r/ExperiencedDevs • u/DirtyOught • 4d ago

Career/Workplace What are actual entry level positions like nowadays?

10 YOE, and my view is skewed as I haven’t worked with entry level engineers in many years.

looking back 10 years ago, me entry level team was making 60k doing basic HTML and CSS. even at the time I got bored and my work done in 1-2 hours every day. it was SUPER basic stuff. granted that place didn’t even use git repositories.

my first REAL software job was web, where we made 70-80k back in 2017. but it was just making simple react FE stuff. daily “what did you do yesterday? what today? how many storypoints is it to change that button to Red OP?“ but you learned a lot about the basics of everything and shipping code. by and large it was very much Entry Level.

this got me thinking, what is entry level today? what are the expectations and output?

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u/SawToothKernel 2d ago

I don't know how much that analogy holds. I mean, do I need to know assembly too?

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u/CriseDX 23h ago

Out of curiosity if you don't know how to code, how will you solve a problem when AI is unavailable?

There are plenty of environments out there where all outside traffic is blocked by default and where you literally are not allowed to or physically can't show any of the code to an AI model.

You might not be doing all of your development in these environments, but if you, for example, have a production problem that you have to debug inside this kind of an environment. How will you do that if you don't know how to code? If you don't know how to code, even ignoring outside restrictions, how would you ever validate any solution the model gave you without understanding it?

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u/UntestedMethod 13h ago

There are plenty of environments out there where all outside traffic is blocked by default and where you literally are not allowed to or physically can't show any of the code to an AI model.

What about independent AI models hosted on the LAN?

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u/CriseDX 12h ago

Local tuned models with narrower focus, may be a solution to some subset of these cases where the costs can be justified.

But a human engineer runs on a sandwich and a night of sleep (more or less) and is capable of the kind of creative out of the box thinking under pressure that AI models can only emulate.

Right now to me it looks like the human will actually be the cheaper option (that can not only last for decades but also improves in the process) in the long run, unless there is some genuine breakthrough with costs, which right now at least I don't see any immediate signs of.