Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is making junior devs useless

beabetterdev.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 399 posts

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#241

Post by samrus »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65
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…

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

> But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line. People like you are why the rides gonna stop

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#242

Post by samrus »

eloisant wrote: post #108
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

Treat your employees well and they won't jump ship.

Its not about treating them well. The environment and culture isnt the problem. Its that tech companies have decided that they dont like giving appropriate raises to current employees. They are somehow fine with paying the same or more money to bring in an equally qualified external hire. But not with retaining people. Idk why, maybe some stupid MBA rule, mayne theres some good reason behind it

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#243

Post by cthalupa »

ffsm8 wrote: post #184
collingreen wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding

By the 1700s the pregnant before marriage rate was roughly 30%. So about a third of all women in the 1700s had premarital sex that resulted in pregnancy. So the actual rate is of course even higher.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/202859

People having premarital sex is not a new thing. Strong societal norms against something are not the same thing as it not happening.

https://historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/no-turning...

A lot of those marriages are a direct result of the pregnancy, too - one thing that did happen was the couple being pushed into marriage ASAP when the pregnancy was discovered.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#244

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

hackable_sand wrote: post #205
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

Completely misses the point of training someone

So exactly what is the point for a profit seeking company to train someone except thsr you expect them to bring you more business value than they cost during their tenure?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#245

Post by h4kunamata »

The silver line is not to avoid AI but to use it wisely, and this is coming from somebody who used to hate AI.

I am not a Python developer or developer for the matter but Perplexity AI did help me to understand the bsic of Python for API requests and get projects delivery with 94% code coverage and vulnerability free.

AI also reduced the time spent with Ansible playbook generation, but I do know Ansible, I do know Linux, homelab is my hobby so I am not just doing copy and paste. I review whatever it generates and correct it when required.

In the companies I have worked and work, I see developers themselves confessing "I used AI, it works but idk how"!

AI itself does not make you useless, only and only if you used it as a smart search engine.

If you are doing copy/paste, you are going to get so screwed professionally speaking.

Folks are no longer learning and what they are doing, AI can do on its own.

That is making some developer useless.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#246

Post by seanmcdirmid »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #153
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if enthusiasts are the exception rather than the norm? I've noticed in the last few years, a lot of junior engineers do not have much active coding experience outside of their university education, they aren't the traditional "obsessed with computers and programming as kids".

There has been a much higher demand for software developers over the past 10-15 years than there are people who are obsessed with computers and programming If you look at the general topic shift on HN over the years it's obvious most people are getting into tech because they want power and money, not for love of tech

> If you look at the general topic shift on HN over the years it's obvious most people are getting into tech because they want power and money, not for love of tech

I think that is a bit presumptuous, even if there is a hint of truth there. Just because a kid didn't grow up around computers and programming shouldn't exclude them from the tech path or mark them as imposters/pretenders.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#247

Post by wonnage »

samrus wrote: post #241
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

> But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now. Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line. People like you are why the rides gonna stop

It’s telling that OP worked at Amazon because this pretty much sums up the culture there - new grads churning through and burning out in two years while a few seniors stick around and perpetuate the cycle.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#248

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

samrus wrote: post #241
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this projec…

> But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now. Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line. People like you are why the rides gonna stop

So I should become a director or CxO of a company (because line level managers are powerless to do anything) so I can make those types of decisions?

Not that I’m a line level manager - I’m just a high level IC who is at the same position on the org chart as a line level manager

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#249

Post by Blackthorn »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #132
elephanlemon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly disagree with this. Bad junior devs might be useless, but I’ve seen good ones absolutely tear through features. Junior devs fresh out of school typically have tons of energy, haven’t been burned out, and are serious about wanting to get work done.

And how do they compare to what a senior dev can do with Claude Code/Codex? I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI - and take time away from the senior.

Pretty favorably, because the coding agents suck.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#250

Post by whateveracct »

oddsockmachine wrote: post #85
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…

I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined: 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general, there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage, just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are use…

Your codebase is essentially becoming bytecode
Post reply on HN