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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

#101

Post by shimman »

glouwbug wrote: post #96
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…

Is all of hackernews webdev only? I can’t imagine “coding not being a job anymore” in fields like automotive, medical, military, robotics, and HPC

I think the fear is that the "higher" paying webdev jobs will be drying up while those traditional industries you mentioned still have the need for developers but auto, medical, and weapon industries never paid well.

Remember moving to New England to look for work and all the interesting embedded medical device companies paid like $80k less than a react dev job I got at an ISP.

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

#102

Post by jtrn »

glouwbug wrote: post #86
jtrn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This analogy only works if you’re ready to commit _only prompts_ and have those prompts do a clean “compile” of your production runtime everytime you pull. Are you ready to do that?

See my response to the other comment if you don't understand that analogy is not the same as "identical".

And to state that "This analogy only works if ...." is just PATENTLY wrong. The analogy works fine if you say that it compares analogous situations. Like if we focus on some encumbrance complaining that "kids these days are too stupid because they don't understand the fundamentals like I do" or "These new tools that make it easier for stupid people, not smart people like me, to make stuff is dangerous because they don't know what they are doing". That's just a few of MANY analogous observations we can make for the two situations. But I guess you think that only the thing you care about is the only thing that exists.

And in the end, everybody who complains like this is just going to be shown to be just as mistaken as all the people who complained that "people who don't code in assembly are dangerous!" And it's just marvelous to watch it play out slowly over the last couple of years. And we are just a couple of years in. I'm just making a note of everybody who is mistaken, as a study in denial and biased thinking. The end for all of this was obvious after Opus 4.6 hit. And it's just getting more and more obvious with each model release and harness improvement. This is a gold mine for studying flawed thinking.

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

#104

Post by jjk166 »

adam_arthur wrote: post #90

I see the complete opposite becoming the case. In a world where code can be generated rapidly, it's super critical that you have a core few set of people who really understand the macro design of the codebase and can continue to factor it well and iterate quickly. Adding more people and contributors just increases the probability that nobody really understands the structure of the codebase, it degrades into DRY and u…

That makes sense from an engineering perspective, but from a business perspective you don't want the understanding to live in the heads of a small team of people. Companies own the codebase, they don't own their employees. If losing a single employee means losing the understanding for a significant chunk of the codebase, that's a serious risk. With the senior/junior model where you have a senior engineer architecting the system and a small team implementing that architecture, the understanding lives in the senior engineer's head, but it also lives in the head of the person who implemented it, and their teammates who implemented the parts that interact with it and were present for the discussions probably have enough knowledge to figure it out pretty quickly, so as long as the company doesn't lose the whole team all at once they're okay. If you make the team more productive with AI tools you can have the team do more, which still cuts down the total headcount, if to a lesser degree, but preserves the redundant understanding.

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

#105

Post by Kim_Bruning »

glouwbug wrote: post #86
jtrn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This analogy only works if you’re ready to commit _only prompts_ and have those prompts do a clean “compile” of your production runtime everytime you pull. Are you ready to do that?

It turns out that this almost works. You'd probably want to commit explicit design documents btw, not every last prompt.

FWIW, when people try this out in practice, they tend to commit the design docs alongside the generated tests and the generated code.

Mutating the docs then leads to mutations in the code.

Several friends and I have workflows that look a bit like this, but I know for sure mine isn't 100% strict(yet?), and ymmv. Everyone is still figuring out the best practices I think.

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

#106

Post by hawaiianbrah »

spike021 wrote: post #83
olsondv wrote: post #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 bei…

>It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineer You still have standups, right? I'd be questioning why at the very least the team lead/manager isn't questioning the lack of progress during those meetings and immediately requesting a more senior engineer help out. Even before AI this was how it worked. Unless the junior engineer is being purposely secretive about lack of progress, w…

Yeah, I can’t imagine having something “weeks or months” late without intervention. That isn’t a failing of AI or the junior, that’s a failing on the team processes/manager/everyone else on the team.

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

#107

Post by machiaweliczny »

_the_inflator wrote: post #87

"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." This is it. Evolving into a developer role was more or less directly proportional to the effort you put in. Before AI I used to ask applicants to the department I oversaw whether they have a GitHub Account with a project to show, and bonus, which they are immensely proud of, no matter what. Y…

> It is horrible until AI gets as good as a perfect project from a prompt or we need to abandon it.

Getting close to it with my recent test of cursor cloud workflow.

I've spent 300M tokens in a day and it achieved what I wanted. Manually would take me a month instead of day so it's not 2x it's 20x faster but project was quite simple rewrite of 20k lines of C++ and there was reference implementation. It also improved on original implementation perf wise.

The problem is with fuzzy ideas for new development and with catching up with comprehension when working on something new - I guess we need better visualization tools for code. Product manager work seems like bottleneck currently and monitoring because coding can move quite fast.

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

#108

Post by hawaiianbrah »

yifanl wrote: post #89
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you design a harness that tries to grow the user? As in quiz the prompter in a way that forces them to reflect and improve? And if they can do that- could they do it to themselves- going from a junior to a pro conversation?

You can't, as that removes the main value add of the AI.

I really disagree with that stance. It would be trivial to have it ask you questions about what it produced to ensure you understand. I’ve literally already done that several times.

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

#109

Post by voakbasda »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #85
codegeek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." This is the biggest issue with AI. It is incredible when in the right hands (Senior devs who know good fundamentals and know how to code) but really bad when in wrong hands (Juniors with no fundamentals but they are made to believe…

So how do you design a harness that tries to grow the user? As in quiz the prompter in a way that forces them to reflect and improve? And if they can do that- could they do it to themselves- going from a junior to a pro conversation?

You cannot speed run human learning. Investing time to read and absorb the material, repeatedly exercising and expanding your understanding, is the only path.

Not coincidentally, this is exactly how we train our AI.

Edit: but to answer your question, an AI harness can only emulate the best teaching methods. Learning is up to the human.

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

#110

Post by Merad »

HEmanZ wrote: post #65

Every single time I see an article like this come out on hacker news I have the same reaction “sure, this year”. There is still room for juniors… in fall of 2026. Will there be in fall of 2030? If your thesis rests on LLMs and AI systems not dramatically improving over where they are today, is it worth anything?

The real value of a junior engineer is that they will become a senior. That's really always been the case IME. Juniors in the first year or two of their career are routinely a net negative, maybe break even. But the thing is, unless you're making the bet that LLMs are going to _entirely_ replace human SWE, we as an industry have to maintain a pipeline to take in juniors and level them up. If we don't, we're going to be in real trouble in about 10 years.
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