71–80 of 116 posts
It doesn't matter how much the employee costs. Let's assume you can hire two Juniors or one Senior for the same salary. If you have to optimize for ARR per employee - you can only hire one person. And if you have the choice between hiring a Junior or hiring a Senior... you're going to hire the Senior.
Goodhart's law fully applies here.
Pre-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 minu…
The problem I have: The CEO (and the investors, or the whole industry) is obsessed with ARR per employee. That's the key metric (in their mind). It doesn't matter how much the employee costs. Let's assume you can hire two Juniors or one Senior for the same salary. If you have to optimize for ARR per employee - you can only hire one person. And if you have the choice between hiring a Junior or hiring a Senior... you'r…
This claim is counterintuitive to me in many business contexts - ex. for an established privately-held company issuing dividends to the owners, what incentive do owners have to emphasize ARR per employee rather than net income?
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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.
I'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…
But the junior will do at least some real work that hopefully benefits the company while they are there. There is at least something on the "benefit" side of the cost/benefit balance to entice them.
The problem that AI creates is that it tends to eliminate even that benefit. The task I would assign to the junior as their first task, which I expect to take them some weeks on as they not only do the nominal task but acquire all the surrounding skills and knowledge to finish it, is now a prompt and the senior engineer intermittently checking in on the AI's completion of it. It's hard to justify hiring the junior and paying them for six months if the senior can do the task(s) they'll finish before they jet off to their next job in a fraction of a day or two.
I have written this from a point of view that is foreign to me to explain the problem from their point of view. I do not accept this formulation wholesale, though there are substantial kernels of truth in it that anyone who wants to convince a real person that they are wrong about this assessment will have to deal with. I'm a very long term oriented person and still believe that raising up talent within your organization is extremely important. After all, in the end, what even is your organization except the talent you have within it and the system you've built for it to operate? Unless you think you can operate without any people at all, people are a vital part of your organization and you'd better be growing the best people you can or you can expect to get beat in the long term by an organization that did invest.
But when I look out at the world, what I see operating in most people and companies is much closer to the point of view I described first. That "beat in the long term", however long it may be, is certainly longer than one quarter or even one fiscal year.
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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.
It's not really a double negative as the negations are in different clauses. If you remove both negations, you get a completely different statement: > Hiring junior engineers will solve the problem you think you have.
Refusing to hire junior engineers won't fix your actual problem.
I'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…
Agreed wfh to me is just generally bad for any creative work but for a new person it must be taking aways years of development.
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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.
A synonym for offensive is disgusting.
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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.
> This is standard because after a year of experience, a fresh junior dev is worth roughly twice as much on the open market.