I see it the other way around the senior engineer is expensive and costs a lot 2 juniors are cheap. Who cares if their code is crap they produce it really fast so they find a bug, just fix it quickly. If anything the time a Sr. spends thinking about things to do things "right" is seen as a waste of time. Whereas the jr. will produce an enormous amount of buggy code but they can fix the bugs quickly by just throwing another prompt to ChatGPT to solve.

Now some might say that the code will be terrible quality and buggy and full of holes and the users will hate it, it is never economically viable to build enormous systems on a house of cards like that. To which I respond, you just described every piece of enterprise software I've ever used ever.

Because as soon as you tilt from producing features to fixing bugs, you are losing traction and your competitors will win and now you are bankrupt.

I've seen entire businesses collapse because of this mentality.

Tell that to SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, or a dozen other enterprise software vendors.

> you are losing traction and your competitors will win

i mean, unless your competitor produces order of magnitude less bugs than you, how can this be true?

Yes, this is also why senior engs get payed so well. Actually if you are junior dev you basically cost money, imo. However a lot of companies hire those in hopes they will make their career and stay longer - especially startups do that, as they can slide on the company culture hook way more. Also they need them as senior engs require equivalents of "secretary" to handle less import things.

I don't mean to sound mean, senior devs are also secretaries of their cto and so on.

Disagree -- I think chatGPT will make juniors more palatable to hire. ChatGPT will basically give juniors a free pair programmer to baby-sit their work/progress. Why pay extra for senior devs when juniors can become much more efficient thanks to ChatGPT becoming stack-overflow on steroids. I think the wage gap between junior and senior will actually drop massively. I predict teams will keep 1-3 architect level positions for designs and reviews and replace all seniors with cheaper juniors.

I really doubt that ChatGPT will be able to give the kind of guidance that turns juniors into seniors.

Getting juniors un-stuck on "simple" problems, maybe. Stack Overflow already does this. Image doesn't build? Search for the error message online. Don't know how to build the old software that only works in Ubuntu 14.10? Sure, you'll find that.

Suggestions on how to refactor, proper design of interfaces, what skill to acquire next? Maybe, but that will be a bigger surprise.

I think it could go either way depending on the product. For example in app/game/web development where code quantity > quality, hire more juniors who can bust out code with ChatGPT all day. But if you're developing software for medical devices, vehicle control systems, HFT, etc. Then nobody's going to let some college grad using ChatGPT touch it. You'd hire senior engineers who can be responsible for the reliable operation of the software and they can use ChatGPT for code review, test suites, etc.

Even in the gaming industry. Typically you have people developing an engine, common frameworks... tools that downstream work to lower branches - now I can just type to chatgpt rather than go through requesting/reviewing, see quicker where I mis-designed my "framework" etc... I am afraid it's gonna be not great for junior engs all together.

Every org has varying level of engineers. This technology will make cheap grind, well cheap. We see the progression. With the speed of changes it seems we should all be worried. (as why does it matter despite being last we fell a year after)