Ask HN: What will tech employment look like in 10 years?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

LLMs, productivity, and code quality

  • Many expect “one senior + LLM” to match or exceed several juniors, but others foresee a flood of low‑quality, poorly tested “AI slop.”
  • Concern that management will normalize zero‑test, vibe‑coded output as acceptable, pushing quality down.
  • Some argue current codebases already contain huge amounts of bad logic from weak seniors, contractors, and rushed teams; LLMs change degree, not kind.

Juniors, career ladders, and role structure

  • Strong consensus that junior and mid‑level roles will shrink sharply; companies will prefer seniors using LLMs or offshored talent.
  • Worry this breaks the pipeline for creating future seniors; “where do seniors come from if no one hires juniors?”
  • A few predict a Mythical Man‑Month‑style model: one lead, a small number of assistants, and domain experts rather than large dev teams.

Testing, debugging, and system analysis

  • Several expect growth in testing, QA, and “integration engineering” as LLMs accelerate code creation but also bug and complexity creation.
  • Some envision test engineers morphing into business‑analyst‑like roles that use LLMs to generate and adapt tests from requirements.
  • System analysts and architects are seen as coming back into vogue to structure problems for LLMs and clean up LLM‑generated spaghetti.

Offshoring vs AI

  • One view: more offshoring plus LLMs, with onshore staff limited to senior “guides.”
  • Counter‑view: if AI is cheap, it will replace low‑cost offshore labor, reducing the need to outsource.
  • Disagreement whether current outsourcing is mostly grunt work or “almost all work but cheaper.”

Skills that remain valuable

  • Repeated theme: coding gets easier; software engineering (architecture, domain modeling, understanding why the software exists) stays hard.
  • Some foresee politics and narrative skills dominating if AI takes over most technical work; others insist deep technical skill will always be required to supervise AI safely.
  • Simplicity and minimal moving parts are predicted to be more valued than today’s fashion for sprawling, complex stacks.

Market dynamics and opportunity

  • One camp is pessimistic: collapse of “knowledge work,” eventual unemployability even for seniors, or a small elite serving wealthy clients.
  • Another camp is optimistic: indie and small teams using AI to outcompete big, slow organizations; more robotics, onshoring, and domain‑specific software creating new demand.
  • Several note that predictions of total automation often fail; others warn “this time might be different,” but admit it’s fundamentally uncertain.