7 ms·

AI Won't Kill Junior Devs – But Your Hiring Strategy Might

59 points by kiyanwang 1y ago

bigfatkitten 1y ago
The legal industry has already figured out that LLMs can draft routine documents (and make massive mistakes) as well as a graduate lawyer, but that’s not the point. That industry has properly recognised that this is where people learn the skills to do more complex, higher value work.
- bogzz 1y ago
  Maybe because law firms aren't managed by MBAs.
  - RhysabOweyn 1y ago
    For now... some states are beginning to change their laws to allow non-lawyers to own law firms. https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-wants-to-be-the-first-accounting-giant-to-own-a-u-s-law-firm-heres-why-224949f2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-wants-to-be-the-first-acco...
    - echelon 1y ago
      Why shouldn't a law firm be owned by non-lawyers? That limitation seems ridiculous. Hospitals are owned by non-doctors. Engineering firms are owned by non-engineers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the ones that fail are owned by the practitioners and the ones that succeed are led by former outsiders. Toymaking companies are owned by adults, gynecology practices can be owned by men, wheelchair companies can be owned by those who can walk, record labels can be owned by non-vocalists, etc. Most sports teams... Why should lawyers get special treatment? If someone is a good operator, that's orthogonal. Most ICs are not good at leadership, logistics, product, long term vision, etc. or at least not everything that a well-rounded CEO or owner might be. While hiring leadership from within the ranks works, it's not a necessary condition for success.
      - bigfatkitten 1y ago
        It’s because there are financial and other accountability requirements unique to law firms (dealing with trust money etc) that are tied directly to the legal professional obligations of the person in charge of the firm.
      - CPLX 1y ago
        Because lawyers occupy a quasi-public role in our legal system. They aren’t entirely separate from the system itself. The legal system depends on the enforcement of ethics and responsibility in a way that might be incompatible with a purely profit motive. This point is arguable of course. On one hand legal services are expensive and often inaccessible for many. On the other hand more aggressive competition and consolidation has absolutely ruined society in a couple situations, medicine being the obvious example. So there’s more than one point of view on this.
        abdullahkhalids 1y ago
        Bits About Money says similar things about banks: "A recurring theme of this column is that banks are privately funded public infrastructure." [1]. So laws around them are quite strict and different from regular companies. [1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-branch-there/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-bran...
      - tomrod 1y ago
        How many things have private equity ruined? Now imagine you are given less than judicious representation by the only law firm in town.
        morkalork 1y ago
        This is a whole thing with pharmacies not owned by pharmacists, veterinarian clinics not owned by vets, dental clinics not owned by dentists and yes, people have noticed the perversion of incentives.
      - jltsiren 1y ago
  - hengheng 1y ago
    Or because bad légal documents become obvious immediately, while bad code has a 2-3 year incubation period.
    - i_am_jl 1y ago
      I am not understanding the joke.
      - arcanemachiner 1y ago
        They're saying that the language in such a document could be read and discovered almost immediately, whereas the logic bomb sitting inside a bunch of poorly written code may take years before it finally explodes.
        i_am_jl 1y ago
        ...while ignoring that flaws in legal documents are not always immediately obvious, and bugs in code are not always difficult to discover.
    - bigfatkitten 1y ago
      Not always. Contracts for example sometimes contain landmines that lay undiscovered for a decade or more. A key difference is that law is an actual profession. It has qualification, continuing professional development and licensing requirements, and personal consequences for getting it wrong. None of these things are true for software development.
    - margalabargala 1y ago
      I would argue they are pretty similar. It's not hard for a bad clause in a contract to get overlooked at first and then become a problem years later. Example: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/think-commas-don-t-matter-omitting-one-cost-maine-dairy-n847151 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/think-commas-don-t-matt...
    - CPLX 1y ago
      I’m pretty fluent in both worlds and they are actually highly equivalent on this one specific point. In both cases it looks perfect and it works right up until it doesn’t, usually for the same reason, entering an unanticipated state.
  - bigfatkitten 1y ago
    They are run by partners laser focused on making money, just over a longer time horizon than private equity would be. Equity partners have most of their own wealth tied to the firm. Grads are cheap. Partners can dangle the future senior associate/partner carrot over the head of a hopeful junior for many years while that junior brings in money that goes into the partners’ pockets. The junior brings in more money as they grow professionally.
