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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#181

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

coldtea wrote: post #179
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade. > The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise. This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see “salary compression and inversion” > That's how companies fail. The company failing in the long term is really not any curr…

> This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade. That counts temps, people who weren't a good fit and were let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of which bring the average down (but are not "hopping"). Corporate IT, governmen…

Nope, it doesn’t count temps at all. This is easily Googleable.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#182

Post by Retric »

bdangubic wrote: post #172
Retric wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems Fascinating. I am finding the exact opposite, like complete 180

How exactly do some people leverage AI to rearrange the furniture in the conference room for an office party?

Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of developers do, but I’ve seen what amounts to several thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because teams leverage the tools they have.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#183

Post by ash_091 »

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…

> statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women.

As a regular 30s dude, definitely not 1% by any measure, app dating had its rough spots but generally was a good time, I experienced no bitterness.

Instead I met a bunch of interesting people and found my partner. We now own a house and are talking about kids.

The real toxicity here is the idea that women at large are somehow responsible for anyone's lack of dating success.

For anyone reading this who might be dating and feel disheartened- the hard truth is that you have two options: you can either blame the group of people you're trying to attract for having faulty preferences, or you can reflect and work on yourself and your approach. Only one of these has any chance of helping you.

One thing I do agree with you on: bitterness is extremely unattractive.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#184

Post by ffsm8 »

collingreen wrote: post #171
michaelhoney wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Perhaps there's a constructive version of this because I agree with the sentiment but it's a little harsh - dude is obviously feeling very betrayed and left out of society and either falling down the incel tunnel or doing recruiting for it. There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous" and that if some people don't want to have k…

> There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous"

That fallacy isn't in there. Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly". And that's definitely another contributer to declining birth rates/families - because neither of them will feel remotely as committed to each other then they would've otherwise.

None of these are singular causes. They're all contributing to the whole situation. Which is precisely why I never made any such fallacy in my earlier comment.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#185

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Retric wrote: post #182
bdangubic wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems Fascinating. I am finding the exact opposite, like complete 180

How exactly do some people leverage AI to rearrange the furniture in the conference room for an office party? Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of developers do, but I’ve seen what amounts to several thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because teams leverage the tools they have.

You pay contractors and caterers - that’s a poor excuse ti have dead weight.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#186

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ash_091 wrote: post #183
ffsm8 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women. As a regular 30s dude, definitely not 1% by any measure, app dating had its rough spots but generally was a good time, I experienced no bitterness. Instead I met a bunch of interesting people and found…

For context, I don’t want this to sound bitter. The first time I was single as an adult was from 1996-2002 and dating apps weren’t a thing. The second time I was single was from 2006-2011 and I wasn’t really trying to date and spent most of the time getting my head back in the game and just hanging out with female friends until I started dating my now wife who I met at work. Even she had to make the first move.

That being said as five foot four guy, the chance of me having any success on a dating app at the time from everything I know would have been basically 0 no matter what. “Working on myself” would have done no good. I was objectively in great shape as a part time fitness instructor and I just run my first (and last) two half marathons before I met my wife.

Some guys just haven’t won the genetic lottery to succeed on dating apps. Again I’m not bitter as one of the relatively few straight male fitness instructors, it wasn’t hard to date during my first stint of singleness

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#187

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

weatherlite wrote: post #49

My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people…

It already happened. The old timers correctly observe that modern applications are bloated and inefficient because of all the heavyweight frameworks, excessive abstraction layers, and "left-pad culture" where external dependencies are pulled in to do the most trivial things but that these things enabled less capable developers to effectively build software to fulfill industry demand. LLM-only coders are just the next step in the devolution.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#188

Post by prescriptivist »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #178
braebo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work we build enterprise software with stuff like Kotlin+Spring + multiple NextJS apps + Microservices + Rust CAD engine. I haven’t have written code aside from tweaking stuff here and there in probably 3 or 4 months. Before that I wrote code by hand every day for many years. I’ve found a lot of fun parts of my new workflow that I enjoy. I still miss being fully immersed in a problem deep in the files… and sometim…

I feel the same way, I have many years of experience, and I have gone from writing everything by hand to using claude code all the time (my latest company is very pro doing everything with AI). Since I have been a software architect for the past 7-8 years it feels in some ways that that experience makes using claude code a lot more productive than for my non-architect colleagues, as I am able to steer it much more ef…

Things are changing so fast and so chaotically with this technology. I'm also writing everything now using Claude code, and I've been thinking a lot about what this means for my work moving forward. One thing I've noticed, is that I will just keep hammering and hammering on my work until I force myself to quit. Even on the weekend I feel the pull to go work on it. I'm just less sort of mentally exhausted by work, I suppose, but I don't think that's particularly healthy if it leads to me working way more than I should. On one hand, I think that's a reflection of how powerful and exciting this technology is, but on the other hand, I think that it triggers some different kind of reward function in my mind that I'm not used to.

In any case, I think if one wants to continue to have a career in this industry for years to come, it's basically table stakes to become fluent in using these tools.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#189

Post by Retric »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #185
Retric wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do some people leverage AI to rearrange the furniture in the conference room for an office party? Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of developers do, but I’ve seen what amounts to several thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because teams leverage the tools they have.

You pay contractors and caterers - that’s a poor excuse ti have dead weight.

You just replaced one task that an AI is useless for with a different task that an AI is useless for.

The point obviously still stands, and no I am not suggesting using Jr devs for physical labor alone is worth adding them to the team. Rather that “Work” includes a very wide variety of tasks that need to get done.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#190

Post by coffeebeqn »

BobbyJo wrote: post #45

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the…

I’ve had some who are useful almost out of school. The amount of tickets is always growing and have someone pick up those “when things calm down I swear I’ll address this” tickets is always helpful. If they can’t get anything done by themselves in the codebase then it gets much harder. I do also think that some people have completely forgotten all the context they didn’t have when they started off xx years ago so mentoring is not always very good
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