We still need the good junior engineers.
AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
41–50 of 151 posts
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#42> 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'd say I'm in a better position by mostly ignoring AI so far - I haven't wasted any time or effort working out the current week's fashion in AI prompting methods that will be out of date by next week.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#43Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#44If the task is simple enough that you can throw AI at it with an intern and get it solved, then it should've been solved already in the first place. I'd argue in more mature organizations all the things that are "backlog todos" are such because there is inherent complexity that can not be solved simply by throwing tokens at it or there are too many unknown unknowns.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#45I 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.
[flagged]
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#46It 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 bei…
This is the direction many engineers (seniors included) are facing if they mostly rely on AI. You lose your skills, you become detached. We will all become 'architects'.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 eve…
Treating people like adults means not admonishing them by saying things like "we're a business, not a daycare". Adults don't need to be informed that they're working a job because they already are aware. Talking down to people by saying things like that is pretty much the opposite of treating them like adults.
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#48> This summer, we assigned the problem to an intern (that’s less tenure than a junior engineer). The intern led the development of this feature. They talked to the product manager to understand the problem and requirements. They wrote the design document on how to approach it, aligned with the team, and built it. Of course they did that with the help of AI, and the team they were working with.
So, interns can still produce some value. How much value?
> In our product, there was a feature which had been requested for years, but had not been built yet. It wasn’t overly complex, but it was not critical.
Said another way: The feature was of so little value that it was not even worth assigning to a non-AI-assisted intern! This is what most of us mean when we say “AI lowers the value of…”
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#49> 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…
Ownership of what then?
Re: AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
#50Sort of like how there's a running joke, "this meeting could have been an email"; I think that for all the substance I found in this "4 minutes to read" blog post, it could have been a one-sentence comment in some discussion thread somewhere instead.
When AI learns to only use concise, meaningful words instead of words for the sake of vomiting out more tokens, I suspect we’ll have finally achieved proper AGI.