  - neilv 1y ago
    Also, a law firm partner worked all their way up as as a lawyer, but a tech company CEO probably didn't work all their way up as a software engineer (and may have never been one)? (Understanding of the role, empathy for it, and a bit invested in thinking of the role as valuable.)
comrade1234 1y ago
Hiring a junior dev is a luxury for big companies that can afford to tie up senior devs tandem coding with a junior for months, then giving easy projects to the junior dev with extensive code review and hand-holding for another year. I don’t think anyone has the budget for that anymore - not even the big companies. It’s two years of negative $ output for the $ you put in and after those two years the junior dev leaves anyway for a more senior position.
- robofanatic 1y ago
  This isn’t a new phenomenon and not limited to software development. Companies know that people get trained and leave all the time. Most companies have plans for that.
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    The answer used to be pensions, reasonable reliable raises, and promotion from within. Workers are responding to the signals sent by companies, the way to make the best money is bouncing around every few years to get actual raises, so that's what a lot of people do.
- laidoffengineer 1y ago
  i'm a laid off senior engineer (or at least that was my level when i was employed). i apply to junior roles all the time and get rejected without interview. feel like there are other senior engineers out there in the same boat. this could be an amazing time for companies to pick up more experienced engineers at junior position/salary. but they aren't biting.
- t-writescode 1y ago
  There’s a lot to be said about this comment, but I’ll stick to two things. 1) it’s a waste of resources for seniors to be doing the work that the juniors and 2s can do. Hunting down infrequent or low priority bugs, fixing small layout issues, etc. they’re perfect for someone paid less and growing and learning the codebase. There is *always* plenty of junior-ready work and the day a week of work to schedule, prep and help those juniors to do it pays dividends. 2) a Junior leaving because you won’t pay them, have a toxic culture or won’t give them a promotion when it’s time speaks more about a broken company culture and one of a style that’s rampant in the tech industry and business at large than it does about loyalty and willingness for the employee to stay at the company. Good leadership and skilled organizers can easily solve the problems you’ve listed; and, even better, create a culture of longevity for all the employees at a company, not just the juniors. Speaking as someone that has worked for companies that give a shit about their workers and who helped raise me up from a low SDE.
mattbrewsbytes 1y ago
This aligns with my thinking that juniors can leverage AI to become seniors much faster than people without AI but there are important concepts about learning debugging, learning how the underlying technologies work, etc. that is crucial to becoming a senior dev. Just using AI to pump out code without knowing the details of how it works will not end up going well for the long haul.
- latentsea 1y ago
  Seniors can also leverage AI to become juniors too.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Dogfooding is encouraged for our top dogs, underdogs, and even random strays we find. In our vision of the future on the internet, everyone is a dog.
  - mattbrewsbytes 1y ago
    I know you kid, or at least that gave me a chuckle, but this might be why seniors don’t find a lot of usefulness with AI, because we see blatant issues immediately and think it’s a waste of time sometimes.
    - latentsea 1y ago
      I sort of kid, I sort of don't. There's a process seniors go through when approaching problems that vibe coding short circuits by removing some of the elements that act as triggers to the critical thinking process. Without those cues, less critical thinking winds up happening. Personally, I think it's more a matter of remapping those triggers onto this new process, but for now I think it's a real phenomenon.
ghiculescu 1y ago
The real issue is wage expectations. In 2 ways 1) For the last decade many juniors have had unreasonable salary expectations that have often still been met. Now there is an alternative that's a lot cheaper and doesn't come with an attitude. 2) It's generally agreed that for the first year or 2 in your career you aren't that useful; after that you start to add lots of value quickly. But salary expectations don't double when you go from a junior to an intermediate - maybe they go up 25%. It's clearly much better value to hire only seniors if you can find them. I'm not saying these are right or wrong but a whole article about juniors that doesn't mention wages, and just tries to implore companies to "do the right thing", misses the point.
codr7 1y ago
Not only does your fancy AI junior randomly spew bullshit back at you; that happens with humans as well; but it keeps doing it, never learning anything. Managing one or several of these idiots has to be the worst job ever invented.
jbmsf 1y ago
