421–430 of 481 posts
"AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine" is a false narrative. AI's end goal has always been to fundamentally eliminate more and more of human labor positions until the only job left is executive directorship.
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Everyone is looked at as a young person when they are young. I've definitely had "junior" colleagues that "got it" better than my 50yo colleagues. It's possible I shouldn't say that outloud, because skilled youngsters have a tendency to misidentify themselves as being part of that set while the wise youngsters have a tendency to *underestimate* their own capability or insight. But I don't think you can make that same…
Mentorship is about more than just “don’t use strings directly in your squeal”, it’s about navigating the organization. Filing proper TPS reports. Encouraging refactoring. Having empathy when shit goes south. Coffee talks. Hikes. Walks. Getting to know them as a person and giving them life advice.
My best mentor taught me, if you keep looking under rocks, all you’ll find is dirt. Look up.
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> If you didn’t go that route, you were still looked at as a junior. Your ego clouds your view. your ego clouds your response. He wasn't talking about if he was hired into a jr role, he was talking about the competency, experience, and skills acquired from the years of writing code for passion. If he could write better code, or debug problems faster than your average jr level employee. Not everyone fits into the tiny…
I’ve yet to find a junior dev that had more skills than a junior dev. I’ve seen them try… but they are still a junior dev. If you aren’t a junior dev, then you aren’t. Mentorship has nothing to do with what bucket you’re in.
However, there are specific job duties of senior and higher that are beyond just writing code. One of them is making more seniors. There’s only one way to do that efficiently. Learning. And while you can go read a manual on how to put a Ferrari together, wouldn’t you want to work with a mechanic who has already made dozens of them?
Why do we reject help?
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I think you've hit on half the actual issue. The other half is that a properly guided AI is exponentially faster at junior tasks than a junior engineer. So much so that it's no longer in anyone but the junior engineer's interest to hand off work to them.
This is what I've been finding. Currently, if I have a junior level task, I take the email I would have sent to a junior developer explaining what I want and give it to ChatGPT/Claude/etc and get a reasonably good solution that needs as many feedback loops as the junior dev would have needed. Except I got that solution in a few minutes.
At the same time it gets better every day.
But I cant hire a company to create software for me 10 times faster and cheaper than 5 years ago.
I am so tired of lies.
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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.
Yeah, don’t do this. Great way to ruin your reputation as a dollar chaser and be exiled to the consulting wastelands. Burning bridges takes minutes. Building them takes years.
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This is what I've been finding. Currently, if I have a junior level task, I take the email I would have sent to a junior developer explaining what I want and give it to ChatGPT/Claude/etc and get a reasonably good solution that needs as many feedback loops as the junior dev would have needed. Except I got that solution in a few minutes.
I have been reading this here since 2021. At the same time it gets better every day. But I cant hire a company to create software for me 10 times faster and cheaper than 5 years ago. I am so tired of lies.
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…
Instant dismissal.
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Would it have actually taken you 3x longer? I am surprising myself these days with how fast I'm being using AI as a glorified Stack Overflow. We are also having studies and posts come out that when actually tried side-by-side, the AI writes the coding route is slower, though the developer percieves it as faster.
> the AI writes the coding route is slower, though the developer percieves it as faster. I have this pattern while driving. Using the main roads, when there is little to no traffic, the commute is objectively, measurably the fastest. However, during peak hours, I find myself in traffic jams, so I divert to squiggly country roads which are both slower and longer, but at least I’m moving all the time. The thing is, whe…
Meanwhile we adults can do real work on a separate real computer. Never use their laptop more than absolutely minimum possible.
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> 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.
Which has nothing to do with the argument you're responding to.