Just post your prompt, I don't need to know what an LLM thinks of juniors in the age of AI and I don't know which parts you wrote.
Junior Developers in the Age of AI
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#12I'm happy to hire juniors but they must still have relevant skills. One question I ask is "how does one build a coding agent" - if a junior is unable to outline the ideas around building and expanding coding agents, it indicates they are not aware of what industry they work in.
I'm a senior dev and not sure I could answer that offhand.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#13I'm happy to hire juniors but they must still have relevant skills. One question I ask is "how does one build a coding agent" - if a junior is unable to outline the ideas around building and expanding coding agents, it indicates they are not aware of what industry they work in.
I guess I'm not aware of what industry I continue to work in.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#14A few points here.
- Junior developers become senior relatively quick. Most senior developers get their senior title just a few short years into their careers. Typically in their late twenties or early thirties. Not judging but that seems to have been the state of affairs in software engineering for quite some time. I was a "senior" by age 30. I've learned a lot since then ;-).
- AI is increasing the demand for software because software just got cheaper to make so people want more, not less. The best software still gets made by senior people (with or without AI). That's why seniors are in demand. That should have an effect on their compensation. Which would be very welcome given the last few years of freelance rates dropping.
- Software creation is a team sport. Having a team mainly consisting of old and grumpy middle aged software engineers isn't necessarily the best thing (been there done that). It might be better to have a mix of young old and experienced/inexperienced. There's plenty of room for juniors in the industry.
- Juniors come in many forms. Some people have a lot to learn. Some people create valuable startups straight out of college.
- Software companies that are not constantly investing in their staff will have to deal with replacing their older staff as they move on, retire, or disappear for other reasons. A constant in flow of juniors that you can then train up and turn into valuable team members still works just like it always has.
- Juniors are a lot cheaper to hire than seniors. If there's a shortage of seniors, hire juniors instead and then train them up. That's what many companies were doing anyway. If anything a lot of silicon valley companies seem to have been preferring to hire juniors almost exclusively for quite some time.
- As long as the amount of programmers keeps on growing (and there are no signs of that slowing down that I know of), there will be more juniors than seniors. I'm not sure if the amount still doubles every five years but that seems to have been true for a long time.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#15This article makes a number of the standard arguments for hiring juniors and a couple new ones:
- Companies should hire juniors [at their own perceived detriment] to improve the overall industry
- Hire juniors because strong companies are resilient to junior mistakes [rather than hiring seniors and also becoming resilient]
- Juniors learning fast inspires others
- Juniors will teach your seniors how to use AI
Perhaps you can see why most companies don't find these terribly compelling.
Personally, I suspect we're going to have to wait for capitalism to fix this. Senior engineers will age out and the supply will drop. This will increase the cost of seniors until low-cost juniors start to look like a better option to the median hiring manager.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#16How do we know it's "AI", and not just the fact that CS has gotten too popular and there's now a glut of new graduates? https://cra.org/crn/2025/08/infographic-computing-bachelors-... EDIT: it's also hard to account for the fact that job position titles aren't very consistent over time and I know quite a few new grads who got "senior" job positions
Even before AI have noticed really small to mid size companies not having enough budget to hire junior developers that they know they'd have to train from the ground up. They'd rather take chances on senior developers and/or contractors.
I think there's a misconception that junior devs require all that much training compared to an experienced engineer. I rarely have all that many relevant skills when starting a new job. I have to learn their processes/tools/etc from reading the docs. So I'm probably coming in at like 20% better than junior.
Junior devs will have an easier time finding jobs in positions that operate in niche industries, because they offer onboarding for everyone.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#17I'm happy to hire juniors but they must still have relevant skills. One question I ask is "how does one build a coding agent" - if a junior is unable to outline the ideas around building and expanding coding agents, it indicates they are not aware of what industry they work in.
More proof that a lot of idiots are interviewing.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#18"There’s some scientific truth to this: 20-somethings are inherently narcissistic. Wisdom requires having a full frontal lobe."
This just became another boomer rant. Complete garbage.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#19Just post your prompt, I don't need to know what an LLM thinks of juniors in the age of AI and I don't know which parts you wrote.
It's just so transparent. A safe message using bland language. Nevermind the slop... the boring nothingburgers are even worse.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even before AI have noticed really small to mid size companies not having enough budget to hire junior developers that they know they'd have to train from the ground up. They'd rather take chances on senior developers and/or contractors.
I think there's a misconception that junior devs require all that much training compared to an experienced engineer. I rarely have all that many relevant skills when starting a new job. I have to learn their processes/tools/etc from reading the docs. So I'm probably coming in at like 20% better than junior. Junior devs will have an easier time finding jobs in positions that operate in niche industries, because they o…
> I have to learn their processes/tools/etc from reading the docs.
> So I'm probably coming in at like 20% better than junior.
There are firms that take that to heart, and there is indeed a lot of truth in it. A large amount of skills and knowledge just aren't transferable when switching jobs. But I think it's not hard to create more than 20% of the value. And even if it really is 20% of the value, the profit generated from the work might actually be more than the salary gap anyway, and the 1-year growth curve might be faster for a senior than a junior.