On Friday, I welcomed Evgeny Shadchnev to discuss the question I’ve been wrestling with in recent weeks: what happens to junior engineers in the age of AI?
Evgeny trained roughly 5,000 beginners to become professional developers over 12 years at Makers Academy - I should know, I was one of them!
Now, as he coaches founders and builds with AI himself, he’s witnessing a fundamental shift in how we learn and work.
AI Summary
This conversation explores how AI has changed the value proposition of junior engineers. When AI can perform similar tasks “a hundred times faster and a thousand times cheaper,” companies struggle to justify investing in junior development. Yet paradoxically, AI also creates an unprecedented learning environment—anyone with dedication now has access to a “perfect tutor available 24-7 for free.”
We discuss the future of engineering: less about knowing specific languages or frameworks, more about thinking clearly, understanding context, and knowing what matters. We explore parallels between spirituality and working with AI—both require navigating relationships with something we can’t fully comprehend. The conversation concludes that intelligence alone was never what made us valuable.
Chapters
(00:00:00) - Welcome and Introduction
(00:03:33) - Evgeny’s Journey: From Developer to Makers Academy Founder
(00:06:33) - Do You See a Future for Junior Engineers?
(00:08:32) - Will There Be Engineers at All?
(00:12:19) - What Makes Us Human? Relevance and Consciousness
(00:14:23) - The Problem Makers Solved in 2013
(00:19:20) - What Changes with AI in the Picture?
(00:24:00) - The Best of Times and the Worst: AI as Teacher and Crutch
(00:29:28) - Learning to Work with AI: Skills and Techniques
(00:33:39) - The Junior Engineer Dilemma: Getting to Senior Without the Reps
(00:38:25) - The Blurring of Job Boundaries
(00:48:45) - Spirituality Meets Technology: What Makes Us Human
(00:58:42) - Evgeny’s Upcoming Pilgrimage to India
Key Moments
The Vanishing Value Proposition (19:20) - “Ten years ago, a junior developer might not have been as valuable as an experienced senior engineer. But it wasn’t valuable enough to invite them to the office, pay them a salary, and invest in their development until they get to the level when they become really useful. Today, this gap is huge.”
AI as Perfect Tutor (22:44) - “For someone who is genuinely dedicated to learning how to be a software developer, this learning, this feedback loop can be incredible. Absolutely incredible because there is just no excuse not to understand anything because you’ve got a perfect, absolutely perfect tutor available to you 24-7 for free.”
The Gym Analogy (36:03) - “The goal to try to really understand everything and every single bit is already lost. Like the world is just way too complex... On the one hand, I completely agree with you. When we accept an answer from effectively a wizard, an AI wizard, and we don’t fully understand it, but we’ve got some confidence that it works, it prevents us from developing the skill that helps us to validate the output.”
Start with Product, Not Syntax (38:25) - “I would probably not go through the classical path of let’s build this simple web page, let’s make it slightly more sophisticated... But I would maybe start thinking as an entrepreneur. Start with a product, something that’s going to be genuinely useful for the customer.”
Beyond Intelligence (56:13) - “Our ability to feel, be conscious, be in a relationship with other conscious beings is, I think, far closer to what makes us human than our IQ, our ability to write code or create value for some company or build businesses or all that useless stuff.”
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