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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#221

Post by borzi »

daxfohl wrote: post #218

Nah, it makes teams useless. Maybe not quite yet, but soon, one engineer will be able to do a few sprint teams' worth of work, and deliver features orders of magnitude faster than a team working in parallel. Yeah, generally at first this will be seniors only. But before long, a junior will be able to come in and learn to manage one sprint team's worth of work under the guidance of a senior and partnered with a PM, an…

Yeap, and people are still forcing juniors to make small code changes when they should be learning by creating entire apps on their own, deploying them, etc. WITH a senior giving them feedback occasionally. I think people are going to take a while to catch on though, for better or worse....

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#222

Post by JeremyNT »

borzi wrote: post #217

This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mist…

I think the issue is they used to make progress at a snails pace and you had plenty of teachable moments.

Now anybody can vibe code something that seems to work with a million landmines.

How can they develop the intuition around this given that they don't know what they don't know? How can we review it and help them get there?

Maybe we can figure it out, but I'm not sure it's easy or obvious.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#223

Post by rco8786 »

voxl wrote: post #151
rco8786 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code The average tenure of a person in engineering role is so short that very few employers are thinking about developing individuals anymore. The actual way this gets approached is "If you want seniors, you must hire seniors". I'm not sure how this plays out now. But it's easy to imagine a scenario like the COBOL writers of the last…

It's a self inflicted wound. Companies do not reward loyalty. They do not give out raises congruent with what you can find if you leave. Business-types unirionically think seasonal layoffs is a "good thing." Self hemorrhaging your institutional knowledge is insanity

Is it? Seems to be working fine for most

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#224

Post by borzi »

JeremyNT wrote: post #222
borzi wrote: post #217

This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mist…

I think the issue is they used to make progress at a snails pace and you had plenty of teachable moments. Now anybody can vibe code something that seems to work with a million landmines. How can they develop the intuition around this given that they don't know what they don't know? How can we review it and help them get there? Maybe we can figure it out, but I'm not sure it's easy or obvious.

By making them walk into the landmines and forcing them to fix it - that is how everyone became a good programmer. It's just the scope that has changed.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#225

Post by rsynnott »

cyberpunk wrote: post #208
rsynnott wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hired a junior "dev" who literally hadn't even completed an HTML course. 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?

25 years doing distributed systems and best i can offer anyone is welcome to cyberpunk’s j33t website!!! :) :)

Fun thing about that:

> Netscape has stipulated removal of the element from the Internet Explorer during an HTML ERB meeting in February 1996, as a condition to removing the element from the Netscape

It's like nuclear disarmament treaties, but for annoying things.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#226

Post by slopinthebag »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #88
zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. But it’s not about that they have inflated value but it comes down to how “modern” software producing organizations work. Product managers and C-level people do not know what they are doing either. Most people are part of the “software engineering” theater, recruiters are recruiting, manager are managing, software developers are developing software, all of them just to get paid or gain status in the org. Mos…

Yeah read Software and Mind by Andrei Sorin

> The mechanistic myth is the belief that everything can be described as a neat hierarchical structure of things within things. And few of us realize that our entire culture is based on this fallacy. While the world consists of complex, interacting structures, we prefer to treat every phenomenon as a simple, isolated structure.

> Through our software pursuits, the mechanistic myth has spread beyond its academic origins, and is now affecting every aspect of human existence. In just one generation, it has expanded from worthless theories of mind and society (behaviour- ism, structuralism, universal grammar, etc.) to worthless concepts in the field of programming (structured programming, object-oriented pro- gramming, the relational database model, etc.) to worthless software-related activities that we all have to perform.

> What is worse, our mechanistic beliefs have permitted powerful software elites to arise. While appearing to help us enjoy the benefits of software, the elites are in fact preventing us from creating and using software effectively. By invoking mechanistic software principles, they are fostering ignorance in software-related matters and inducing dependence on their systems.

> Increasingly, in one occupation after another, all we need to know is how to operate some software systems that are based on mechanistic principles. But our minds are capable of non- mechanistic knowledge. So, when the elites force us to depend on their software, they exploit us in two ways: by preventing us from creating better, non-mechanistic software; and by preventing us from using the superior, non-mechanistic capabilities of our minds.

> The ultimate consequence of our mechanistic culture, then, is the degradation of minds. If we restrict ourselves to mechanistic performance, our non-mechanistic capabilities remain un- developed. The world is becoming more and more complex, yet we see only its simple, mechanistic aspects. So we cope perhaps with the mechanistic problems, but the complex, non-mechanistic ones remain unsolved, and may eventually destroy us.

Wow, I'm immediately hooked. The book is free online as well to download.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#227

Post by overfeed »

nostrademons wrote: post #130
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…

> When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either.

But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders

https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#228

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #196
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So exactly how am I going to convince my management to open a req for a junior developer who is not going to help us meet our quarterly goals and take time away from the other senior developers that will either have to work longer hours or do less work?

I’m not going to work as a charity and neither are any of my coworkers. We are all here to exchange labor for money.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#229

Post by daxfohl »

borzi wrote: post #221
daxfohl wrote: post #218

Nah, it makes teams useless. Maybe not quite yet, but soon, one engineer will be able to do a few sprint teams' worth of work, and deliver features orders of magnitude faster than a team working in parallel. Yeah, generally at first this will be seniors only. But before long, a junior will be able to come in and learn to manage one sprint team's worth of work under the guidance of a senior and partnered with a PM, an…

Yeap, and people are still forcing juniors to make small code changes when they should be learning by creating entire apps on their own, deploying them, etc. WITH a senior giving them feedback occasionally. I think people are going to take a while to catch on though, for better or worse....

Yeah, IMO one of the first things we'll see change is more of a migration back to monoliths. Right now adding a feature has to go through multiple teams, a dozen services, a coordinated implementation and deployment schedule, a Byzantine and often manual set of integration tests, etc. Yeah AI can help with that, but the point is that AI doesn't need it. On a monolith, it sucks for dev teams because parallel development at large scale is difficult and other teams' bugs can delay the launch of your unrelated project. Hence, microservices became popular. With AI, development happens so fast that it's largely serial. So there's no real coordination needed. A whole feature is one PR, one set of tests, one app to run locally if you want, one deployment, one thing to look at and roll back if there's a bug. Creates a virtuous cycle all the way up.

I imagine lots of established companies will struggle migrating back to that pattern, but I have to think most new companies will head in that direction, which should let them catch up quickly.

Anyway that's my take. We'll see.

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