Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
In addition to reliability issues, it often engenders a mind-numbing workflow and an environment where junior developers will never acquire the expertise to become senior developers capable of designing complex systems.
Yeah, I mean I feel like uh the models have been getting a lot better at sort of agent-based longer running coding tasks and it seems pretty clear that they are now actually pretty capable and depending on exactly your definition of of junior engineer it seems pretty spot-on I would say.
But this is the book that I give to every junior engineer because I think like nobody ever really talks about debugging as like a discipline outside of like basic heuristics.
So, even in a world of AI where some things are easier, we were talking earlier about mindset, AI fluency. From my experience, younger folks are more open-minded. They tend to be more native in some of these new ways of working.
They just recently released a report, and I think like you really have to squint to see anything happening. Like basically, if you want to take kind of like uh an an approach across the entire economy and looking at even looking at like software engineering, like the most exposed sort of sectors, there's just like not really anything going on. There might be a little bit of a signal about like junior developers getting jobs less than before, and that but that's like a less than before rather than a level shift.
The thing that I find interesting is that's not novel. This has been the thing we've always been trying to do forever. How do we get a junior engineer to ship code safely without breaking stuff? Right? How do we make patterns in the codebase? How do we make tests? Like it's it's all the old stuff that we've always wanted to do.
There's always negative sentiment that exists for any business that's getting hyped. They have no incentive to correct it. Um so again it's complicated because I know the training costs are a big part of it. Uh the R&D department is is hugely expensive but long-term inference makes sense as a business and I think it it always will.
In a sense, we're all turning into project managers, right? And and we can have an army of junior programmers called agents that will just spit out reams of code, but someone's got to have the big picture and review all of that. And so, increasingly our craft is going from one of writing the code to one of of reviewing the code and and building the architecture of the code and overseeing the work, if if you will.
Yeah, AI is an amplifier. And if uh if you're young and learning quickly, AI is going to amplify that or can amplify that. So, I I personally think this is this is the golden age of the junior programmer.
the marketing metrics the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time. They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.
Assuming you are still hiring junior engineers (you really should be even in this AI era), the good ones will learn quickly and want to see career progress in their first few years of working.
When a team of 10 AI-enabled super-designers can do the work that used to require a UX department of 100, the need for higher management levels shrivels. I call this the “pancaking” of the design profession.
I would argue having a business leader run these institutions and then having a board that has, itself, diverse viewpoints, and by the way, permanently structured to have diverse viewpoints is a much better way to run a university than picking an academic that the faculty supports.
Yes, and that's true inside companies too. And so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data. And that really is about trying to... There are little things you can do. So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last.
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