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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#161

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Retric wrote: post #158
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that junior dev will probably leave in 2 years because HR won’t allow you to give them a raise to match their market comp. But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.

That’s not really an either or situation, you can have 7 team members with Claud Code and 1 Jr without. I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.

What’s the use of the junior? You have just widen the gap between mid and junior developers making them less useful

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#162

Post by FpUser »

raegis wrote: post #131
FpUser wrote: post #77

Problem is not making juniors useless. They kind of are by definition. Problem is that now they have very little chance to become seniors.

"juniors are useless": Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language. Nobody is born a "senior developer", so surely all of your training as a "junior" is not useless. There is always a disconnect between what younger people know and what older people expect them to know, so training is required almost universally.

>"juniors are useless. Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language"

Don't be so dense. It is a figure of speech. We all were useless at some point. Nothing to be ashamed of

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#163

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

fluidcruft wrote: post #61
Tharre wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code. Companies know this as well, but this is a prisoner dilemma type situation for them. A company can skip out on juniors, and instead offer to pay seniors a bit better to poach them from other companies, saving money. If everyone starts doing this, everyone obviously loses - there just won't be enough new seniors to satisfy deman…

The way other professions do this is by burying trainees with debt and then writing off debt if they stay.

See Revature.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#164

Post by freejazz »

skeledrew wrote: post #101
somenameforme wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this can be falsified by just considering the history of humanity. It wasn't that long ago that human language literally did not even exist. And our collective knowledge wasn't all that much more than 'poke him with the pointy end'. Somehow we went from that to putting a man on the Moon, unlocking the secrets of the atom, and more. And if you consider how awful we are at retaining/sharing information and just…

All that humanity has achieved happened due to the simple loop of identifying a desire/need and finding a way to satisfy it. Also known as reinforcement learning. The only thing that really differentiates humans from machines is... history. We've been learning and passing on our knowledge to successive generations over millennia. Nothing really special there; give the machines a few years to learn and see what happen…

What needs do machines have? What desires do they have?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#166

Post by [deleted] »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #161
Retric wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not really an either or situation, you can have 7 team members with Claud Code and 1 Jr without. I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.

What’s the use of the junior? You have just widen the gap between mid and junior developers making them less useful

[deleted]

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#167

Post by sarchertech »

wreath wrote: post #90
sarchertech wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s gonna take a long time for that to become the norm I think. I really wish I could take 5 years off while everyone figures this out.

You don't have to take 5 years off for it. Just continue same old business (assuming you don't have outside pressure to use this slop-machine) and keep your skills and judgment sharp until the tools and workflow stabilizes, and most of all, the money to fuel this hype runs out.

The reason I say that is because I don’t want to deal with trying to keep things from collapsing around me while people slam in tens of thousands of lines of vibe coded slop.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#168

Post by Retric »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #161
Retric wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not really an either or situation, you can have 7 team members with Claud Code and 1 Jr without. I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.

What’s the use of the junior? You have just widen the gap between mid and junior developers making them less useful

Working on problems that are a poor fit for a mid level developer with AI assistance of which there are still plenty.

I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, which means a larger percentage of what’s left over is more cheaply done by Jr’s working without AI assistance.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#169

Post by satisfice »

ffsm8 wrote: post #143
nostrademons wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs…

The Birthrate dropping has multiple causes, none of them have any relation to the topic at hand It's a negative (from the perspective of reproduction) confluence of both social and economic developments. E.g. the death of the traditional gender roles has inevitably reduced birth rates - for multiple reasons to boot. Because on the one hand, the women has am easier time not to commit and just sleep around, consequentl…

The rich and powerful can have all the gender roles they want. They are being phased out only among the peasants.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#170

Post by sunir »

hluska wrote: post #74
sunir wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would there be a lack of original ideas? People who are born to code so to speak will do it. Information wants to be free as the saying goes. It only takes one time for an innovation for it to be to copied everywhere. We don’t need the same volume of developers to have the same or faster speed of innovation. And conversely if there is stagnation there is a capital opportunity to out compete it and so there will b…

That’s the big scary point at the crux of all of this - you’ve had decades without the tooling to develop instincts. Nobody knows whether it’s possible to develop instincts with the tooling or what those instincts will look like. Creativity takes a degree of skill to execute on and the concern is that we’re potentially graduating people to painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel before they’ve even learned to sket…

I can't repair my car, which used to be the hallmark of technical masculine skill in the era of Grease the musical, because mechanical maintenance is not primary in my lifetime. Nor do I have any idea how to manage a farm. I think the kids will be fine. On the other hand, I fear I will not survive once my Internet connection goes out.
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