141–150 of 399 posts
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That sounds like a bad hire, not a junior. Why didn’t your manager help fix that?
I gather that quite a lot of companies are using dumb metrics which would show this as _good_ behaviour, these days.
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Yep. This is why many companies have a terminal level with “up or out “ rules. Before that level you are not fully independent and require too much supervision. No one wants a Jr engineer with 10 years of experience. I see a lot of Sr engineers get very frustrated by how much time they have to spend helping Jr engineers. But, that’s the job, or at least a big part of it. Or at least it was.
I burnt out helping a junior on my team for the past few months. It was just terribly obvious she was feeding my responses directly into a chatbot to fix instead of actually understanding the issue. I can’t really even blame her, there isn’t much incentive to actually learn
If at that point it's clear (to me) the situation is not salvageable, it's a management issue, I've done my job.
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…
It's a negative (from the perspective of reproduction) confluence of both social and economic developments.
E.g. the death of the traditional gender roles has inevitably reduced birth rates - for multiple reasons to boot. Because on the one hand, the women has am easier time not to commit and just sleep around, consequently becoming uninteresting to men that would've preferred to make a family... But also because biologically, men are more attracted to demure women, which on average will ultimately remove even more attraction, consequently removing even more likelihood of families being built.
But that's once again only one factor, you got others too... Like stagnant wages, which force younger people too abstain from making a family simply because the financial situation doesn't allow for it. And if it happens anyway, it's more then likely to end in a broken family instead of something positive
Another factor is the availability of choice. Dating apps are available, statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women.
Just to be clear, in case someones brain has completely rotten through and interprets any blame into my comment: neither sex is responsible for this. Our society just decided to move on from gender roles, for supposedly economic reasons.
The consequences are felt both for women and men, with both feeling less valued and miserable on average. Which understandably makes them less attractive to the other sex again.
Still not a full list of factors at play btw, there is also the builtup of micro plastics in the men's balls, harming sperm production along with normalization of pornography, reducing the sexual frustration of people and consequently making them less driven to find partners. There is also the influencer industry, purposefully encouraging para social relationships, satisfying the social urges of a lot of people, consequently reducing the likelihood of them seeking out friendships... Reducing the likelihood of meeting other people and thus reducing the likelihood of getting a natural relationship through that.
Third places have also mostly vanished, likely related to multiple of these effects to etc pp
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fwiw 90% of software is reinventing the wheel. 80% of devs have an itch to "rewrite from scratch". AI will deduplicate all of this
My experience is that 100% of AI devs are reinventing the wheel, most of the time for no better reason than "I can do it" or "not invented here"
But for me it's been a signal that people have no imagination, so they are just burning tokens for no reason.
I can't seem to get the article to load, but I think I get the gist from the title. I hired a junior "dev" who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course. Before AI I could not have hired them because they literally did not know how to dev. After AI, anyone with a little grit can push themselves into the field pretty easily. As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you can choose the easy route…
I mean, I'm a fairly senior dev, and have literally never completed, or indeed really heard of, a html course. Is that, eh, part of your average CS degree these days?
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…
As should have others, which the university education system should have made sure.
The fact that some people come out of 4+ years of software engineering education utterly clueless means that they somehow managed to dodge having to build anything, I think means that they will never get good at any point in time, as they either were very talented at dodging having to build things, and I don't think that talent is going to abandon them, or they couldn't really grasp the basics in an environment designed for just that.
With that said, I think you can see for most juniors, what you can expect out of them in terms of pure coding ability - sure a lot of them have room to grow, but I've met so many great people who were very young, yet were useful from day one.
In fact, if you have the willingness to grind away at some problem, that puts you ahead of a significant amount of the pack. I have had the misfortune of working with people who lacked any demonstrable skill, and had coping strategies for having to deal with any sort of hardship. Getting useful work out of them was a challenge in of itself.
These people managed to get the years in to be considered senior, and are probably dispensing their wisdom 'mentoring' juniors somewhere else, and are no longer expected to actually contribute to meaningful issues.
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…
I’ve gotten plenty of use out of junior devs. The critical bit is what makes anyone a useful worker. I’ve found anyone that’s both dedicated and meticulous is worth the investment. Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end yo…
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…
I think the idea of 'junior' needs to be refined a bit. By the time I got my first job I've been coding for years, and have built rather substantial things. In fact, in terms of pure coding ability, I was probably past the initial, fast part of my growth. As should have others, which the university education system should have made sure. The fact that some people come out of 4+ years of software engineering education…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve gotten plenty of use out of junior devs. The critical bit is what makes anyone a useful worker. I’ve found anyone that’s both dedicated and meticulous is worth the investment. Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end yo…
And have you compared the output of three junior devs to hiring one mid level ticket taker who isn’t that much more expensive + AI coding agents?
1 new Jr every 2 years works quite well for a team of 7+ developers.
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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…
Now at my 45 years, I couldn't care less for whatever grand objective the current company I work for has. I exchange my knowledge and time for hard cash, and let the owners , ceo and whatnot run with their grandiose vision.
I only want to be left alone.
We all get here. It's funny when we turn back.