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

franciscotrindade.me

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

#21

Post by literallyroy »

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…

Making changes to someone else’s PR (other than extremely trivial ones) feels like they don’t have much ownership. People often have a reason for doing things the way they did and skipping over them seems like a mistake.

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

#22

Post by franciscomt »

franciscomt wrote: post #18
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.

But I agree that now it’s something people can catch up. The point is that I think it will make a difference if you’re someone that never coded manually vs someone that is (un)learning after having a full career pre-AI. Is not much different that people who started working with computers and others who had to learn how to deal with them late in their career.

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

#23

Post by birdsongs »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #16
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.

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…

> My company has excellent culture.

> Zero tolerance

> We’re a business not a daycare

Okay man, I'm sure it's great.

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

#24

Post by _joel »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #12
unified101 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Software Engineer" is a thing.

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

#25

Post by 0x696C6961 »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #17

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…

I've dreamt about pernosco (rr) style traces being available for tests in PRs. Imagine a DST setup where the PR shows diffs of deterministic test execution traces (I have no idea what these diffs would look like)

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

#26

Post by gjvc »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #16
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.

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…

is it your business? do you own it?

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

#28

Post by fsnovask »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #16
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.

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…

Sure bud

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

#29

Post by franciscomt »

dzonga wrote: post #13
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 s…

That’s a good point. My whole career has been in product/tech led companies.

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

#30

Post by throwatdem12311 »

birdsongs wrote: post #23
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> My company has excellent culture. > Zero tolerance > We’re a business not a daycare Okay man, I'm sure it's great.

You’d be suprised how often people rise to the occasion when you don’t treat them like children.

I don’t know why I can’t rely to the person below me so I’m editing:

We don’t admonish. It’s a mission statement and an up-front mutual understanding by all parties that you own your work end to end and you are accountable for it. You don’t even get an interview if you don’t agree. People that are offended by it don’t even bother applying. Excellent filter.

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