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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#261

Post by coldtea »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #181
coldtea wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, governmen…

Nope, it doesn’t count temps at all. This is easily Googleable.

That counts 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

#262

Post by Retric »

bdangubic wrote: post #207
Retric wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do some people leverage AI to rearrange the furniture in the conference room for an office party? Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of developers do, but I’ve seen what amounts to several thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because teams leverage the tools they have.

> I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems this part I find fascinating. most places I worked (30 years in, 10 as a contractor so quite a lot) the distinction between Jr, Mid and Sr falls exactly into the kind of works that they do. I, as a Senior, often work on hard shit, Jrs are not (yet) entrusted with those problems and work on entirely different set of problems. I cannot compute…

I’m not saying everyone on the team is doing the same kind of work, rather the kind of work that LLM’s make people better at become less relevant when a bunch of people have access to them.

Automation always runs into diminishing returns for similar reasons. If 99.99% of a workload is embarrassingly parallel, what remains becomes important once you can throw enough cores at the problem.

You’ll see a guy in a multi million dollar crane lifting multi ton objects and then people using ropes attached to that same load for final positioning etc. What you don’t see is people using ropes to lift bricks 20 stories by hand as the crane lifts multi ton pallets of bricks as automation is taking care of that kind of task.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#263

Post by nerdsniper »

keeda wrote: post #231

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 fal…

I learned Calculus despite having access to Mathematica, TI-89/92/CX-CAS, and WolframAlpha. I still had to do hundreds of derivations and integrations and manual manipulation of separable differential equations entirely by hand to learn it. But these tools made it easier for me to understand what I was doing wrong.

So, I agree with you, but it's also already been true for decades now with other tools.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#264

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Blackthorn wrote: post #260
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do junior devs. I’ve gotten great results treating coding agents as junior devs where I keep my hands on the wheel

Some of you folks think way too highly of yourselves. Junior devs are awesome. You tell them what needs doing, if it's not well defined you have them write a document to figure it out, and then they churn away at it and will often surprise you with a brilliant solution. Meanwhile, I've never once seen a coding agent give a brilliant solution or design to just about anything, and anything with the barest whiff of unde…

Now ask a junior dev to design a concurrency implementation. To know the complete in my case AWS SDK and write a script in 3 minutes.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/boto3/latest/

Or do the same for IAC - same surface area - and use Terraform on one project, CloudFormation on another, and the CDK on a third and to generate code for you when you give them the correct architecture. It took me a day to do that before AI depending on the architectural complexity and I know AWS well (trust me on this). How long would it take me to delegate that to a junior dev? It took ChatGPT 2 minutes before I started using Claude just by my pasting a well labeled architecture diagram and explaining the goal.

It took me about 8 hours total to vibe code an internal web tool with a lot of features that if I had estimated before AI, I would have said a mid level developer would have taken two weeks at least. It wasn’t complex - just a CRUD app with Cognito authentication. How long would it have taken a junior developer?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#265

Post by adampunk »

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?"

There appears to be a cottage industry in pumping out "LLMs will eat your skills; listen to me, the wise senior engineer with the same anxieties" pieces.

https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code...

That's the same style. Plays well there, tho, it seems. Even when an agent writes it.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#266

Post by array_key_first »

nerdsniper wrote: post #263
keeda wrote: post #231

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 fal…

I learned Calculus despite having access to Mathematica, TI-89/92/CX-CAS, and WolframAlpha. I still had to do hundreds of derivations and integrations and manual manipulation of separable differential equations entirely by hand to learn it. But these tools made it easier for me to understand what I was doing wrong. So, I agree with you, but it's also already been true for decades now with other tools.

All these tools only replace mechanical aspects, not thinking ones. AI is truly unique and unprecedented in that way.

A spellchecker is purely mechanical, it just helps you spell your essay right. But it won't make your essay good, or help you write the right essay.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#267

Post by nerdsniper »

array_key_first wrote: post #266
nerdsniper wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Calculus despite having access to Mathematica, TI-89/92/CX-CAS, and WolframAlpha. I still had to do hundreds of derivations and integrations and manual manipulation of separable differential equations entirely by hand to learn it. But these tools made it easier for me to understand what I was doing wrong. So, I agree with you, but it's also already been true for decades now with other tools.

All these tools only replace mechanical aspects, not thinking ones. AI is truly unique and unprecedented in that way. A spellchecker is purely mechanical, it just helps you spell your essay right. But it won't make your essay good, or help you write the right essay.

Integration in calculus often required me to "guess" a strategy ahead of time. It was more similar to searching for moves in chess than solving long division. Some moves would make it easier vs. harder and some would seemingly be a dead end.

WolframAlpha usually got to the correct answer, but often used a non-human strategy for integration. Generally, the best way to do it was simpler than what WolframAlpha's "step-by-step" showed, which was rather "brute force" and inelegant.

So, again, I agree. But again, it's a matter of degree and encompassing more domains vs. a binary change.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#268

Post by array_key_first »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65
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…

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…

The main problem with having only seniors is that seniors have many many blindspots. Just by the nature of being there a while, they've built up hundreds of automatic processes that allow them to ignore or work around bad things at the company. In terms of code, tech, relationships, product vision, etc. It's the same reason why telling engineers to QA their own shit is a recipe for disaster. You need fresh perspective.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#269

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

coldtea wrote: post #261
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, it doesn’t count temps at all. This is easily Googleable.

That counts 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.

Again do you have any actual evidence? Citations?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#270

Post by Blackthorn »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #264
Blackthorn wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of you folks think way too highly of yourselves. Junior devs are awesome. You tell them what needs doing, if it's not well defined you have them write a document to figure it out, and then they churn away at it and will often surprise you with a brilliant solution. Meanwhile, I've never once seen a coding agent give a brilliant solution or design to just about anything, and anything with the barest whiff of unde…

Now ask a junior dev to design a concurrency implementation. To know the complete in my case AWS SDK and write a script in 3 minutes. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/boto3/latest/ Or do the same for IAC - same surface area - and use Terraform on one project, CloudFormation on another, and the CDK on a third and to generate code for you when you give them the correct architecture. It took me a day to do that before AI dep…

Design a concurrency implementation? I sure hope they would spend more than 3 minutes on it! Concurrency lends itself to subtle bugs even when experts write it.

I'd gladly take a junior dev to do any of that work there, because they can think for themself and not hang onto any bias you unknowingly build into the prompt like it's a religion.

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