On the flip side, IS this a good thing for senior engineers?
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AI has torched the market for junior programmers
51–60 of 203 posts
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#52I 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
100% would echo that - but I'd say it's a wide problem across job markets not just for junior programmers
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#53Would be interesting to see how this affects the service companies.
Typically for a project you’d have something like 1 senior, 1-2 mid and 2-3 juniors and sell the team to the client.
The junior/mid is where the margins are, as seniors knew their value and commanded a bigger salary with little margin for profit, but juniors aren’t paid as much, yet you can still comfortably bill the client.
Nowadays it’s 1-2 seniors for the whole thing and the service company is expected to pay for the tokens the seniors use to replace the lucrative juniors, so it’s a double hit for the company.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#54I'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…
Going back 29 years to the beginning of my career, I'd say maybe 50% of the graduates in my class, probably more, either were not cut out to be engineers or didn't really have any passion for it(or both).
I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?
I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#55I'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…
i don’t condone cheating but i also don’t blame anyone who follows a generally benign career path for its financial benefits.
I wouldn't blame them either, but I sure as hell wouldn't hire them.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#56> 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.
Those things stopped being full time jobs, but they only became more important to understand how they worked. Knowing more math makes you a better "living computer", but it also makes you a better programmer, in terms of code optimization for hardware constraints, and architect, because you have a better understanding of what is possible.
A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical sense) than a senior manager who's never looked at code, but perhaps not as good at choosing what to code in the first place.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Stop the moral grandstanding. This is a legitimate observation. We're also not hiring juniors. Only seniors who can use LLMs and evaluate the outputs.
Glad we were never "juniors" either, nor would we ever hire them. Here is the reason:
We just layoff the expensive engineers and offshore all our work to very cheap remote staff engineers (at least 2 in Mumbai), give them the Claude chatbot to do the work of 20 engineers.
So now we have reduced our costs by 90%. No need for juniors at all.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#58I am not really seeing how the first chart can be construed as AI disrupting the junior job market...
The 22-25 red line had plateaued before the release of ChatGPT and was already trending downwards by the time ChatGPT appeared.
Additionally, it took a quite a while before vibe and agentic coding appeared and gained traction, and I cannot really see how the precipitous decline between say Jan 2023 and Jan 2024 can be attributed mainly to AI.
The "other" reasons mentioned later in the post seem much more convincing.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#59I'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…
To be fair junior developers almost universally kinda suck and you have to teach them the job. They'll take 10x the time to do a job a senior would, and do it in a way that is much more complicated than it needs to be.
The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers
#60In silicon valley, apartment rents are up 20% relative to one year ago. People are getting hired, clearly. Not sure who.