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AI is making junior devs useless

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191–200 of 399 posts

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#191
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Your comment is incredibly misogynist and sexist. Here's a more fact-based good summary for some potential reasons for the declining fertility rate: https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As a regular 30s dude, definitely not 1% by any measure, app dating had its rough spots but generally was a good time, I experienced no bitterness. Instead I met a bunch of interesting people and found…

For context, I don’t want this to sound bitter. The first time I was single as an adult was from 1996-2002 and dating apps weren’t a thing. The second time I was single was from 2006-2011 and I wasn’t really trying to date and spent most of the time getting my head back in the game and just hanging out with female friends until I started dating my now wife who I met at work. Even she had to make the first move. That…

FWIW, one of my (male) friends is about 5'2" and met his wife on OKCupid. She's about 4'10".

Dating is kinda like founding a startup or getting a job, in that you have to kiss a lot of frogs, but you only need to succeed once. The point's to eliminate all the unsuitable prospects in the pool and find the one that is a match for you.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#194
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…

It's the opposite. The less competent the average developer the more valuable coding LLMs become (as the only way for those bad developers to generate ok code). Eliminate the good developers and even bad coding LLMs become valuable.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#195
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And you can actually hand things off to them: this problem is now your problem. With AIs you’re herding cats

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI It would still be a waste of a seniors time to write that prompt. They should have more important things to spend time on

And it’s not a waste of their time to have to give detailed requirements and troubleshooting steps to a junior developer, constantly being interrupted, and then having to check their work thoroughly? If you have to be that detailed anyway - you might as well use AI.

No, teaching the next generation of humans is not a waste of time

I'm very sorry for you that you think that way

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#197
post #55

It's interesting to watch industry after industry hollow itself out from the inside then inevitably die long after all the financial people, investment bankers and management consultants have all cashed their checks. Steve Jobs famously accurately called this out years ago [1]. Xerox, Boeing, PC manufacturers (who basically created the Taiwanese makers through a series of short-term outsourcing steps), etc. But there…

I've seen a lot of hot takes on HN but faulting streamers for the inability of Hollywood to adapt to cultural and technological change is gonna require oven mitts. The rise of streaming is a win for the little guy and the viewers against Hollywood's capitalist entertainment oligopoly.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#198

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…

If the median tenure is 3 years and the software business still is very profitable then people must be net useful within that 3 years. A lot of people also just don’t want to job hop much and honestly the interview culture keeps me from hopping more. I do still fall in the 3 years per hop but I’ve always had a good reason to- ie. layoffs, company going in a worse position than when I started, shit management at various levels, forever compounding responsibility…

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#200
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…

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He tried, but was rejected.
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