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The Death of the Junior Developer

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Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#31

Post by petra »

josephmosby wrote: post #18

This has happened before. From 2000-2004, this was the world. Companies were going out of business or cutting headcount to the bone, and the folks with 7+ years of experience were getting picked up (often at a discount). If you started your first job coding in 1999 and then got laid off half a year later, sucks for you. 2004 both Salesforce, Google, and Blackboard (they were big then!) IPO, and Facebook comes screami…

Even sass, in theory, should decrease the number of programmers needed for a given system industry wide.

But of course there are newer things to build, buy that is largely affected by 0% interest rate.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#32

Post by plorkyeran »

benatkin wrote: post #15

The format of the article is creative and I don’t like it. The use of movies seems to be trying to channel a16z with movies instead of hip hop quotes and it isn’t working.

I stopped reading midway through because I realized I was more focused on (unsuccessfully) trying to figure out how the movies connected with the sections following them than on the actual article.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#33

Post by bovem »

All this talk of replacing junior engineers makes me think:

Aren’t interns and junior engineers paid on their potential rather than the work they produce?

Doesn’t it take a while (like 6 months - 1 year) for any associate to start contributing significantly to the organisation’s output?

A lawyer might delegate the same task to ChatGPT rather than a junior but is the purpose of delegation primary to get the task completed or to give an opportunity for junior to learn the specifics of the task?

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#34

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

menacingly wrote: post #21

You're only allowed to believe LLMs are a kind of digital messiah or that they're complete hype garbage, when of course the answer is some point between. There is obviously a lot of potential here, but there is also a lot of solution looking for a problem. My current red flag is if an argument hinges on a trademark breathless frisson for the growth potential. Statements like "models are getting smarter every month" t…

It's going to take much longer and more human(?) effort to apply DL/LLMs in worthy applications by adding constraints and human-injected workarounds to make them work with more useful and fewer unpleasant surprises.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#35

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

migf wrote: post #26

As a senior I'm really not feeling any FOMO here. If the tools are going to get better and better, is there any need to be an early adopter, or build expertise in using them?

And who (without equity or significant direct incentives), in their right mind, would work on, invent, or deploy an automation tool that would make themselves and/or millions of others redundant? Some may say "productivity" assistant, but then it's not much of a hop to layoffs and reduced salaries.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#37

Post by benatkin »

plorkyeran wrote: post #32
benatkin wrote: post #15

The format of the article is creative and I don’t like it. The use of movies seems to be trying to channel a16z with movies instead of hip hop quotes and it isn’t working.

I stopped reading midway through because I realized I was more focused on (unsuccessfully) trying to figure out how the movies connected with the sections following them than on the actual article.

That's what's great about a16z's blog and what's bad about these movies. They don't connect in a fun or thoughtful way, that I can decipher. If they did, I might like it.

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#38

Post by FrustratedMonky »

The examples about law offices, and writers, is not wrong. This is happening. The article might be too long, or you might not like the style, but the concepts are correct.

While this somewhat seems like pitch for 'Cody', I don't think it is, it's just what the author is familiar with from his own company. Doesn't hide that it is a wrapper on other tools.

"Cody Pro lets you use both GPT-4o and Claude (and others), so you can spot-check all your work with another LLM."

Re: The Death of the Junior Developer

#39

Post by welder »

rkunal wrote: post #24

Using LLM is so tiring. If I wanted to chat all day, I would be an extrovert. I have a genuine query. Are any software engineers getting sane code out of LLM ? I struggle to conjure good unity or kotlin code from both paid and self hosted solutions.

I get prototypes for features [0].

For me, the sweet spot is simple but time consuming tasks where the execution is very clear, or the result is very clear but I have to first read a ton of d3.js docs before implementing it. This stuff LLMs do faster than me typing it. Anything more involved where I myself don't know the final result yet, it's faster to figure out the problem while coding instead of trying to figure it out by describing to an LLM.

[0] https://wakatime.com/blog/58-chatgpt-prototyped-our-new-feat...

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