AI is making junior devs useless • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#341

Post by Imustaskforhelp » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 9:05 AM UTC

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.

So Woman have to be pregnant for 9 months for only the state to go take the baby away.

Are you gonna suggest that State enforces procreation too?

This "answer" that you are saying is this close to being an Eugenics project. A govt. which has its officers arrest/detain babies because of their race and you are saying that these are the people that the babies should be left?

5-year-old boy among four students detained by ICE, according to school leaders : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwL-OBLC7is

Also consider these people in your answer to be the slaves of the govt. because we live in a free world and yet propaganda can be so effective. I can't imagine what the propaganda can be if State raises the child.

Yes, Instead of trying to make the economy affordable so that childcare can be affordable, we go ahead and let the states raise our children.

Has even the notion of affordability become so foreign that we have forgotten it can exist?

I sincerely hope you were joking with this message and this wasn't the first thing which came into your mind.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#342

Post by vineyardmike » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 9:06 AM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #278

array_key_first wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with having only seniors is that seniors have many many blindspots. Just by the nature of being there a while, they've built up hundreds of automatic processes that allow them to ignore or work around bad things at the company. In terms of code, tech, relationships, product vision, etc. It's the same reason why telling engineers to QA their own shit is a recipe for disaster. You need fresh perspectiv…

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?

Fresh eyes are always better equipped to ask “Why” to poke at (no longer necessary) Cheshire Fences. Their ignorance (by virtue of being new) gives them cover to question things. This doesn’t necessarily mean inexperienced people, but that does give even more cover to ask the very necessary “why” and get answers, and excuses their lack of familiarity to intuit the situation.

Junior people also tend to have the humility to know they’re inexperienced and lacking insight, so they tend to be more willing to “follow” the senior employees rather than attempt to leave their mark as a leader. “Too many cooks in the kitchen” and all that jazz.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#343

Post by eloisant » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #123

eloisant wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The problem is that (hypothetical) you as a line level manager don’t control comp and raises. Even in BigTech your manager doesn’t control your promotion and everyone knows it’s better to “boomerang” because you will get paid less being promoted to an L5 (mid) from an L4 than someone hired as an L5.

Then you shouldn't say "A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment" but "my company decided not to invest in people".

That might not be YOUR choice, it's still a choice being made at the company you work for.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#344

Post by lan321 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 9:36 AM UTC

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…

In my experience it just boils down to:

1- You need a ton of internal knowledge so it doesn't really matter what they know past the basics.

2- Testing gets expensive with seniors

3- You can't get mid-senior level employees you like. I see very often companies having really high requirements for hiring leading to the only candidates passing being friends of employees. Juniors pass easier via the 'he's motivated to learn' path.

4- Juniors bring a motivation with them. Seniors tend to generally care less so a couple of energetic juniors can get them moving a bit quicker. Especially if you find a good one, since a senior really doesn't want to get outperformed by a fresh graduate. Also, since they usually suck at politics, it's easier to prod them about why things aren't working than the seniors who've played the blame game for 20 years and have perfected the art of dodging responsibility.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#345

Post by ffsm8 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 10:41 AM UTC

notpachet wrote: post #202

ffsm8 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly". Having premarital sex is not everyone's definition of "promiscuous".

I agree, which itself is also contributing to falling birth rates. I think everyone in this thread is imagining me as a bitter incel being outraged by not getting the attention I supposedly deserve, which couldn't be further from the truth.

I'm merely observing a lot of factors which in aggregate can unquestionably be seen as causing this.

The reality is that the traditional gender roles where very positive in the context of reproduction, which was literally my first sentence of my first comment.

It is not a judgement on wherever we should aim to revert to them, it's just factual. Arguing against that is basically at a level of arguing that water isn't wet.

Now to link this back to the discussion at hand: a significant chunk of society would consider premarital sex with people whom they aren't planning to marry to be promiscuous. And those people are part of the population which wouldve become families in a different age.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#346

Post by tim333 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

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…

>"built the muscles"

You can build muscles by digging a field by hand but most people commercially use tractors. And operating tractors is a skill but a different one.

I imagine it'll go like that with AI. People will use it and learn the skill of using AI.

I mean you can learn the skill the machine does if you want like learning to write machine code rather than using a compiler but there may be a limited number of people doing that.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#347

Post by coldtea » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 11:27 AM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #269

coldtea wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That counts 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, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.

Again do you have any actual evidence? Citations?

Do you have actual evidence it excludes them?

You're making the stronger claim.

Experience says most absolutely don't jump ship every 2-3 years in the kind of companies I mentioned. Now, if you think companies are playing a rotating musical chairs game and are majority new people every 5 years, ...

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#348

Post by zombot » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 12:34 PM UTC

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…

Well, that's what happens when the dollar is the idol that people worship. When society collapses because of that, we will have deserved it because we worked our asses off to create the perverse incentives that led us there.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#349

Post by fragmede » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #251

> > For someone like you, who likely has years of experience without LLMs, your brain totally understands good code/bad code, good architecture, and just general intuition around code and systems. LLMs must be an absolute gamechanger. But for someone like me who is starting out in this field, how am I supposed to build the years of experience and intuition that comes from manually writing code and building systems wh…

I've been teaching a few people to vibecode, and it depends on the person learning. The honest answer is as someone who's been in the industry multiple decades, a lot of my knowledge isn't necessary to be useful at vibecoding. I was about to go into a long discussion about cryptography and public private keys, and prime numbers and RSA and gpg and etc but we short circuited that discussion by asking ChatGPT about it and asking it to dumb down the explanation it gave to a couple of salient sentences and I added some flavor and we moved on with our lives.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#350

Post by sunir » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

fdgg wrote: post #284

sunir wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. We are still in a capital crunch so overhiring is out of fashion. People don’t remember the early 90s or the dot.bust when the same things were said. Kraft 1977 Programmers and Managers talked about this if I recall. Still the best alternate take on our industry I have ever read.

The most likely explanation for "AI layoffs" is not that AI has caused a dramatic jump in productivity - its more that managers are running out of creativity in relation to revenue-generating and cost-reducing projects and henceforth have no use for the surplus of labour. Its much easier to maximize the stock price in the short-term by riding the 'AI' wave. There seems to be some nonsensical belief that there exists…

That’s a strong point. I interpret that: Covid created needs that weren’t permanent and also caused overinvestment to address digitalization and remote life needs to support lockdown as well as predictions for a permanent change in the future. Either way a lot of the work to be done in software is done for a while.