this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Entry-level devs ain't replacing anyone. One senior dev is going to be doing the work of a whole team
For now.
But when a mid-tier or entry level dev can do 60% of what a senior can do, it’ll be a great way to cut costs.
I don’t think we’re there now. It’s just that that’s the ultimate goal - employ fewer people, and pay the remaining people you do employ less.
Yeah, the glorious future where every half-as-good-as-expert developer is now only 25% as good as an expert (a level of performance also known as being "completely shit at it"), but he's writing 10x the amount of unusable shitcode.
You scoff, but this is exactly the future CEOs and upper management absolutely want.
Why? Because labor is too expensive and “entitled” (wanting things like time off, health insurance, remote work, and so on).
They will do everything they can to squeeze labor and disempower the bargaining capability that knowledge workers have.
Why do you think Microsoft has been trying to screengrab everything that knowledge workers do? To train their models to do that work instead. Why did they just lay off thousands of workers and direct something like $80 billion towards AI investments?
You know why.
Quality doesn’t matter. Income minus expenses matter. You are an expense. They will do everything they can to replace you as soon as they catch even a whiff of economic viability (or even before), because even if it’s more costly right now, it can drive down labor costs by putting the squeeze on employees.
And that is the point.
Okay but that is different from the argument that entry developers only need to be half as good to deliver a working product