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 …
  • boaratio
    40·
    16 days ago

    Unemployed principal software engineer here. This graph is a lie.

    • criss_cross
      9·
      15 days ago

      Was gonna say I took a pay cut and I’m staying at my current braindead job right now because the market is ass.

    • thenextguy@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      16 days ago

      I got retired about six months before I was planning to. That line would have to be a lot steeper to get me to go back.

      • boaratio
        6·
        16 days ago

        I’m only 46 and have been looking since February.

    • locuester@lemmy.zipEnglish
      52·
      16 days ago

      The graph is anticipating the future. Not current. Take a couple years off.

      • boaratio
        15·
        16 days ago

        My family had just bought a house before I was laid off, and we’re burning through our savings at an alarming rate. If I don’t find a job soon, I’m going to have to liquidate my retirement account. I don’t have years, I have months.

      • grue
        7·
        16 days ago

        But if you take a couple of years off, won’t it be tough to get back in?

        • locuester@lemmy.zipEnglish
          8·
          15 days ago

          No one knows.

          I think a true Sr shortage is likely decade+ away. So if you need money you gotta make ends meet somehow.

          I’m leaning into the AI space, becoming proficient at understanding and developing harnesses for different purposes, running local models, adjusting to context switching more often than not, etc.

          I’m currently working a short term AI Cyber gig for a financial firm I already had a relationship with, but then taking time off to tinker.

          Dev/Sys/Net Operations, Cyber. All great fields for leaning into AI

          • heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
            4·
            15 days ago

            If few are entering as entry-level because snubbed by LLMs, there will be fewer seniors — eventually.

            • locuester@lemmy.zipEnglish
              5·
              15 days ago

              Yeah that’s what I said. It takes about a decade to become Sr. So that’s when we will start feeling the shortage.

        • setsubyou
          4·
          15 days ago

          If you can afford taking a few years off in the first place, you can also afford starting a company and doing your own projects for a while. Don’t leave the field behind, put some software on app stores and pick your topics by what skills you want to learn or maintain. Maybe it even makes money.

      • nothingcorporate@lemmy.today
        7·
        16 days ago

        Yup, nobody can get to senior for the same reason RAM is so high: LLMs. In this case, big-brained execs not hiring anyone at lower levels and replacing them all with AI…a little down the road there will be one old engineer named Lily who still understands how tech works and everyone will call her the oracle.