> The AI version of this argument is not a new insight. It’s an old (and mistaken) preference, wearing new clothes.
Everything sounds like AI now when you squint just a bit.
Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
41–50 of 116 posts
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#42Hiring seniors is a waste of money. You need someone who knows enough to drive LLMs, but not too much more. The LLMs are good enough to do the debugging, the coding, and a big part of the design work and system architecture. Most of the work today is manual testing and feeding the bugs back into the LLMs.
I've been programming for 15 years, but I've never really taken the plunge into 3D work. Always wanted to. So I figure, now that coding agents are so powerful, let's see if I can make something! I've tried 3 experiments so far, and have given it serious effort. They're all terrible. The reason they're terrible is that it's a skill issue. I don't have 3D skills. I don't know the lingo, I don't know how to describe my…
Yeah, you need to learn the jargon, and then use that to ask the agent to debug its own output. Sometimes you can get away by asking the agent to do the web searches and get it to figure out the stuff on its own. Again, it's not zero effort, but it's no longer skilled work.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are we defending the feelings of chatbots? Does the word clanker upset you too?
It mildly upsets me, because I think the impulse to denigrate that which we oppose is a harmful one which, if cultivated, we can all too readily turn on people who don't deserve it. But it's not a real slur for real people. (Note that in Star Wars , where many people got this slur from, droids are – or at least, have the potential to be – people, albeit they are usually enslaved, and subject to arbitrary mind wipes.)…
"Retard" is a forbidden curse (read: slur) that holds great power in the English language.
I understand the risks of using this sort of language, and yet still I have determined that it is prudent to use the harshest rhetorical weapons that we have available to resist the large AI firms.
"Clanker" much less potent, much less powerful. I want an anti-AI slogan that stays in people's minds after they leave this comments section, and I think "AI is for retards" is that slogan.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#44[flagged]
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#45I'm not sure what the article actually has to say about the topic it presents. It seems to want to be something about not hiring junior talent (something by the way not restricted to the tech industry) but instead it ends up more a critique about people wanting to use a waterfall pipeline.
I'm just staring at the title, wondering how this offensive, double-and-a-half-negative phrase made it all the way to the frontpage. I'm going to skip this one for that obvious reason.
I agree with the sibling comment and also don't understand how the title is "offensive". I literally can't think of anything that could be offensive about any term in the title or the title as a whole.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#46Wouldn't the logic to only hire Junior engineers if AI could do the work, what do you need the Senior salary for if they're both just asking AI to do things.
This is obviously assuming the ideology of an organization that would consider something like "We shouldn't be hiring engineers anymore" in the first place so they obviously have absolute trust in AI.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#47Pre-AI juniors were valuable because on many tasks, it was faster for me (senior eng) to write a quick spec have a conversation with a junior, and have them go off for a few hours or a few days and write the code, and then come back with it for review. I could do that with several junior engineers and pretty reasonably paralellize the work.
Now a junior takes my spec, drops it into Claude, and submits a PR a few minutes later. So I'm back to being the bottleneck -- there's constant pressure to provide specs and review code, and ultimately that process is just me having an indirect conversation with Claude (em dash is mine).
The junior is probably providing negative value, since it would be more efficient for me just to talk to Claude, and they're not learning anything, because it's really hard to learn anything by skimming code that's being pooped out by Claude.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is, I still think we need to train junior engineers. I think my best advice to juniors right now is stop using Claude so much. Use it to plan and answer questions, but you should still be writing code even it's slower. Because that's the only way they're going to learn enough to effectively guide AI and review output and get past being a net negative.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#48I'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI. What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because…
I guess a lot of this depends on whether you consider juniors to be part of your talent pool. Unless you are retaining them, it is just subsidizing industry at large to train them. I stayed less than a year at my first two jobs. They bet wrong.
This is standard because after a year of experience, a fresh junior dev is worth roughly twice as much on the open market. Most companies won't give a 100% raise because it would upset the apple cart with other employees wanting similar raises. So the junior dev has to move on to get paid what they're worth.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#49I'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI. What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because…
I guess a lot of this depends on whether you consider juniors to be part of your talent pool. Unless you are retaining them, it is just subsidizing industry at large to train them. I stayed less than a year at my first two jobs. They bet wrong.
You win some, you lose some. Maybe your coworker juniors became seniors and didn't negotiate higher pay.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a poorly instructed llm? Or a poorly constructed thought?
It's lived experience. My management is a lot happier when I move too fast to really pay attention to the problems and use my expertise, and the output is good enough that nobody really complains. Building most software is no longer skilled work; it takes minimal training. The industry just hasn't caught up yet.
Well. I own my business and I really hate this attitude that some startups executives have. I want quality. Not blind speed. I want speed to be a by product of a well built product and a system that builds it. Not a bunch of slop thrown over the wall that I have to then debug and fix.