Yes, but here's the problem: Those steps behind you are being destroyed. It's not the senior engineers who are getting replaced; it's the people fresh out of college looking for their first job. And as AI gets better each step above that first job will disappear.
You'll be fine. Your job won't get replaced until after you're gone. But when you look around you're not going to see any young people.
Given the pace of AI development I don't think that's guaranteed. The game is to stay on top of the AI even if it means expanding your interests from programming to mostly product management.
Right? The whole rhetoric around "it's just the juniors" is the most "4. bargaining <- you are here" thing that keeps getting posted all over the place. I don't get it. How can you look at the progress in the past 3 years (in a month now) since chatgpt was first released and say "oh, it's definitely just the juniors, all seniors are safe"???
In the enterprise consulting space, I see myself increasingly working with more with low-code/no-code tools, AI agents, and being dragged into architecture activitivies.
Classical programming, the stuff to do in .NET, Java, Go whatever, from the ground up is eroding away.
Ready made products get acquired, integrations that were done via serverless/microservices, are now being tried with AI agents, and the only thing left as technical task is drawing diagrams, and letting the few coders that are still around where they should click, or a couple of MCP tools to be made available.
The horror. People making weekend plans.
Especially around SV culture, this goes over the top.
What absolute fucking self-congratulatory drivel.
Sure, Mr. Palpatine. Any time now.