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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#231

Post by keeda »

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills.

I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it falls short" -> "AI native expert".

How to actually implement this at scale is still TBD ;-) Ironically, AI will be invaluable for this e.g. as a hyper-personalized tutor but it will also present an irresistible temptation to offload the hands-on practice. We already have studies indicating the former is helpful but the latter stifles mastery. At this point I can only see self-discipline as a mechanism to willingly avoid AI.

Unfortunately, our testing-oriented education system only serves to incentivize over-reliance on AI (Goodhart's Law etc.) None of our current institutions and processes are suited for what is already happening and will only accelerate from here on. Things will need to change radically.

For this reason, I once predicted apprenticeships will be a thing again, and already there are signs with Microsoft's preceptorship proposal: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3779312

This is highly encouraging because a tech giant is not only acknowledging the problem, but proposing a solution. Not a complete solution by far but at least a start.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#232

Post by opem »

mh2266 wrote: post #87

This post, ironically, seems very likely to have been written by an LLM :/ "it's not x, but y", with bonus em-dash: > your value as a developer is not in your ability to ship code. It’s in your ability to look at code "But here’s the thing." "And honestly?"

I think so. Just go to the homepage, all of the thumbnails are AI generated with clickbaity titles.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#233

Post by cyberpunk »

rsynnott wrote: post #225
cyberpunk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Damn, my elite frontend skills are 30 years out of date?

Better stick to apis then I guess.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#234

Post by bluefirebrand »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #228
bluefirebrand wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We as a collective need to convince our management of this, but that needs to start with people getting their heads out of their asses and working together instead of this mercenary attitude you have

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#235

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #195
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How is that true? As an architect when I was working at product companies, the director/CxO wasn’t going to call the junior developer to the carpet for not getting a task done or even the mid level ticket taker. Hell they don’t even know what the individual tasks are. I’m going to be the one ultimately responsible either way for project success.

Even when I was working at AWS as a mid level/L5 in the Professional Services division (lower title/lot more money), I was the one who was responsible for my “workstream” on larger projects. I couldn’t say “that’s not my fault. Blame the new L4 junior consultant who just got out of the internal boot camp for new grads”.

Now that I have moved back up to a more senior position in consulting, if a project I’m leading goes sideways, I can’t tell the customer that it’s not my fault, it’s the fault of the workstream leads and the workstream leads can’t tell me, it’s the fault of the more junior consultants who work under them. They will never talk to the client. The people under the workstream leads may not even speak English.

And that’s not meant to be an insult. The workstream leads have to he able to speak passable English and they can work with people under then who only speak Spanish.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#236

Post by SilverElfin »

collingreen wrote: post #171
michaelhoney wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 k…

They’re not completely wrong though. Data does show clearly that online dating has extremely lopsided behaviors. Women really do tend to message the top cohort of men by attractiveness much more so. Men have a more expected distribution. I think that causes a lot of men to really resent dating and women because they struggle and put in enormous effort and get nothing back. Online dating is a very toxic modern invention.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#237

Post by mistrial9 »

wolttam wrote: post #28
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.

I agree with the sentiments here. But, I’m less hopeful about the presented solutions. I think my argument against humans still needing to know how to manage complexity, is that the models will become increasingly able to manage that complexity themselves. The only thing that backs up that argument is the rate of progress the models have made in the last 3 years (ChatGPT turned 3 just 3 months ago) I think software p…

disagree because when the "super fast" new CPUs of 20 years ago became common, it was easy to write code that executed slower than previous code, due to language constructs and wasteful work patterns. Therefore, I predict that LLM code can explode in complexity (14KLOC for a binary file parser with some features) but that compute will bog down and effort to understand will explode.. that is, in extreme cases.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#238

Post by srfn »

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…

Adam, can you please share, how in the world, this junior dev got hired with you?

I'm self-taught dev with multiple years of experience. I choose the hard route, even after AI. For me, programming is theory building, so I always choose understanding above all else.

Rock solid understanding of TypeScript, frontend and backed.

I have sent 100s of CVs. For Juniors, Mids and Seniors. Not even a single interview.

I will be glad for your thoughts on the matter.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#239

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #234
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We as a collective need to convince our management of this, but that needs to start with people getting their heads out of their asses and working together instead of this mercenary attitude you have

I don’t have to do anything except keep my head down, do my job and enjoy my well earned autonomy. I’m definitely not going to try to convince my skip, skip, skip manager to change their hiring policies. It’s not like my line level manager has any power over anything

Even when I was at a startup before 2020 and I did have the ear of the CTO and the founders I knew my ultimate mission was to do what was needed to get acquired and before that I knew exactly what my mission was when k was hired to lead the tech initiatives as we were acquiring companies “find efficiencies” and go public.

Or do you think I could have convince anyone of anything as an L5 at AWS in the middle between architect at a startup and my current company?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#240

Post by nostrademons »

wazoox wrote: post #214
Root_Denied wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically a "Tragedy of the Commons" situation across the board.

Sort of. With the salient point that nothing really exists, but the commons. The individual is nothing without the whole society around.

Also sort of. Some form of social organization seems to be necessary for humans to function. But humans are also pretty good (well - relatively speaking, it usually seems to require a war or revolution) at changing that form of social organization as technology, population, and environmental conditions change.

I think this is a very likely outcome. We aren't going to get continued population growth next generation; a significant number of the people needed for it will never be born. This is going to have ripple effects across wide swaths of political and economic organization. But you'll have pockets of population that basically barricade themselves off from the wider economic world and insulate themselves from its collapse, and then the people within them, along with whatever form of social organization they happen to adopt.

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