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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

#81

Post by echelon »

rvz wrote: post #57
echelon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's with these attitudes?

The world is changing rapidly. There's a very large chance you and nobody else here will have a software job.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#82

Post by throwyawayyyy »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #59
m00x wrote: post #35

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…

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.

I think this is the thing. Companies have always been forced rather against their immediate interests into the cost of hiring junior engineers. As soon as the idea gained traction that this cost was unnecessary, companies stopped. So: we had the post-COVID tech slump, and then immediately after, by horrible coincidence for prospective junior engineers, LLMs turned out to be good at coding. Result: a missing generation of engineers, and a giant headache in about 15 years time. But which tech exec could possibly care about what happens in 15 years?

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#83

Post by jemmyw »

Fraterkes wrote: post #65
m00x wrote: post #35

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…

Alright, I’m at the start of my career but do have a genuine burning interest in programming. Am I fucked or not?

If you're in that 20% that actually has an interest in the work then you'll probably be fine.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#84

Post by mschuster91 »

j45 wrote: post #68
marginalia_nu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years. Too many if not most can't even change a single sentence in their curriculum in 1-2 years. It doesn't mean University isn't worth it, it's worth less if you aren't self-directed learner building things.

> Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years.

Maybe, just maybe, companies should invest into training again instead of outsourcing training to universities and saddle the prospects with the cost in the form of student debt? FFS we used to tell our children "if a job requires you to pay for entry, you're getting scammed" - and yet, we've all accepted it with "academia", "coding bootcamps" and god knows what else.

Universities should be a place for the gifted to advance science, not be degree mills for large companies too goddamn lazy and penny-pinching!

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#85

Post by sixtyj »

cosmodisk wrote: post #62
awepofiwaop wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're clearly in it just for the money That's often how jobs work. I happen to like my job, but let's not pretend like everyone is going to make sufficient money following their most passionate interests.

I'm yet to meet anyone even remotely associated with tech ( let's call it all IT) that is good and only cares about money. Debugging code at for 8 hours straight is most people's hell on earth but some people love it and that love doesn't come through paycheck alone.

Everyone perceives the world differently. For example, I like to look for mistakes and I spot them (in a text while editing), but I have a friend who’s hopeless at that. On the other hand, he’s good at seeing projects through to the end, which is something I’m not good at.

So it really is good to find people who are a good fit for a specific position - and who, in the worst-case scenario, would do the work even for free or without anyone supervising them.

The question is whether the younger generation has grown up with the motto “money first and at any cost”… Not everyone, of course, but when I see how everything everywhere is reduced just to monetary value, it makes me feel a little down sometimes.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#88

Post by matheusmoreira »

sublinear wrote: post #36

> 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 wh…

> If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny.

I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired?

By "project" do you mean "product"?

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#89

Post by WillPostForFood »

I'd like to see a larger date range. The Stanford dataset starts in 2021 (covid, work from home, low interest rates, govt stimulus), which is one of the weirdest economic times in the last 100 years. It would be useful to see how Jrs are doing compared to ~10 years ago.

Re: AI has torched the market for junior programmers

#90

Post by bee_rider »

j45 wrote: post #68
marginalia_nu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years. Too many if not most can't even change a single sentence in their curriculum in 1-2 years. It doesn't mean University isn't worth it, it's worth less if you aren't self-directed learner building things.

This is the well known weird thing about programming, right? University students learn CS, happen to also pick up some programming trade skills as a side effect, and then get hired as software craftspeople. The coincidentally learned skills are never quite up to date, just close enough.

But nobody wants to set up programming trade schools or apprenticeships so shrug.

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