We have one junior dev in a team about a dozen. They have had other roles with us, both at the current job and previous ones. We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of leverage. But it's hard to imagine committing to the training without the history.
- ramesh31 1y ago
  >We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of leverage. This is the problem, early career devs are extremely bimodal in skill distribution. You can luck out and land the 1 in 10 who just gets it and has the knack and has been coding since they were 12. But 9/10 times you end up with someone who has trouble even making a commit or with writing basic syntax, who just "picked" software as a career at some point in college for the salary. This has been my experience anywhere that doesnt have FAANG level cash to be hiring the top graduates at 150k+.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    >You can luck out and land the 1 in 10 who just gets it and has the knack and has been coding since they were 12. But 9/10 times you end up with someone who has trouble even making a commit or with writing basic syntax, who just "picked" software as a career at some point in college for the salary. This has been my experience anywhere that doesnt have FAANG level cash to be hiring the top graduates at 150k+. This is crazy to hear as someone who has been coding in one form or another since 14, and was driven into becoming a scrappy freelancer because no one would give me the time of day. Where are these kids who can't make a commit, or know basic syntax even coming from?
    - wonger_ 1y ago
      Maybe they played the interview game well? Or knew the right people at the right time?
varelse 1y ago
[dead]
kristianc 1y ago
> Indeed, companies that try to staff only with experienced devs face a pipeline problem. Without juniors today, there are no seniors tomorrow. This one seems like a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Defecting (hiring only seniors) is rational in isolation, but if everyone defects, everyone loses. What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.
- tiew9Vii 1y ago
  Provide an environment and incentives so that people enjoy working for your company and don’t want to leave.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- hamandcheese 1y ago
  > if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway. But if companies aren't hiring juniors like they used to, shouldn't retention be a lot easier?
- kunzhi 1y ago
  > What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway. I find these statements so damning and self-incriminating. It's an open admission that the junior should expect to be treated poorly.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  This is the way. Our company hires a bunch of juniors from different fields every year, we keep the best ones and let the others off with recommendations (if warranted and in most cases they are).
codr7 1y ago
Using AI certainly isn't expected in any teams I'm leading; not that I'm going to forbid anyone to use a tool, but I will warn everyone about depending on it and the requirement for verification/understanding.
gokhan 1y ago
I find it quite naive that senior devs think this will stop with juniors. TFA says "No juniors today means no seniors tomorrow ... juniors must focus on higher-level skills like debugging, system design, and effective collaboration" and yet he believes AI won’t be doing all of that by the time those juniors somehow upskill on their own. I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS, and it already looks quite capable of debugging things independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier). System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills. Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number of years they've been working. The author is from Google. I’m not sure if effective collaboration is something given there, but in many companies, especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And it's usually inversely proportional to the company’s age. What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never checked.
- mjr00 1y ago
  > What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. It may shock you to learn that this was true before LLMs. There was a website called "Google" which acted as a front-end for almost all recorded knowledge in human history, and putting a phrase like "best design patterns for web APIs" as a search query (the primitive name for prompts) would give you hundreds, if not thousands of real-life examples and explanations of how to accomplish your goal. Somehow senior developers kept their jobs despite the existence of this almighty oracle. LLMs do a better job of filtering and customizing the information, but seniors will still keep their jobs.
siliconc0w 1y ago
Only non-engineers listening to VC-hype on podcasts think that AI can replace fully junior engineers. Here is a problem I recently asked a junior dev to solve: Our service occasionally gets especially expensive requests that amplify to our dependencies, one of those dependencies have started complaining that our bursts of traffic are impacting other users, talk to them and propose a solution that aligns with our different requirements. Possible directions are X, Y, Z. AI is pretty far from able to do this. A cracked out vibe coder maybe could have just added a one-off naive rate limit algorithm pulled from stack overflow or maybe pulled in an unmaintained 3rd party 'rate-limit' package and called it a day. And that would be fine for a MVP but in large organizations figuring out what to build, how to build it, and getting agreement with stakeholders is way, way more work that doing than actual implementation (which still rarely can be one-shotted and needs a lot of hand-holding and iteration to get decent solutions).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- haiku2077 1y ago
