Microsoft and CMU Team Up to Train Early Career Software Engineers

Re:Microsoft and CMU Team Up to Train Early Career Software ... by keeda on Sunday October 18, 2026 @03:44AM (#50138855)

Yes, that dynamic is essentially what this is proposing to solve. Microsoft is acknowledging that junior engineers will be less in demand due to AI (and presumably it is experiencing that itself) because economics, i.e. when supervised by senior engineers, AI is way cheaper and faster than junior engineers.

These economics would choke off the pipeline that turns junior engineers into senior engineers, which would still presumably needed to supervise the AI.

I don't see the irrationality here?

And yes, bottlenecks at MSFT (or any large corporation) are unrelated to kLOC/hour, which I would argue are primarily because of human factors... which also AI threatens to obviate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50121996

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Re:Microsoft and CMU Team Up to Train Early Career Software ... by socializer on Sunday October 18, 2026 @12:45PM (#50142725)

> I don't see the irrationality here?

You're replacing juniors with AI to save money (because again, I doubt there are velocity gains to be had at MSFT), and then you're spending money to keep junior SWEs on payroll and train them in a parallel program.

There's no way this is cheaper than just letting some junior SWEs actually do the coding on the actual projects you're building, right? And gain experience that way?

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