Systems thinkers are the future
Have you ever wondered how many people taking on software engineering jobs actually enjoy them? How many of them are passionate about the tasks they are doing?
It is not a question about being good or bad developer. In fact, it might actually have reverse correlation.
The point I’m trying to convey is that not everyone is cut out to do everything and that’s more than okay–that’s actually healthy. Because it makes society diverse.
Now, continuing my previous post on junior developers I want to drop another idea: juniors will not become obsolete, the point of entry will shift.
What do I mean by this? Well, previously when you wanted to pursue career in software development you would start with an ever-green question of what programming language to learn, what framework to pick up and so on. Minor technical details.
With the advancement of LLMs this is shifting to a higher level of abstraction: what do you want to build, not how.
You know how big IT consulting firms have positions of systems and business analytics? They aren’t strictly required to know programming. It is another job.
So here is my take: with the advent of AI, junior positions will shift from deciding what language or framework to learn to learning analytics basics.
You will not build the systems yourself, but you will build and communicate and debate vision of the systems. Why they should work the way they should, regardless of the technical details.
And if you are curious, you can advance later and deepen your knowledge about particular technology.
In a sense, it is an inverse approach: instead of starting with a programming language (bottom-to-top), you start with a vision of the system (top-to-bottom).
Vision requires intuition and that’s something that LLMs cannot provide.