  The problem you proposed would be a mid level or senior dev type problem on most organizations' job role descriptions. In most organizations junior devs are not expected to design solutions for open ended problems on their own.
  - azemetre 1y ago
    Why not? How else do you get these skills without doing it?
    - jlawer 1y ago
      Job / Position description means something more... It means that your expected to do the task and perform well at it or you will be let go. Generally you don't put those skills in a Junior PD, but you would expect a Junior to take on these tasks if they hope to progress. The Mid level PD would have it listed and as the junior shows they can meet each and every additional skill, the option of a promotion becomes available.
coryvirok 1y ago
This has led me to wonder if this is the last generation of "senior" devs. The thinking goes, if it takes a couple of years to educate and train a junior dev on average and LLMs can increasingly replace junior devs... There is no need for a company to hire junior devs, starving the ecosystem of talent that would have otherwise gone onto becoming senior. In a world where the average work is the first to be displaced (due to training data availability), the last to be replaced are the ones furthest from distribution mean...
riatin 1y ago
> Traditionally, new developers cut their teeth on small, repetitive tasks – fixing simple bugs, writing unit tests, churning through minor feature tweaks. These tasks were mundane but crucial for skill-building. Now, a lot of that grunt work can be handled by generative AI. To me, this is the salient point. There are more juniors coming through now who aren't learning the fundamentals, because there is a ready shortcut around the mundane tedious work. Which means they're trying to move onto higher value, higher risk areas without understanding the foundations
somerandomqaguy 1y ago
>As Camille Fournier bluntly put it, many tech managers who shifted to "senior-only" hiring are asking for trouble: "How do people ever become 'senior engineers' if they don't start out as junior ones?" If I were a betting man, I would wager that those managers either don't care, or are gambling that by the time senior engineers are in short supply, AI will be good enough to replace them as well.
- throw234234234 1y ago
  It is a low likelihood and low severity risk for an individual manager/actor in any event with some potential mitigations (i.e. pay a little more if the time comes). Going by this and other forum's posts lately the mood seems to be that the tech industry is in structural decline due to AI - so as a manager who may buy into that I won't take this risk all that seriously. Anyway as an average single company anything you do won't move the needle much - those people you train can move on anyway so that isn't a good way to cover that risk. Even if I have to pay more later, which is an unlikely outcome potentially given AI, that's tomorrow's problem and it affects my competitors and other companies as well most probably so I'm not at a relative disadvantage. Unless I'm a very big employer of tech I'm not going to affect future market dynamics either way as a single team. However if the market is in structural decline and jobs will whittle away - maybe its better we don't hire juniors? They may thank us when they settle in another career with better long term prospects if what many posts are starting to say - that AI will kill the industry slowly. Better the hiring pool shrink to adjust to future expected demand than have higher unemployment and worse issues later.
root_axis 1y ago
It won't just kill junior devs - it's killing senior roles as well - right now. Of course, developers are still needed, but the people who are doing the hiring and firing don't really care about that, they just expect more productivity with a smaller workforce, something that's been pretty common even prior to the advent of LLMs.
rsynnott 1y ago
I'm curious just how much of this "senior only hiring" stuff is a _narrative_ thing vs an actual reality. Many small startups _never_ really hired junior people, preferring to only take people who had some experience. To some extent, taking juniors and _turning them into_ seniors has always been more of a big-company thing than a small-company thing (which makes _sense_; it's expensive). I'd be curious whether there's actual data showing a shift, or if it's just vibes.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  I feel like I've worked with (and heard about) more companies trying the senior only thing in the last few years (Covid and beyond). That could be a bias in my sampling of people I know and work with though. I do think hiring only seniors is generally a bad idea unless you want only seniors who are content cranking out tickets and code. That, to my mind, isn't what you want a senior for, but apparently much of the market disagrees with me.
andrewkyren066 1y ago
[dead]

