I’m under the impression that the opposite is happening. It’s not the senior positions that are getting eliminated, instead, they’re eliminating the entry-level positions because they can just have AI do it. The senior positions are then forced to troubleshoot the AI on top of all their other responsibilities. The end result means less gets done overall and they deplete their talent pool.
I was trying to remember how my boss said it in a meeting when he was salivating at the potential savings. It was a 2-for-1 deal where at least one technical expert role got eliminated. So in his mind the remaining employee supervises (or is supervised by) an AI that performs what they call the “non-value add” work like data aggregation, formatting, etc so that the person can focus on “analysis”.
Of course this is just their intention and flies in the face of reality once you begin losing institutional knowledge from layoffs and natural attrition and the technical debt starts accumulating so you need people to clean it up. In my experience they’ve preferred to outsource some of this shit work because it looks good to have lower payroll expense even if your operating expenses increase from paying contractors and consultants.
I still think that ultimately at the aggregate level there is a deskilling because the leftover people are no longer required to be SMEs per their department function and rather become AI supervisors with enough knowledge to troubleshoot problems. Like in finance you wouldn’t need CPAs to do accounting, you just need some staff accountants who themselves are being squeezed.
Of course this is just their intention and flies in the face of reality once you begin losing institutional knowledge from layoffs and natural attrition and the technical debt starts accumulating so you need people to clean it up.
I’m the only developer at my job and we have mountains of technical debt that come just from me. The one time I tried using AI, it just made that debt accumulation exponentially worse and I’ve just finished a 4 month long brain melting re-write of out entire system by hand.
I can’t imagine being somewhere that I had to take on the technical debt of other experienced developers leaving, and my own, and and AIs…
I’m under the impression that the opposite is happening. It’s not the senior positions that are getting eliminated, instead, they’re eliminating the entry-level positions because they can just have AI do it. The senior positions are then forced to troubleshoot the AI on top of all their other responsibilities. The end result means less gets done overall and they deplete their talent pool.
That’s also true.
I was trying to remember how my boss said it in a meeting when he was salivating at the potential savings. It was a 2-for-1 deal where at least one technical expert role got eliminated. So in his mind the remaining employee supervises (or is supervised by) an AI that performs what they call the “non-value add” work like data aggregation, formatting, etc so that the person can focus on “analysis”.
Of course this is just their intention and flies in the face of reality once you begin losing institutional knowledge from layoffs and natural attrition and the technical debt starts accumulating so you need people to clean it up. In my experience they’ve preferred to outsource some of this shit work because it looks good to have lower payroll expense even if your operating expenses increase from paying contractors and consultants.
I still think that ultimately at the aggregate level there is a deskilling because the leftover people are no longer required to be SMEs per their department function and rather become AI supervisors with enough knowledge to troubleshoot problems. Like in finance you wouldn’t need CPAs to do accounting, you just need some staff accountants who themselves are being squeezed.
I’m the only developer at my job and we have mountains of technical debt that come just from me. The one time I tried using AI, it just made that debt accumulation exponentially worse and I’ve just finished a 4 month long brain melting re-write of out entire system by hand.
I can’t imagine being somewhere that I had to take on the technical debt of other experienced developers leaving, and my own, and and AIs…