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AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

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Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#271

Post by pessimizer »

stuaxo wrote: post #63
alangibson wrote: post #62

Strongly disagree with "AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine". It was always understood that it would seriously push down demand for them.

The people selling the AIs probably initially wanted to replace seniors with juniors. Much like how Java was supposed to being us as an age where you didn't need to that good at coding 30 years ago.

To be fair, that's the traditional mechanization story, and the story of the end of the guild system. Machines and time studies replaced the (transferable) knowledge of masters to no-skill hires who could be trained to do specific movements that gave them no transferable experience and no leverage against the employer. The outputs were worse, but they were a lot cheaper and the margins a lot higher (and squeezed out through better machines and time studies, not better employees.)

AI does not look like it will work like that, because the outputs to programming usually need to be precise. Instead, it looks like it may just be a revolutionary tool that it takes a long time to master, and gives the learner a skill that is entirely transferable to a new job.

Could programmers use it to create a new guild system?

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#272

Post by bayarearefugee »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #236
fluidcruft wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from working with a n00b except that it only took 30sec to get to the next bug rather than a week?

The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer

> The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer

And then quit after accepting a new job that pays them their modified value, because tech companies are particularly bad at proactive retention.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#273

Post by codr7 »

tjansen wrote: post #128
codr7 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and where, if I may ask, are all those business applications that write themselves? Because all I see is a clown party, massive wasted resources and disruption to society because of your lies.

BTW I never said they write themselves. My point was rather that you need a lot of knowledge, and know exactly what you want out of them, supervise them and provide detailed instruction. But then they can help you create a lot more working code in a shorter time.

At that point it seems to me that they become a distraction, a filter between you and the software you're building. Surely it must be easier to tell the computer directly what to do then to route the entire design through that mess?

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#274

Post by aeternum »

reactordev wrote: post #266
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the type of work you hate doing is perfect for a junior. Easy tasks to get a hold on the system.

Yup, sounds like a great opportunity to show you’re senior by mentoring.

Mentorship is unfortunately broken because gone are the days of apprenticeships.

If you find a great mentor, do everything you can to learn quickly then jump ship to big tech and cash in.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#276

Post by fluidcruft »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #236
fluidcruft wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from working with a n00b except that it only took 30sec to get to the next bug rather than a week?

The junior engineer will grow into a senior engineer

And then they get their own junior engineers and you get fresh new junior engineers.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#277

Post by [deleted] »

kaydub wrote: post #233

Because juniors don't know when they're being taken down a rabbit hole. So they'll let the LLM go too deep in its hallucinations. I have a Jr that was supposed to deploy a terraform module I built. This task has been hanging out for a while so I went to check in on them. They told me the problem they're having and asked me to take a look. Their repo is a disaster, it's very obvious claude took them down a rabbit hole…

[deleted]

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#278

Post by qnleigh »

aeternum wrote: post #274
reactordev wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, sounds like a great opportunity to show you’re senior by mentoring.

Mentorship is unfortunately broken because gone are the days of apprenticeships. If you find a great mentor, do everything you can to learn quickly then jump ship to big tech and cash in.

This is kind of sad. I'm probably missing context here, but surely it's not necessary to rush out of a good working relationship with a good mentor. The most important things you'll learn from a good mentor can't be learned in a rush (like prioritization, project management, how to be a good mentor...).

In any case, I would replace 'jump ship' with 'pay it forward.'

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#279

Post by ljm »

Was AI supposed to help juniors shine? By all accounts it would give such a person a superficial boost in productivity but you don’t climb the ladder that way without getting hard experience, you’d just be the super-powered perpetual beginner.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#280

Post by dotnet00 »

kaydub wrote: post #233

Because juniors don't know when they're being taken down a rabbit hole. So they'll let the LLM go too deep in its hallucinations. I have a Jr that was supposed to deploy a terraform module I built. This task has been hanging out for a while so I went to check in on them. They told me the problem they're having and asked me to take a look. Their repo is a disaster, it's very obvious claude took them down a rabbit hole…

The deciding factor for being able to effectively utilize LLMs and dodge hallucinations is ability to read code and intuition for how a solution should look. I think juniors are especially hesitant to just dig into understanding some source code unless they have no other choice, e.g. preferring to wait on email response from the author of the code over piecing things together.

This makes LLM tools so tempting, you don't even have to wait on the email response anymore! But of course, this is basically going in blind, and it's no wonder that they end up in hallucination mazes.

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