59 points by kiyanwang 1y ago

The legal industry has already figured out that LLMs can draft routine documents (and make massive mistakes) as well as a graduate lawyer, but that’s not the point. That industry has properly recognised that this is where people learn the skills to do more complex, higher value work.

bogzz 1y ago
Maybe because law firms aren't managed by MBAs.
- RhysabOweyn 1y ago
  For now... some states are beginning to change their laws to allow non-lawyers to own law firms. https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-wants-to-be-the-first-accounting-giant-to-own-a-u-s-law-firm-heres-why-224949f2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-wants-to-be-the-first-acco...
  - echelon 1y ago
    Why shouldn't a law firm be owned by non-lawyers? That limitation seems ridiculous. Hospitals are owned by non-doctors. Engineering firms are owned by non-engineers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the ones that fail are owned by the practitioners and the ones that succeed are led by former outsiders. Toymaking companies are owned by adults, gynecology practices can be owned by men, wheelchair companies can be owned by those who can walk, record labels can be owned by non-vocalists, etc. Most sports teams... Why should lawyers get special treatment? If someone is a good operator, that's orthogonal. Most ICs are not good at leadership, logistics, product, long term vision, etc. or at least not everything that a well-rounded CEO or owner might be. While hiring leadership from within the ranks works, it's not a necessary condition for success.
    - bigfatkitten 1y ago
      It’s because there are financial and other accountability requirements unique to law firms (dealing with trust money etc) that are tied directly to the legal professional obligations of the person in charge of the firm.
    - CPLX 1y ago
      Because lawyers occupy a quasi-public role in our legal system. They aren’t entirely separate from the system itself. The legal system depends on the enforcement of ethics and responsibility in a way that might be incompatible with a purely profit motive. This point is arguable of course. On one hand legal services are expensive and often inaccessible for many. On the other hand more aggressive competition and consolidation has absolutely ruined society in a couple situations, medicine being the obvious example. So there’s more than one point of view on this.
      - abdullahkhalids 1y ago
        Bits About Money says similar things about banks: "A recurring theme of this column is that banks are privately funded public infrastructure." [1]. So laws around them are quite strict and different from regular companies. [1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-branch-there/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-bran...
    - tomrod 1y ago
      How many things have private equity ruined? Now imagine you are given less than judicious representation by the only law firm in town.
      - morkalork 1y ago
        This is a whole thing with pharmacies not owned by pharmacists, veterinarian clinics not owned by vets, dental clinics not owned by dentists and yes, people have noticed the perversion of incentives.
    - jltsiren 1y ago
- hengheng 1y ago
  Or because bad légal documents become obvious immediately, while bad code has a 2-3 year incubation period.
  - i_am_jl 1y ago
    I am not understanding the joke.
    - arcanemachiner 1y ago
      They're saying that the language in such a document could be read and discovered almost immediately, whereas the logic bomb sitting inside a bunch of poorly written code may take years before it finally explodes.
      - i_am_jl 1y ago
        ...while ignoring that flaws in legal documents are not always immediately obvious, and bugs in code are not always difficult to discover.
  - bigfatkitten 1y ago
    Not always. Contracts for example sometimes contain landmines that lay undiscovered for a decade or more. A key difference is that law is an actual profession. It has qualification, continuing professional development and licensing requirements, and personal consequences for getting it wrong. None of these things are true for software development.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    I would argue they are pretty similar. It's not hard for a bad clause in a contract to get overlooked at first and then become a problem years later. Example: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/think-commas-don-t-matter-omitting-one-cost-maine-dairy-n847151 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/think-commas-don-t-matt...
  - CPLX 1y ago
    I’m pretty fluent in both worlds and they are actually highly equivalent on this one specific point. In both cases it looks perfect and it works right up until it doesn’t, usually for the same reason, entering an unanticipated state.
- bigfatkitten 1y ago
  They are run by partners laser focused on making money, just over a longer time horizon than private equity would be. Equity partners have most of their own wealth tied to the firm. Grads are cheap. Partners can dangle the future senior associate/partner carrot over the head of a hopeful junior for many years while that junior brings in money that goes into the partners’ pockets. The junior brings in more money as they grow professionally.
- neilv 1y ago
  Also, a law firm partner worked all their way up as as a lawyer, but a tech company CEO probably didn't work all their way up as a software engineer (and may have never been one)? (Understanding of the role, empathy for it, and a bit invested in thinking of the role as valuable.)

