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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#111

Post by alemanek »

pluc wrote: post #42
EGreg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t about training anymore. It is about harnesses. Just look at new math proofs that will come out, as one example. Exploration vs Exploitation is a thing in AI but you seem to think that human creativity can’t be surpassed by harnesses and prompts like “generate 100 types of possible…” You’re wrong. What you call creativity is often a manual application of a simple self-prompt that people do. One can have a loo…

There is no "new ideas" with AI. Claiming the opposite is a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.

What I am excited about is the possibility of LLMs to draw conclusions from the last 150years of scientific papers.

There have been lots of instances of knowledge being rediscovered even when it was previously published but sitting on some shelf forgotten. LLMs ability to digest large volumes of data will I think help with this issue.

We will still need to reproduce and verify conclusions but will be interesting to see what might come from this.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#113

Post by estimator7292 »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65
BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

This is the difference between being an engineer and being a clock puncher. You don't care about the business, you don't care about the product, you don't care about society as a whole. So long as you get your paycheck and your annual pay bump, fuck absolutely everyone and everything else, right?

Don't worry, just leave all your problems for someone else to fix. I'm sure that won't have any lasting consequences at all.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#114

Post by croes »

jatari wrote: post #48
croes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A teacher who just gives you the solution isn’t a good teacher. You can use AI as a teacher but how many will do that?

Highly motivated people will use whatever tools they have to get better at something, whether they have a textbook, the internet or a LLM to use. The skill of the very top programmers will continue to increase with the advent of new tools.

And how many will not? For mist people it’s just a job to get money, they will put exactly as much effort in it as is necessary to produce an acceptable result

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#115

Post by coldtea »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65
BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

>What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion.

Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors.

- Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good while).

- The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.

- In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring" era.

>Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

That's how companies fail.

It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you command more devs, you get more leverage.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#116

Post by elephanlemon »

BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

Strongly disagree with this. Bad junior devs might be useless, but I’ve seen good ones absolutely tear through features. Junior devs fresh out of school typically have tons of energy, haven’t been burned out, and are serious about wanting to get work done.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#117

Post by HDThoreaun »

DJBunnies wrote: post #6
slibhb wrote: post #2

I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.

Not in my experience. They just regurgitate code, and juniors don’t know if/why it’s good or bad and consequently can’t field questions on their PR. “It’s what the LLM said.” - Great. Now go learn it and do it again yourself.

This just means you have bad juniors who aren’t interested in learning.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#118

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #81
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k

Again HN bubble thinking. Most developers in the US are working at banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc in second tier cities - in the “enterprise” and are not making “$400K”. Most developers will never in their career see more than $175K inflation adjusted and I really haven’t seen comp on the top end increase in nominal terms in a decade [1] for enterprise devs.

That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you see comp go from around $80K —> $115K -> $150K —> $175K, junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) -> Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+.

For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on Atlanta.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries

Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K?

[1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I’m at a new plateau that’s higher.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#119

Post by threatofrain »

BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

Many juniors are actually very experienced but the industry can’t see that on paper.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#120

Post by pluc »

skeledrew wrote: post #91
pluc wrote: post #26

I can't wait until the AI people realize that without developers' original ideas, AI has nothing new to steal from. We don't create, AI will spit out the same old concepts. What, you're gonna create the next generation of AI by training it on what the very same AI has already produced? C'mon now. You don't get technical creativity reflexes by using AI. This is technical stagnation in the making. By cannibalizing its…

Technically all the problems that almost any given business needs to be solved today has already been solved umpteen times over the years. There are no new problems that can't be solved by porting and/or combining old solutions.

That's the literal definition of stagnation. That is not compatible with growth.

Also that's not a new idea, that "everything worth inventing/exploring has already been". It's precisely what AI reinforces, and that goes against human nature (and capitalism) as that statement has historically proved.

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