Junior Developers in the Age of AI
thoughtfuleng.substack.com
Junior Developers in the Age of AI
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#2I'm happy to hire juniors but they must still have relevant skills. One question I ask is "how does one build a coding agent" - if a junior is unable to outline the ideas around building and expanding coding agents, it indicates they are not aware of what industry they work in.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#3How do we know it's "AI", and not just the fact that CS has gotten too popular and there's now a glut of new graduates?
https://cra.org/crn/2025/08/infographic-computing-bachelors-...
EDIT: it's also hard to account for the fact that job position titles aren't very consistent over time and I know quite a few new grads who got "senior" job positions
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#4I'm happy to hire juniors but they must still have relevant skills. One question I ask is "how does one build a coding agent" - if a junior is unable to outline the ideas around building and expanding coding agents, it indicates they are not aware of what industry they work in.
I hope you're hiring for an agent developer position, otherwise it's not going to be a very effective signal
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#5How do we know it's "AI", and not just the fact that CS has gotten too popular and there's now a glut of new graduates? https://cra.org/crn/2025/08/infographic-computing-bachelors-... EDIT: it's also hard to account for the fact that job position titles aren't very consistent over time and I know quite a few new grads who got "senior" job positions
Even before AI have noticed really small to mid size companies not having enough budget to hire junior developers that they know they'd have to train from the ground up. They'd rather take chances on senior developers and/or contractors.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#6I'm happy to hire juniors but they must still have relevant skills. One question I ask is "how does one build a coding agent" - if a junior is unable to outline the ideas around building and expanding coding agents, it indicates they are not aware of what industry they work in.
Great LinkedIn post, thanks for sharing.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#7That chart shown in the article is very interesting. But I think more important things happened in 2023 than just GPT3.5.
ZIRP ending, coding becoming a full blown meme ("day in the life of a wfh swe" videos on tiktok), and work from home exploding.
This combination of factors made it risky to make a mistake hiring an unqualified SWE. SWE salaries exploded AND money got more expensive. At the same time, the number of unqualified applicants exploded due to the EZ bootcamp wfh 6 fig meme, and on top of this, remote interviewing made it very easy to cheat your way into a job you were not qualified for. Since it's very difficult to gauge quality of SWE talent, this pushed companies very strongly in the direction of hiring senior talent. Of course, companies and managers do not want to announce that they do not know a good engineer from an awful one. So here comes a convenient excuse, the excuse that companies make for everything nowadays: "AI".
The article is correct though. This explosion in interest in CS, along with very powerful AI tools, has produced a very strong batch of junior engineers that are very very underpriced relative to their senior colleagues. If I were running a company right now and needed cheap, strong talent, there is never a better time than now. Recruit and hire exclusively junior engineers -- and only interview in-person.
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#8lil bro re-labeling himself as engineer instead of coder to keep job
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#9I'm happy to hire juniors but they must still have relevant skills. One question I ask is "how does one build a coding agent" - if a junior is unable to outline the ideas around building and expanding coding agents, it indicates they are not aware of what industry they work in.
Sorry but I don't understand why you ask this question, can you explain your train of thought?
Re: Junior Developers in the Age of AI
#10> It’s why the best engineers try to write as little code as possible. They understand that each additional line is another thing that must be understood, remembered, and maintained.
As a long time SRE/DevOps, this is the key point that I believe people are overlooking in the "AI will let anyone write code!!"
Support does not scale linearly with additional software. If anything, it grows faster due to the "two systems == one connection, three == three connections, four == six connections" etc.
Sure, you could argue that LLMs could ALSO do the support but the reason you have people around to begin with is for when the technical systems break in weird and interesting ways. Similar to how planes have pilots even in the age of autopilots (the humans are, of course, still fallible).
Another argument might be: well, LLMs will write better software. My counter is that there weren't really excuses for not writing better software before but we still got buggy code with poor documentation. If anything, LLMs will make it easier to crank out barely maintainable and supportable code at even faster rates.