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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#311

Post by doginasuit »

keeda wrote: post #231

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it fal…

An apprenticeship is great for all sorts of reasons that AI can never touch, but I don't think abandoning AI will be necessary unless you aren't really motivated by a desire to understand and do the thing you are trying to learn. If you are, it is an incredible tool.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#312

Post by skydhash »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #304
skydhash wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article As an Entry Level Engineer, you’ll be expected to develop and maintain lower complexity components under the guidance and tutelage of more experienced team members. That does not really contradict my point. > If I have to define everything in great detail anyway, why not just use AI? You don't have to define everything. And to do so is detrimental to their growth. If you're their mentor, you're suppo…

Okay. But that still doesn’t answer the question. Why should I hire a junior who doesn’t know the what or the how. Instead of hiring a mid level developer who could be an excellent developer who can turn business requirements into code and is more than likely better at certain things than I am since they live and breathe it everyday and can both do the work without supervision and can offer valuable advice and say so…

> Why should I hire a junior who doesn’t know the what or the how.

I'm not saying you should. It's the business model that will answer that question. But the traditional wisdom was that juniors are not costly and have few obligations tying them down. And juniors don't stay junior.

And some may know the what and the how, at least technically. What they may lack may be just how to develop their skills further to be useful in a professional settings. It's easy to learn programming languages, tools, libraries and frameworks when you have a lot of free time. And they're not asking to be your protégés, you're just training them to be useful for your team.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#313

Post by polynomial »

dyauspitr wrote: post #215
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…

It doesn’t make sense to hire juniors at all other than as a service to society. I haven’t hired a junior in 4 years. The one I hired 4 years ago was because not only did he do reasonably well on the interview but he literally begged me because he trained himself to do it while painting houses so I saw a lot of passion in him.

I've hired that guy and he was a ticket grinder, well-respected by the team.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#314

Post by polynomial »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #128
estimator7292 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the difference between being an engineer and being a clock puncher. You don't care about the business, you don't care about the product, you don't care about society as a whole. So long as you get your paycheck and your annual pay bump, fuck absolutely everyone and everything else, right? Don't worry, just leave all your problems for someone else to fix. I'm sure that won't have any lasting consequences at al…

I work for one reason and one reason alone - to trade 40 hours of labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. The company is not going to give me money for “caring about society”. They are going to give me money to meet my quarterly goals to help them meet their profit goals for the company and in a former life , to make them look good for the public market pre-IPO and at another company for an acqui…

TBF those RSUs come in handy on cold winter nights when you need tinder.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#315

Post by somenameforme »

skeledrew wrote: post #291
fdgg wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculous take lmao. What are your contributions again?

And what exactly is ridiculous about it?

Reinforcement learning requires a well defined goal and a well defined way to quantitatively measure progress along that goal. In reality these don't exist without a hand of God guiding you. In the case of machine learning that hand of God is our own. Even given infinite processing power, you could not construct a reinforcement learning system that would mimic humanity's progress - it simply is a nonstarter due to the nature of reinforcement learning itself.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#316

Post by ipaddr »

nostrademons wrote: post #130
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…

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 answer is to remove the parents. Give birth and let the state raise the child. The parents continue to work and live childless without the costs and responsibilities. Society pays and gives this group an equal playing field.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#318

Post by grigri907 »

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…

You can't whitewash your statement by saying, "neither sex is responsible for this" after you've already twice accused women of "sleeping around."

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#319

Post by nostrademons »

ipaddr wrote: post #316
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 answer is to remove the parents. Give birth and let the state raise the child. The parents continue to work and live childless without the costs and responsibilities. Society pays and gives this group an equal playing field.

Kinda like in Brave New World, or The Giver - or, for that matter, in hundreds of orphanages in real life?

This doesn't really work either. Having been loved by an attachment figure (usually a parent) seems to be essential to normal psychosocial development. Without it, kids can't really form bonds or groups. They never learn to trust, and without the ability to trust, they can't work in concert with other people. They end up violent and criminal.

If you tried to do this society-wide, society would collapse. Everybody would simply try to grab what they could and kill everybody else.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#320

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

array_key_first wrote: post #300
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would better be able to see those blind spots - a junior developer with no experience or a mid level or senior developer coming in with a fresh set of eyes?

A junior, they have no baggage. Most software is unbelievably bad - almost all those seniors are come from products and companies that are horribly mismanaged, just in different ways. Or, maybe, the same way.

Every developer from the beginning of time thinks that when they come into a new company that everyone who came before them were idiots. Eventually we mature beyond that.

I worked for two companies as a lead and the first thing I did to make things better is - nothing. I asked questions and understand the why.

But what company have you worked for that you only have to understand code? There is code, underlying architecture, dependencies between teams, database schemas and the politics?

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