Telescoping

We're trying to hire a senior engineer. After that, the average age of my team is going to be over 40. It's a bit scary come to think of it. Is it a good thing? Or a bad thing? I don't know. Are we going to be slow and boring as a team? What would the youngest on the team thin? I don't have the answers. It just happened. I didn't design it or plan it.

The thing is - it probably doesn't make much sense to hire junior developers at this stage. The logic behind hiring a junior developer is 2 folds:

1. there is always going to be something that is "too simple for" or "below" a senior developer.
2. given the choice, it's almost always better to "grow" your own talent instead of acquiring it from out side.

Even if "2" is still true, to some extent, the logic of "1" just doesn't hold anymore. The following are simple facts we're facing in software industry as far as coding agents goes:

1. Agents have way more knowledge about the basic materials of programming - language syntax, API parameters.
2. Compared to most average software developers, it knows better how to build software. I.e. after reading all the text books, blog posts, cream of open source projects, it knows the best practices of software engineering.
3. It follows instruction better. A junior developer probably suffer from lack of listening skill, which is very much undervalued. Agents read everything you give to it without missing a word. Anthropics and OpenAI has fine tuned their model to follow instructions better and better.
4. It's faster.

So if I were to hire some junior developer in the team, I'd have to convince myself that I am willing to let go all of the above for the sake of growing him/her, while at the same time bear the risk of loosing it to an competitor after the growing is done? It just doesn't make sense at all.

This is software engineering. But it's probably true for a lot of other knowledge work as well. Law, health care, finance, etc etc. Why would anyone hire any random young man as a charity?

The disruption is going to be real if not already. What are the possible outcome?

For most people, having a job is a necessity. This is not going to be true any more. There will be people with jobs. But they'll be highly trained experts, more so than current level. And their job will probably be supervising AI agents instead of doing anything concrete. For the majority of human race, to work to be able to survive is not needed anymore. But people still needs progress, connection, purpose, etc. These things will come from other activities, not work. Those activities are looking more and more likely to be something in the virtual world, built by AI agents.

All these are speculations of course. And that's assuming AI won't cause world ending scenarios as well.

Technology cannot be stopped. Mankind thought we tamed corps and livestock - it's the other way around. We're conditioned to stay in boxes like cars, elevators, instead of walking in grasses and open fields. We fall asleep many feet above without a single shred of worry. Things will only change faster this time. Let's see.