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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#81

Post by whattheheckheck »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #65
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…

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…

Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#82

Post by heresie-dabord »

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…

> Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks [...] not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute.

Junior devs are by your own explanation not useless. They are the most important human investment in your project.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#83

Post by zozbot234 »

weatherlite wrote: post #49

My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people…

> My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding.

It will always be preferable to work on an understandable codebase, because that maximizes the AI's affordances too. And then the AI can explain things to you. A skilled human will always have a lot of solid knowledge relating to their hyper-specific niche that isn't part of your average general purpose AI, so humans will obviously have a key role to play still.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#84

Post by whattheheckheck »

matt_heimer wrote: post #64
recursivedoubts wrote: post #10

As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/ Everyone else: we must let the juniors write the code. Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.

The real question will be; Do we need to pay the juniors to write code to become seniors? If coding is an art then all the juniors will end up in the same places as other struggling artists and only the breakout artists will land paying coding gigs. I'm sitting here on a weekend coding a passion project for no pay so I have to wonder.

So non technical business people will hire vibe coded seniors?

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#85

Post by oddsockmachine »

weatherlite wrote: post #49

My nightmare scenario (which might start to materilize) is that our last years in the industry will be becoming prompt monkies / agent "managers" working on codebases we barely understand in such velocity there's no way we can gain real understanding. Whenever something breaks (and it will , a lot) A.I will fix it - or so we'll hope. And the sad thing is - this might work; you'll get more stuff done with fewer people…

I'm already seeing this in the company I recently joined: 80-90% of code is generated/prompted. Big PRs, very little review or oversight. Absolutely nobody considering long-term architecture (and IMO nobody capable of such). In general, there's very little critical thinking involved at any stage, just throw error messages back into the LLM, rinse and repeat. I'm hoping there's a world where people with skills are useful in getting these projects back on track, but perhaps as a society we're learning to accept this reduction in quality.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#86

Post by whattheheckheck »

sega_sai wrote: post #69

I recently read a similar discussion in the context of AI in science and PhD students. And the point the author was making that the goal of having PhD students is NOT to produce academic research, but to train people. I think the same idea applies here. Somebody still needs to train people, and the companies will probably need to ensure that they have resources for that, as there will not be enough senior people for…

Back to fuedalism we go!

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#87

Post by mh2266 »

This post, ironically, seems very likely to have been written by an LLM :/

"it's not x, but y", with bonus em-dash:

> your value as a developer is not in your ability to ship code. It’s in your ability to look at code

"But here’s the thing."

"And honestly?"

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#88

Post by whattheheckheck »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #58
nextstepfan wrote: post #39

Actually the truth is that a lot of senior devs are not very good either, and have negative value. But they have an inflated value of themselves that does not reflect reality. Pretty much all software projects seem to peak, and then decline in quality. There are only a handful of senior devs in the world who are actually good programmers.

I agree. But it’s not about that they have inflated value but it comes down to how “modern” software producing organizations work. Product managers and C-level people do not know what they are doing either. Most people are part of the “software engineering” theater, recruiters are recruiting, manager are managing, software developers are developing software, all of them just to get paid or gain status in the org. Mos…

Yeah read Software and Mind by Andrei Sorin

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#89

Post by skeledrew »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #81
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…

Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k

Until there are no more "seniors"...

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#90

Post by wreath »

sarchertech wrote: post #19
esafak wrote: post #5

Junior devs: you have an oracle you can pester incessantly. Make the most of it so you can learn to detect its mistakes, know when to push back, and what to ask of it. That's when you are in the clear. Juniors who merely parrot the LLM get fired.

It’s gonna take a long time for that to become the norm I think. I really wish I could take 5 years off while everyone figures this out.

You don't have to take 5 years off for it. Just continue same old business (assuming you don't have outside pressure to use this slop-machine) and keep your skills and judgment sharp until the tools and workflow stabilizes, and most of all, the money to fuel this hype runs out.
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