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AI has torched the market for junior programmers

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Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#31

Post by calvinmorrison »

jack1689 wrote: post #8

I feel it has rather created an opportunity for a junior programmer to deliver 5x faster than before and it has lowered the barriers to be a decent junior developer. Perhaps in today's job market for junior devs what changed are the metrics against which they are judged for. It's not just knowing theory of coding, it's about speed at which you ship and most importantly quality. Ultimately, how good is such a develope…

I see the opposite economic problem. Guys in their 50s with a house for 120K and a 2.0 mortgage and no kids in the house or graduated cost less than a young junior with a wife and kids and a house

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#32

Post by rvz »

> In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers, and that new programming jobs would look different.

Turns out that as admitted, the opposite was true and was predictable. Such that, in late 2024 [0], I predicted that there would be more layoffs in 2025.

> In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates, with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight.

Of course they would. Why hire a junior software engineer when you can replace them with an offshore remote mid engineer at 1/10th of the cost and give them Claude?

Surely that makes all of this even cheaper? False. Just ask Apple. [1] Or Boeing [2] [3] with their expensive offshoring and their trade secrets either leaked or the quality degraded.

And those drunk on token usage are now limiting it because it is expensive. Ask Meta, Tesla, Amazon and Microsoft why they are not "tokenmaxxing".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...

[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2025/06/12/boeing-...

[3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513787/boeing-and-the...

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#35

Post by m00x »

I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers. Our company was senior-heavy and we're just now diversifying.

80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.

They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#36

Post by sublinear »

> These are marketers, founders, teachers, analysts, and product managers, and they are writing software, which in my book makes them developers. They just don't identify that way, and more importantly it's not their job title, and job titles are what labor statistics count.

This makes perfect sense and is a net good. There were a ton of awful bloodsucking SaaS startups destroying progress for these niches.

People who understand their niche best have taken it upon themselves to build exactly what they need.

The question about junior devs is a red herring. There are no "junior devs" because the title is obsolete. If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny. This is the way hiring always was anywhere that wasn't a coding sweatshop.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#37

Post by bayarearefugee »

alunchbox wrote: post #5

On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?

> On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?

Doubtful.

You'll be expected to produce much more, you aren't likely to see raises commensurate with the increased productivity, and the AI tide is still rising and will likely eventually put downward pressure on your pay at an increasing rate.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#38

Post by ttoinou »

MattGaiser wrote: post #17
jack1689 wrote: post #8

I feel it has rather created an opportunity for a junior programmer to deliver 5x faster than before and it has lowered the barriers to be a decent junior developer. Perhaps in today's job market for junior devs what changed are the metrics against which they are judged for. It's not just knowing theory of coding, it's about speed at which you ship and most importantly quality. Ultimately, how good is such a develope…

The problem is that someone has to oversee the junior and the multiplier on productivity also applies to the overseer. So you could have the senior oversee the junior or just have them oversee Claude.

Difficult truth, but that’s the truth we need to accept

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#40

Post by dataviz1000 »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #10

> We are watching programming stop being a job title and become a capability, the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know. Casually pretending that decades of software engineers comparing programming to typing and saying "you are not a programmer, that is not a job" long before chatbots, didn't exist. The job was always "software architect", "software engineer"…

> the same way "typist" stopped being a job title when it became a thing everyone was expected to know

The same way "computer" and "calculator" stopped being a job title when they became devices might be a better way to reason about what is happening.

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