There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers. Every company on earth is about to want one who can drive a fleet of agents with judgment — and almost nobody …
My family had just bought a house before I was laid off, and we’re burning through our savings at an alarming rate. If I don’t find a job soon, I’m going to have to liquidate my retirement account. I don’t have years, I have months.
If you can afford taking a few years off in the first place, you can also afford starting a company and doing your own projects for a while. Don’t leave the field behind, put some software on app stores and pick your topics by what skills you want to learn or maintain. Maybe it even makes money.
I think a true Sr shortage is likely decade+ away. So if you need money you gotta make ends meet somehow.
I’m leaning into the AI space, becoming proficient at understanding and developing harnesses for different purposes, running local models, adjusting to context switching more often than not, etc.
I’m currently working a short term AI Cyber gig for a financial firm I already had a relationship with, but then taking time off to tinker.
Dev/Sys/Net Operations, Cyber. All great fields for leaning into AI
Yup, nobody can get to senior for the same reason RAM is so high: LLMs. In this case, big-brained execs not hiring anyone at lower levels and replacing them all with AI…a little down the road there will be one old engineer named Lily who still understands how tech works and everyone will call her the oracle.
The graph is anticipating the future. Not current. Take a couple years off.
My family had just bought a house before I was laid off, and we’re burning through our savings at an alarming rate. If I don’t find a job soon, I’m going to have to liquidate my retirement account. I don’t have years, I have months.
But if you take a couple of years off, won’t it be tough to get back in?
If you can afford taking a few years off in the first place, you can also afford starting a company and doing your own projects for a while. Don’t leave the field behind, put some software on app stores and pick your topics by what skills you want to learn or maintain. Maybe it even makes money.
No one knows.
I think a true Sr shortage is likely decade+ away. So if you need money you gotta make ends meet somehow.
I’m leaning into the AI space, becoming proficient at understanding and developing harnesses for different purposes, running local models, adjusting to context switching more often than not, etc.
I’m currently working a short term AI Cyber gig for a financial firm I already had a relationship with, but then taking time off to tinker.
Dev/Sys/Net Operations, Cyber. All great fields for leaning into AI
If few are entering as entry-level because snubbed by LLMs, there will be fewer seniors — eventually.
Yeah that’s what I said. It takes about a decade to become Sr. So that’s when we will start feeling the shortage.
Yup, nobody can get to senior for the same reason RAM is so high: LLMs. In this case, big-brained execs not hiring anyone at lower levels and replacing them all with AI…a little down the road there will be one old engineer named Lily who still understands how tech works and everyone will call her the oracle.
Just Warhammer 40k things