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AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

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Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#11

Post by franciscomt »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #8

> The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR). The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes. Yeah this part should not exist anymore. It doesn’t where I work. When I get a PR I just ask an agent to make the proposed changes. There is absolutely zero…

I agree. Although I think that was never the job. Even without AI, the practice of subdividing work into coding tasks was not a good one.

AI just made it obvious.

Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#12

Post by throwatdem12311 »

unified101 wrote: post #7
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now. Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback. Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.

Your boss isn't shortly going to say the same about you? Fable is better than you at engineering.

I basically only use Fable, and no it isn’t. Coding isn’t engineering.

Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#13

Post by dzonga »

franciscomt wrote: post #2

Author here. My last post on this reached the front page, and the main objection was that after AI, the junior's marginal value is gone: if a junior just passes specs to an AI tool and PRs back, why pay the salary? That deserved a real answer, so I wrote this post. Short version: that describes a problem with how the role is structured, not what juniors can do. Push back welcome.

my take from this article - there's a point you miss. is the organization product driven ? because usually that changes how engineers solve or approach problems. a few organizations are product driven.

if it's product led - and every engineer no matter the level are supposed to understand the business and the requirements that drive value i.e create their own tickets etc - then yeah the value of the junior engineer stays the same or goes up.

with other orgs - where product managers act like high priests and everything has to go through Jira. then the value of not just junior engineers but engineers in general has been always at an all time low.

Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#15

Post by lelanthran »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #5
petcat wrote: post #3

I think it is less about junior/mid engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development. This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult…

Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now. Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback. Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.

> Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.

I'm pretty certain SOTA is better than you at engineering. It's gonna be a real shock to your system when you finally acknowledge to yourself that you are nothing more than an expensive proxy to an LLM.

Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#16

Post by throwatdem12311 »

birdsongs wrote: post #6
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now. Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback. Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.

> Good riddance. > Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind. I'm really grateful for my company's culture. Reading replies like this, I remember how easy it is to forget how atrocious that can be elsewhere. Thanks for the perspective and reminder.

My company has excellent culture. Zero tolerance for slop, top to bottom. With or without AI, you own your work and you are accountable for it. We’re a business not a daycare for foreign contractors without useful skills.

We prefer to hire on-shore junior engineers now, but their job isn’t just to just bang out grunt work Jira tickets. They own their work end to end and support it at every level. They get mentorship from seniors to move beyond coding and into systems and architecture level thinking. That’s the job now.

Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#17

Post by dataviz1000 »

This is something I've been thinking about the last couple days: how to get junior engineers to be valuable.

I developed a system to help prepare for leet coding interviews so I never feel lost under pressure solving a problem again. It is like a debugger that steps through the code showing all the values of all the variables with data visualizations that reflect the logic so I can grok what it is doing. [0]

After I had the Claude build it, I started looking at the values and there were some mistakes. So, again, the coding agent ran all the code, recorded all the values, and made sure that they line up.

Here is the really cool thing about that. The coding agents can't be trusted. By observing the values stepping though, what I really was doing was debugging coding agent code. It is debugging code presented in a way that is extremely simplified.

What I've been thinking about yesterday and today is, can I do the same thing with a pull request? Have the coding agent run the code, capture all the values, and create a console for the reviewer to step through looking at with data visualizations that abstractly represent that code.

Two things. 1. Coding agents can't be trusted and 2. reviewing code is very difficult. But is it possible to use coding agents to make reviewing code easy for humans? I think so.

That would be a great way for junior engineers to be extremely useful. They only have to step through the code and make sure that all the values line up.

[0] https://adamsohn.com/algoviz/

Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#18

Post by franciscomt »

lelanthran wrote: post #9

> If the assumption is that AI is going to radically simplify the technical portion of the role, then the people who have started their careers with AI will be in the best spot once they have acquired the experience. This doesn't make sense - AI is to allow unskilled people to produce what was previously only produced by skilled people. IOW, how does having 2 years of experience using an LLM to generate code beat hav…

I think it’s an oversimplification to say that using AI for se dev is a trivial skill. You can see it even now with some people chatting with Claude and others running multiple agents in a loop. There’s skill in that.

Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#19

Post by birdsongs »

hactually wrote: post #10
birdsongs wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good riddance. > Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind. I'm really grateful for my company's culture. Reading replies like this, I remember how easy it is to forget how atrocious that can be elsewhere. Thanks for the perspective and reminder.

how do you mean? surely you're paid for delivering product not coding? if it is the latter, I too would love to be paid for recreational coding

You misunderstood my reply. I'm talking about culture, not engineering or coding.

I'm just grateful I don't work with people that say "good riddance" to blanket foreign talent bans, and "catch up or get left behind" to fellow engineers.

That doesn't sound like a nice place to work? Is all I'm saying.

Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it

#20

Post by throwatdem12311 »

lelanthran wrote: post #15
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good riddance. Worked with many offshored firms before, from all over the world. The work was subpar before and it’s even worse now. Now I can fire off agents ona remote box to do the grunt work and open PRs, then just prompt to review/iterate it. No timezone timezone delays or language barriers. Nearly instant feedback. Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind.

> Coding is solved. Engineering is not. Catch up or be left behind. I'm pretty certain SOTA is better than you at engineering. It's gonna be a real shock to your system when you finally acknowledge to yourself that you are nothing more than an expensive proxy to an LLM.

I basically only use Fable and no it isn’t. Might I suggest that if you think it is you’re just projecting your own insecurity on others. Coding isn’t engineering.
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