The LLM Incentive Ratchet
Why Your Senior Engineer Pipeline May Dry Up
Predicting the future impact of technology is fraught with humorously inaccurate examples. The telephone, automobiles, televisions, computers — all were once predicted to fail in overtaking their predecessors.
Further, there is no shortage of predictions that a new technology will take our jobs.
- 1960s: Computers will eliminate the need for office workers
- 1970s: ATM machines will replace bank tellers
- 1990s: The internet will lead to mass unemployment in the retail sector
So what’s different this time around? Why would this technological advancement, specifically recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), put some Product Engineering positions on the endangered species list?
Let’s take a closer look at how various incentives produce a unidirectional ratcheting effect toward more LLM adoption over human labor.
Throttling the Junior-to-Senior Pipeline
Are Senior level positions immediately in danger? I don’t believe so.
In fact, I expect the opposite in the short term. I expect the combination of highly competent engineers able to effectively use bleeding edge AI capabilities to be in high demand by employers over the next few years. I suspect we are entering a period where human productivity noticeably increases and peaks briefly before declining.
Highly competent professionals able to leverage AI will be in high demand over the next few years.
On the other hand, I expect junior and entry level positions to gradually shift from human workers to AI over time. This can come in two forms which are not mutually exclusive.
#1 The Evaporation of an Engineering Mindset
The ability to solve hard problems is a key skill that all software professionals must learn and dial in as it is crucial for advancing in their career and taking on harder, more complex problems.
Historically, search engines like Google have been used as a crutch to help individuals solve problems, but a search engine can only take you so far in doing your job. You, the person leveraging a search engine, still need to bring an engineering mindset in order to achieve an outcome.
LLMs are a step up from search engines as a crutch. They make it increasingly easy to paste in an issue, clarify, provide context, and eventually get the LLM to spit out a close enough solution if not a total solution.
The worrying reality of this situation is there isn’t a strong incentive for junior level individuals to learn how to think like an engineer. Quite the opposite. If one can solve a problem more quickly by outsourcing it to a token prediction black box, then why not? The crutch is there and near at hand. It’ll be used and used often. The prior path to seniority now has an impassible obstacle: the diminishing need to learn to think like an engineer.
With LLMs, junior software professionals will be incentivized to not think like an engineer.
#2 The LLM Utility Ratchet
Large Language Models will integrate within technology organizations as micro-assistants at first. “Write this unit test”. “Refactor this function”. “Produce this mockup.” LLMs will shave tens of minutes off of mundane tasks and generally be a net positive for disciplined Product Engineering teams.
As LLM improvements evolve they will be more and more capable of taking on small to medium sized tasks from start to finish in a fraction of the time of a human with increasing accuracy and increasingly within acceptable standards of quality.
Once small, simple software deliverables can be accomplished in near-autonomy by an LLM this will be a key milestone where we should expect to see the adoption and accommodations for LLMs to ratchet in one direction.
There will be a powerful incentive to change product engineering execution to be more tailored towards crafting work items into a structure that an LLM can quickly solve. Feedback loops tighten. Productivity increases. Teams experiment with different accommodations. The good ideas persist, while the less effective ones are discarded. LLM utilization and reliance ratchets.
The Diminishment of Juniors Today Leads to a Shortage of Seniors Tomorrow
There’s not much of a logical leap here. Every Senior+ Product Engineering professional was once much less experienced and through hard work and experience they got to where they are years later.
If the Junior software professional pipeline is squeezed, either through partial replacement or because they haven’t learned how to take on more challenging problems, then 3–5 years later where will the Senior software professionals come from?
“Bullshit. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
To the skeptics, I’d ask you to make the following considerations.
Image and Video Generation Is More Difficult
Image and video creation via generative AI was thought to be many years, even decades, away as recent as 2019. A few short years later it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern generated images from reality or whether artworks were produced by professional artists.
Likewise, we are on the precipice of video generation sweeping through several industries. Consider that generating convincing videos with object permanence is a more difficult problem than generating mockups, database schemas, or code.
Tech companies are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into advancing LLMs. They are quickly conquering text, image, and video generation. Code generation is well on its way to catching up.
We All Helplessly Steer Towards Incentives
Businesses will be incentivized to be more economical with their resources in order to survive and remain competitive and profitable.
As of today LLMs cost a few dollars per 1 million tokens. (For context, the tokenized version of this blog post would cost 6/10 of a penny.) Human software professionals, on the other hand, have six figure total compensation packages, benefits, time off, feelings, and are orders of magnitude slower within specialized tasks.
Even if a company on moral, ethical, or cultural value grounds opts to ignore the above statement they will increasingly feel the squeeze from a competitor who is able to operate more efficiently. LLMs will allow businesses to operate more efficiently and therefore businesses will need to adapt to survive, as they are incentivized to do so.
