My thoughts on AI and Remote work is a disaster for software engineers: AI and Remote work is a disaster for software engineers
Commentary
- AI and Remote work is a disaster for software engineers
- Spicy take. I’ve been working remotely for ~2 years as a junior-ish backend engineer, and I use AI daily. If AI + remote sabotages juniors were broadly true, I should be a pretty weak engineer by now. That hasn’t been my experience at all.remote work sabotages careers of youngsters
- I think remote doesn’t sabotage. It removes forced structure. If you don’t build your own, you stagnate and just feel lost. There’s no overhearing seniors, no accidental learning, no pressure to “look busy”. If you just do assigned tickets and log off, yeah, sure, you’ll stagnate. But that’s not a remote problem; that’s an ownership problem. You can sit in an office and do the same thing.AI — too little brain stimulation
- Same with AI. If you use it to skip thinking, you’ll get faster at producing things you don’t understand. But if you use it to explore, ask “why does this break?”, generate edge cases, compare approaches, it’s like having a patient senior who will walk through things with you endlessly. The difference is in how you engage with it, the intention rather than the environment.
- I do agree that juniors need tight feedback loops and exposure to better engineers. That’s harder to get remotely, and most companies don’t compensate for it well. But the answer isn’t “go back to office”, it’s “design better learning environments”, more deliberate mentorship, better code reviews, more context sharing.
- Also, the market point is real: AI is eating the bottom layer of trivial work. But that just raises the bar; it doesn’t remove the path. Juniors now need to show they can reason about systems, not just implement tickets.
- The point is, if an individual is naturally curious, remote or on-site doesn’t matter, he’ll succeed in whichever environment.