Live data from Hacker News

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

franciscotrindade.me

31–40 of 151 posts

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

#31

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

Something not being the primary reason I'm paid does not imply that it's "solved". Personally, I enjoy working at a company where people have intellectual curiosity about varying viewpoints to ambiguous questions like "is coding solved?" rather than scolding people who don't adhere to the dogma as being "left behind".

To be clear, I use LLMs every day as part of my work pretty much entirely because my employer wants me to and has encouraged me to make them part of my workflow. They've managed to do that without anyone saying anything as aggressive as the parent commenter.

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

#33

> 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.

We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.

When I ask an agent to do a code change for a PR, it’s because it’s not something I think the other engineer really should waste their time on. It’s on the same level as nitpicking what lines the braces go on before we had auto-formatters and lint checkers in CI.

Other staff engineers I rarely even see their code. I trust them to be able to review and deliver and support their own code and communicate breaking changes. Knowledge gets disseminated at weekly architecture reviews, in person.

Offshore developers under me have their code gone over with a fine-toothed comb. They don’t own the work. They don’t support it. They can’t even speak to me without using copy pasted Claude responses that are wrong half the time anyway. I have zero qualms with “going over them”.

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

#34

> 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…

[dead]

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

#36
It largely depends on the person. We have several junior engineers who cannot solve a problem without AI. When AI can’t solve it, they just keep trying and failing. And I mean weeks to months late. Then rinse and repeat on the next task. It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineer. Combine the teaching with a real struggle is what makes them better.

As it is now, they aren’t being taught and they’re not learning from what the AI is producing because they don’t understand it. The produced code is a black box, and the AI’s development is a black box too. All they know is that running it produces something like what they asked for. They have no idea about failure modes which is a fundamental concept of engineering. The worst part is that AI is covering up their deficiencies. They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in.

There are obviously good junior engineers that are using AI judiciously and not as a crutch. They’re the ones who still interact with seniors to get help and actually learn. They would have been successful without AI too. These are the ones the author is talking about. In my experience, the momentum is moving towards the worse type of junior the more AI is adopted. Unless that changes, it will erase their value.

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

#37

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…

Is this just an ad for the product? How is this connected specifically to junior engineers? Is it implying that they cannot debug code without this kind of tool while more experienced people can?

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

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think this is related to culture, it's just the internet nowadays. You need hot takes for engagement. That user probably runs with that mindset always on

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

#40
I couldn't disagree more. Juniors have very poor design sense and can't guide the AI to land in the right spot. Consistently on my team the developers who are the most reliant on AI are causing me the most trouble. They produce a lot of code but constantly make the same mistakes and can't seem to learn and improve their own design skills, or are doing it at a snail's pace.
Post reply on HN