: benefit to society (for my open source contributions); revenue to company (for half my day job); learning business skills to improve my earning potential (for the other half of my day job).

I would delegate the actual coding to junior engineers, and spend most of my time designing the higher level architecture and everything else needed to herd them into delivering the high level business objective.

Unfortunately, the current generation of AI agents (Opus 5, GPT 5.6 Sol) can do a somewhat similar role to those juniors. They don't have the human element that made it fun to mentor the juniors, but they also don't have feelings so I can give them feedback without worrying about coming off as a condescending asshole.

Dunno if that's helpful at all to you, but if you're genuinely wondering why a decent chunk of senior engineers are sticking around in the AI world, then there's one perspective.

The only way I see this ending is Juinor wages plummeting and turning into unpaid internships or paid (the other way) ‘educational programs’.

I do have a slightly more positive note on that. Universities are slow to adapt their curriculums to new technologies, but they will eventually care that they're producing graduates that provide so little value to companies that they're unemployable.

They'll begin to produce graduates that are the equivalent of today's mid level and senior engineers. While I don't know exactly what kind of education can instill in 4 years the essence of what took me decades to learn, I do know that pretty much every generation of humans have surpassed their parents so far. So I have every confidence you kids will figure it out.

I feel like larger orgs have too many incompetent idiots and useless layers of management to appropriately manage people. So you have people extruding AI slop because that's optimal for getting some fucking ghoul middle manager to see you. The guy who fixes bugs and writes useful tests isn't going to impress fucking Joanne who can't even code but somehow is still in charge of the department.

I think this is a big problem at Google. You get rewarded for shipping something, even if that means killing a better product.

Other than that, yeah I guess it's a social game. Getting people to like you matters more than you might think it should.

and the thing they do is they tell themselves they need to almost cosplay being a more senior engineer than they are.

I don't think it's just engineers telling themselves this. Every place I've worked has had the credo that you have to demonstrate the abilities of Engineer Rank N before you can be seriously considered as a candidate for Engineer Rank N. In practice this makes everyone, but especially juniors looking to move up in the company, overwork themselves in an attempt to demonstrate that they can handle the promotion they may or may not (but statistically, not) ever receive. The few that do start angling for the Rank N+1 promotion, and so on all the way up the pyramid. I think this is a major factor in the "you have to leave to get a promotion" phenomenon, because every major shop is essentially trying to get everyone working for pay one rank below where they're actually performing.

I think in moments like this, the thing you need to do is actually a little counterintuitive. but you have to start from a position of assuming that everyone around you is operating in good faith, okay? like, they hired you for you. they didn’t hire you for who you think you’re going to be in six months. they like you for who you are right now, bro.

This is good advice, but I think it's worth highlighting that you start with that assumption. I think finding a healthy employment situation is kind of like dating in that way. If you operate on the assumption that they like you for who you are, you will quickly get feedback on that assumption, for better or worse. If you get positive feedback, yay, they're cool with you and you can be yourself in the relationship. If they want you to change it gets more complicated. I think there are ways that a good manager can help you grow professionally, but it's tricky because they can also manipulate you by dangling a series of carrots in front of you that you will never reach the end of. If you don't chase that carrot with the alacrity they expect, you might get PIP'd. That's your cue to leave, IMO. I've never seen someone come back from a PIP in any shop large enough to have a formal PIP process.

Humans hate the slop. This doesn't work.

People keep trying to say, "maybe the AI would do a good job at handling the communication" and then they see it autogenerate paragraphs of slop that no one ever wants to fucking read, and the person copying and pasting it couldn't even be bothered to read it. It's pointless if people are sending messages no one cares about

I think it's going to be a weird period where we're expected to do everything that involves real engineering, anything "business centric", and they're going to be like "yes we gave you $500k annual, please provide the Secure And Well Architecture of the Olden Times... We need you to redesign a new system from scratch because the slop is losing us money"

...which I'm personally okay with, because I didn't really save that much for retirement or plan on it anytime soon? I was getting more worried about grey hairs aging me out of software, but maybe they'll age me back in.

It big enough. I don't know how they feel about the corp, but if I was bright eyed at one point, I'm now a cynical old bastard who will tell you to stop talking because I can't listen to stupid shit.

Yeah your probably right. Its the:

X, not Y verbiage.

Maybe your juniors just don't give the same amount of fucks about working for some big faceless corp who doesn't give a shit about them (20 juniors eh? Sounds pretty big), and no promise of a better future.

This is probably a bad thing, but I can live with general programming skills becoming the new COBOL programming skills.

they dont want to hire more new to the field, because that would be more payroll they had to payout.

i think they like other stems,. like biotech has done rely more on the senior level/scientists, of course they hire less of them, and not hire any, or barely any of the entry or junior level employees. so its a law of diminishing returns for a employer since they are mostly holding onto more "experience" employees.

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.

New seniors are also newbies. I haven't seen a single senior who's been productive from day one. It always takes a few months to understand the systems organisation, get to know how people work, and so on. People expect 3 months to be enough, but it can take up until a year.

Regarding people staying and not making space, I'm not sure where the problem is. If someone gains skills, they get a raise. If there isn't money, that means you can't keep them around anyway because there isn't enough work to pay them. If you're still growing you'll be able to pay them and their increased skillset.

IMO there is no "space" issue. A team that starts out with 5 juniors and 5 seniors that grows into 10 seniors isn't an issue unless you can't pay for it. Am I missing something

40 + year greybeard here. I never touch AI. When I am told I must use it, I say No. When I am told my use will be measured and part of my yearly review,, I say 'record 0 usage now'

I am the only senior left with 20 snot nosed kids using AI to code, create IaaS scripts.

I can say No to AI because the company cannot have me quit...

Staying in tech today is soil crushing. Me and my fellow techs would get excited about trying stuff, experimenting with new software, ooohing and aaahing because someone got a fancy keyboard.....

Now everything sucks.