Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is making junior devs useless

beabetterdev.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 399 posts

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#171

Post by collingreen »

michaelhoney wrote: post #160
ffsm8 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Birthrate dropping has multiple causes, none of them have any relation to the topic at hand 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, consequentl…

[flagged]

Perhaps there's a constructive version of this because I agree with the sentiment but it's a little harsh - dude is obviously feeling very betrayed and left out of society and either falling down the incel tunnel or doing recruiting for it.

There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous" and that if some people don't want to have kids with some women then therefore -nobody- will do it.

Good luck out there everybody - the world changes in fascinating ways and it can definitely run some folks over but try not to get jaded and fall down a despair spiral.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#172

Post by bdangubic »

Retric wrote: post #168
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the use of the junior? You have just widen the gap between mid and junior developers making them less useful

Working on problems that are a poor fit for a mid level developer with AI assistance of which there are still plenty. I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, which means a larger percentage of what’s left over is more cheaply done by Jr’s working without AI assistance.

> I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems

Fascinating. I am finding the exact opposite, like complete 180

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#173

Post by collingreen »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #140
thisisit wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Junior devs have always been useless > The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Last time when a junior dev was added to my team I had a similar thought. But then talking with management I was informed that things went beyond just training. The company had a social responsibility pledge and understanding with the local educational institutions. Th…

Then don’t base comp on promotions - problem solved.

This kind of flippant approach is equally valid as "just use ai", "let other companies train the juniors", and "don't give promotions just hire new juniors + ai". All of these have obvious problems from their overly myopic viewpoint.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#174

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

troad wrote: post #54
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #13

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…

> As with everything in life: you can choose to hard route or you can choose the easy route and your results will follow accordingly. Hard agree, but probably not in the way you're implying. It's the difficult things that make life fun and interesting. A life spent going from one easy thing to another is a life barely lived at all.

From a professional standpoint, I’ve never found “enjoyment” from coding. I enjoy every part of the process of getting business goals from talking to stakeholders -> completed project with coding being the necessary evil.

Funny enough, I started working in 1996 professionally (and had been a hobbyist for six years before going to college). But it was only between 2012-2016 that I was a ticket taker without working with the end user directly - everything I’ve done has been B2B.

GenAI (and working remotely since 2020) has made me enjoy every part of my job.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#175

Post by [deleted] »

michaelhoney wrote: post #160
ffsm8 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Birthrate dropping has multiple causes, none of them have any relation to the topic at hand 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, consequentl…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#176

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Retric wrote: post #168
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the use of the junior? You have just widen the gap between mid and junior developers making them less useful

Working on problems that are a poor fit for a mid level developer with AI assistance of which there are still plenty. I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, which means a larger percentage of what’s left over is more cheaply done by Jr’s working without AI assistance.

A mid level developer is just a ticket taker. That’s their job. No matter what their title, if they are just pulling well defined tickets off the board, that’s what they are.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#177

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

collingreen wrote: post #173
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don’t base comp on promotions - problem solved.

This kind of flippant approach is equally valid as "just use ai", "let other companies train the juniors", and "don't give promotions just hire new juniors + ai". All of these have obvious problems from their overly myopic viewpoint.

How is that flippant? I went from an “architect” over the entire cloud developmrnt strategy at a 60 person startup making $160K in 2020 to working at AWS ProServe making $220K (cash + signing bonus + RSUs) as an L5 (mid level - no longer there). Do you think I cared about my title?

I said just the opposite - hire fewer seniors + AI and don’t hird juniors.

I’m now a staff level employee again at a 3rd party consulting company working with small and medium businesses (my preference) after taking a detour in BigTech from architectural roles at smaller companies. My quarterly strategic goals were a combination of what the CxO’s/directors defined and what I defined was in the best interest of the company. None of those goals had anything to do with larger societal issues.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#178

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

braebo wrote: post #98
weatherlite wrote: post #49

My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people…

At work we build enterprise software with stuff like Kotlin+Spring + multiple NextJS apps + Microservices + Rust CAD engine. I haven’t have written code aside from tweaking stuff here and there in probably 3 or 4 months. Before that I wrote code by hand every day for many years. I’ve found a lot of fun parts of my new workflow that I enjoy. I still miss being fully immersed in a problem deep in the files… and sometim…

I feel the same way, I have many years of experience, and I have gone from writing everything by hand to using claude code all the time (my latest company is very pro doing everything with AI).

Since I have been a software architect for the past 7-8 years it feels in some ways that that experience makes using claude code a lot more productive than for my non-architect colleagues, as I am able to steer it much more effectively whether directly in sessions or via custom skills / mcp.

The big issues right now for me are hiring and manager expectations, I changed positions last fall due to mass layoffs and it took me 3 months to find one: having leetcode interviews in the current climate seems completely useless, even more than it was in the past, and system design interviews are so formulaic it also feels like a crapshoot. Plus every job getting hundreds of AI generated applications makes actually being considered in the first place quite difficult.

Manager expectations are also ridiculously inflated nowadays, it seems most action items that come are claude written with fantastical random statistics (if you add caching you can make your backend 98.3% faster!), and it takes so much time to fight this and unrealistic team velocity expectations.

Interesting times, I do feel lucky I have had a long career, but I very much fear the ladder being pulled up even more than it has been when outsourcing because widespread. I know everybody says "things always change, new opportunities will open up to compensate for the ones that are being lost" but this time it does feel different, and not in a good way.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#179

Post by coldtea »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #126
coldtea wrote: post #115

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. 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 curr…

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

That counts temps, people who weren't a good fit and were let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of which bring the average down (but are not "hopping").

Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#180

Post by varispeed »

greentea23 wrote: post #133
dahart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a mistake to assume tomorrow’s training looks like today’s. Unsupervised learning is a thing and a very hot research topic, precisely because it avoids some of today’s big problems with acquiring the vast amounts of training data necessary.

Unsupervised leanring has been around for years and is already how the current wave of models are trained. It doesn't mean no data, it means no human provided labels of the data. So you still need creative new human ideas to move LLMs forward. LLMs != intelligence.

Exactly this. Even frontier models like Opus 4.6 have absolutely zero understanding of the task at hand. If you give them problem they have not encountered in training data, they will not solve it. You can however, guide them to resolve the problem, but in that case these get reduced to merely an auto complete. Don't get me wrong - models are getting better and hide very well that they don't understand anything, you can almost get fooled now.
Post reply on HN