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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#271

Post by array_key_first »

rco8786 wrote: post #223
voxl wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We have no frame of reference if it's working because basically everyone is doing it. And business only measure on extremely short timelines. Meaning, it could be good right now, and catastrophic on the 10+ year timeline.

I definitely think this is the case. Almost all software is unbelievably bad. Almost all software gets worse the longer it exists. And almost all software does not meet its business purpose - it's merely contorted by the customers to just barely meet their needs.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#272

Post by skydhash »

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…

The one reason I can't care about these kind of arguments is that you're describing the solution, not the problem. Based on my career (maybe shorter than yours), usually you put juniors on projects of low complexity and low impact while you play the mentor role. It's not about them being a productive worker or a menial helper, it's for them to train using practical projects. Your problems don't look like suitable projects unless you want them to train them in copy-pasta from the Internet.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#273

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Blackthorn wrote: post #270
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can absolutely guarantee you that a junior dev or even a senior dev could do complicated IAC as fast as AI. It isn’t that knowing the architecture is the problem, it’s just very tedious. You have to look up all of the properties involved for each service and each property of each resource. I trust AI to know proper AWS architecture from being trained on the total corpus of the internet more than a junior dev.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#274

Post by sotix »

AI has made senior engineers useless to me. I have purposefully asked senior engineers specific questions to get their insight on a matter only to have them tell me, "here's what our internal AI tool said". This has occurred countless times. I find that staff and principal engineers have remained extraordinarily valuable as teachers. Our junior devs have been exceptional and are eager to learn. Our seniors have become lazier and stopped being as generous with their knowledge.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#275

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

skydhash wrote: post #272
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The one reason I can't care about these kind of arguments is that you're describing the solution, not the problem. Based on my career (maybe shorter than yours), usually you put juniors on projects of low complexity and low impact while you play the mentor role. It's not about them being a productive worker or a menial helper, it's for them to train using practical projects. Your problems don't look like suitable pro…

First let’s define roles. I am not just pulling them out of thin air.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

Junior - everything is spelled out in excruciating detail, the what and the how. They are going to be slow, not know best practices, constantly bug other developers and you srs going to have to correct them a lot.

Mid level developer - little ambiguity on the business case or their role in it. They are really good coders in their domain. They have the experience to turn well defined business requirements into code. You don’t have to explain the “how” to them just the what. They should have the ability to break an assigned “epic” based on the business requirements to well defined stories and be a single responsible individual for that Epic maybe working with juniors depending on the deliverable or other mid level developers.

A senior developer works at a higher level of ambiguity and a larger scope, the business may know they want something. But neither the business or technical requirements are well defined. Think of a team lead.

Senior+ - more involved with strategy.

If I have to define everything in great detail anyway, why not just use AI? It can do it faster, cheaper, more correct and the iteration is faster. I would go as far as saying in my recent coding agent experience, a coding agent is realistically 100x faster than a junior developer since you have to give both of them well defined tasks.

My experience with Claude code and codex recently is that even the difference between a mid level developer and a coding agent is taste when it comes to user facing development, knowing funky action at a distance, and knowing the business, with a mid level developer you can assume shared context and history with an ability to learn.

So again, why do I need to hire a junior developer in the age of AI?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#276

Post by orangecoffee »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #239
bluefirebrand wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your getting unnecessarily down voted by devs who want to feel morally superior, but don't have any concrete answer to the conundrum you've posed.

It's about money, and the actual solution would be to lower pay at senior level and give it to juniors, with some lock in agreed by the junior in exchange for this grace.

I doubt the vast majority will agree to this.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#277

Post by fdgg »

sotix wrote: post #274

AI has made senior engineers useless to me. I have purposefully asked senior engineers specific questions to get their insight on a matter only to have them tell me, "here's what our internal AI tool said". This has occurred countless times. I find that staff and principal engineers have remained extraordinarily valuable as teachers. Our junior devs have been exceptional and are eager to learn. Our seniors have becom…

Its a disaster.

Remember this simple fact - if you dont use it, you lose it. The cognitive damage these tools will create wont be largely visible on a macro-scale for a few more years yet. But people are eventually going to realise, all this work (pre off-loading to LLMs) once geared the brain to work in a particular kind of way that results in the generation of ideas for inventions to yield innovations and so on...

Personally Im only strictly hiring people who have not been exposed to the LLM-virus / people who are extremely disciplined with their use about it (which is difficult to determine).

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#278

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

array_key_first wrote: post #268
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65

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. 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 perspectiv…

Who would better be able to see those blind spots - a junior developer with no experience or a mid level or senior developer coming in with a fresh set of eyes?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#279

Post by problynawt »

fdgg wrote: post #277
sotix wrote: post #274

AI has made senior engineers useless to me. I have purposefully asked senior engineers specific questions to get their insight on a matter only to have them tell me, "here's what our internal AI tool said". This has occurred countless times. I find that staff and principal engineers have remained extraordinarily valuable as teachers. Our junior devs have been exceptional and are eager to learn. Our seniors have becom…

Its a disaster. Remember this simple fact - if you dont use it, you lose it. The cognitive damage these tools will create wont be largely visible on a macro-scale for a few more years yet. But people are eventually going to realise, all this work (pre off-loading to LLMs) once geared the brain to work in a particular kind of way that results in the generation of ideas for inventions to yield innovations and so on...…

[dead]

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#280

Post by fdgg »

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…

"At this point I can only see self-discipline as a mechanism to willingly avoid AI"

Do you realise how difficult this actually is? Millions of people have zero self-discipline with their consumption of social media.

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