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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#121

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

addaon wrote: post #94
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…

> 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 project done on time”. They do “negative work”. I have. A good junior can do in a week what a senior with domain knowledge can do in a half day, with only an hour of mentoring along the way. This isn’t a great exchange rate per dollar (juniors are cheaper than seniors, but not that much cheap…

And as a senior+ with domain knowledge, with AI I can do the work of two juniors without the communication overhead + do all of the project management, dealing with stakeholders, etc.

But you don’t build seniors, you build capable mid level ticket takers who jump for more money at the first opportunity.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#122

Post by pluc »

skeledrew wrote: post #93
pluc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fine. How else do you learn but by taking things apart and rebuilding them? This obsession with productivity is incompatible with onboarding new talent. Having 1000 versions of the same concept is exactly what progress is.

> 1000 versions of the same concept That sounds beyond wasteful.

It is. Humans are messy.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#123

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

eloisant wrote: post #108
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…

Treat your employees well and they won't jump ship.

The problem is that (hypothetical) you as a line level manager don’t control comp and raises. Even in BigTech your manager doesn’t control your promotion and everyone knows it’s better to “boomerang” because you will get paid less being promoted to an L5 (mid) from an L4 than someone hired as an L5.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#124

Post by jnwatson »

Thanemate wrote: post #21
recursivedoubts wrote: post #10

As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/ Everyone else: we must let the juniors write the code. Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.

The issue stems from 2 things: 1) People hearing "an LLM is as smart as a junior" and actually opting for the LLM subscription price instead of hiring a junior 2) The gap between senior and junior in terms of performance has become larger, since the senior devs had their hands get dirty for years typing stuff out manually AND also tackling challenges. This generation of junior-mid developers will have a significant p…

I think your second point is interesting, and it has actually already happened a couple of times.

It used to be a lot easier to find devs that knew assembly and could navigate call stacks through memory by hand because a lot of folks had to learn that to get their job done. Now higher level languages have mostly eliminated that level of operation.

The same applies to infosec roles. It is 10x harder for junior infosec folks than 20 years ago because there are a bunch of skills you need in infosec that today's mainline dev experience doesn't need, but were more common a while ago.

Case in point, I remember working with a partner company's junior engineer on some integration. They needed some hard-coded constant changed and time was of the essence. I told them to change a couple bytes in the elf binary directly. They looked at me like I was a wizard. I thought it was a fairly pedestrian skill having grown up reversing computer game save files.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#125

Post by bdangubic »

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…

everyone was junior at one point, everyone. “junior” is just age mate, just age…

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#126

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

coldtea wrote: post #115
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…

> 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 ever…

This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade.

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

This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see “salary compression and inversion”

> That's how companies fail.

The company failing in the long term is really not any current employees main concern unless you are a founder if the average tenure is 3-5 years. Even the stock market doesn’t care about the long term viability of a company.

BigTech for instance can afford dead weight. Amazon has an internship program and for those who come back or through their non traditional programs for their internal consulting division (AWS Professional Services) they have a 3 (6?) month training program.

In ProServe at least (former employee) even for their l5/L6 employees, they have the 3 month training program - “AWSome Builder” where you simulate a customer project and have to pass.

After leaving AWS and being hired as a staff consultant by a third party company, they put me on a plane two weeks in to meet with a customer. They don’t even hire less than senior+ people in the US.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#127

Post by slibhb »

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.

For me, the hardest part of software development was learning incantations. These are not interesting, they're conventions that you have to learn to get stuff to work. AI makes this process easier.

If people use AI to generate code they don't understand, that will bite them. But it's an incredibly tool for explaining code and teaching you boring, rote incantations.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#128

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #113
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…

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 al…

I work for one reason and one reason alone - to trade 40 hours of labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. The company is not going to give me money for “caring about society”. They are going to give me money to meet my quarterly goals to help them meet their profit goals for the company and in a former life , to make them look good for the public market pre-IPO and at another company for an acquisition.

I give a company 40 hours a week and all of my 30 years of industry experience and they give me money (and in a former life RSUs)

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#129

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

skeledrew wrote: post #89
whattheheckheck wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k

Until there are no more "seniors"...

More money for me until I retire - well actually I’m past the point where I chase more money - and then after that - it’s not my monkey and not my circus.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#130

Post by nostrademons »

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…

It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children.

The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different.

It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.

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