comrade1234 1y ago

Hiring a junior dev is a luxury for big companies that can afford to tie up senior devs tandem coding with a junior for months, then giving easy projects to the junior dev with extensive code review and hand-holding for another year. I don’t think anyone has the budget for that anymore - not even the big companies. It’s two years of negative $ output for the $ you put in and after those two years the junior dev leaves anyway for a more senior position.

robofanatic 1y ago
This isn’t a new phenomenon and not limited to software development. Companies know that people get trained and leave all the time. Most companies have plans for that.
- rtkwe 1y ago
  The answer used to be pensions, reasonable reliable raises, and promotion from within. Workers are responding to the signals sent by companies, the way to make the best money is bouncing around every few years to get actual raises, so that's what a lot of people do.
laidoffengineer 1y ago
i'm a laid off senior engineer (or at least that was my level when i was employed). i apply to junior roles all the time and get rejected without interview. feel like there are other senior engineers out there in the same boat. this could be an amazing time for companies to pick up more experienced engineers at junior position/salary. but they aren't biting.
t-writescode 1y ago
There’s a lot to be said about this comment, but I’ll stick to two things. 1) it’s a waste of resources for seniors to be doing the work that the juniors and 2s can do. Hunting down infrequent or low priority bugs, fixing small layout issues, etc. they’re perfect for someone paid less and growing and learning the codebase. There is *always* plenty of junior-ready work and the day a week of work to schedule, prep and help those juniors to do it pays dividends. 2) a Junior leaving because you won’t pay them, have a toxic culture or won’t give them a promotion when it’s time speaks more about a broken company culture and one of a style that’s rampant in the tech industry and business at large than it does about loyalty and willingness for the employee to stay at the company. Good leadership and skilled organizers can easily solve the problems you’ve listed; and, even better, create a culture of longevity for all the employees at a company, not just the juniors. Speaking as someone that has worked for companies that give a shit about their workers and who helped raise me up from a low SDE.

mattbrewsbytes 1y ago

This aligns with my thinking that juniors can leverage AI to become seniors much faster than people without AI but there are important concepts about learning debugging, learning how the underlying technologies work, etc. that is crucial to becoming a senior dev. Just using AI to pump out code without knowing the details of how it works will not end up going well for the long haul.

latentsea 1y ago
Seniors can also leverage AI to become juniors too.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  Dogfooding is encouraged for our top dogs, underdogs, and even random strays we find. In our vision of the future on the internet, everyone is a dog.
- mattbrewsbytes 1y ago
  I know you kid, or at least that gave me a chuckle, but this might be why seniors don’t find a lot of usefulness with AI, because we see blatant issues immediately and think it’s a waste of time sometimes.
  - latentsea 1y ago
    I sort of kid, I sort of don't. There's a process seniors go through when approaching problems that vibe coding short circuits by removing some of the elements that act as triggers to the critical thinking process. Without those cues, less critical thinking winds up happening. Personally, I think it's more a matter of remapping those triggers onto this new process, but for now I think it's a real phenomenon.

ghiculescu 1y ago

The real issue is wage expectations. In 2 ways 1) For the last decade many juniors have had unreasonable salary expectations that have often still been met. Now there is an alternative that's a lot cheaper and doesn't come with an attitude. 2) It's generally agreed that for the first year or 2 in your career you aren't that useful; after that you start to add lots of value quickly. But salary expectations don't double when you go from a junior to an intermediate - maybe they go up 25%. It's clearly much better value to hire only seniors if you can find them. I'm not saying these are right or wrong but a whole article about juniors that doesn't mention wages, and just tries to implore companies to "do the right thing", misses the point.

codr7 1y ago

Not only does your fancy AI junior randomly spew bullshit back at you; that happens with humans as well; but it keeps doing it, never learning anything. Managing one or several of these idiots has to be the worst job ever invented.

jbmsf 1y ago

We have one junior dev in a team about a dozen. They have had other roles with us, both at the current job and previous ones. We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of leverage. But it's hard to imagine committing to the training without the history.

ramesh31 1y ago
>We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of leverage. This is the problem, early career devs are extremely bimodal in skill distribution. You can luck out and land the 1 in 10 who just gets it and has the knack and has been coding since they were 12. But 9/10 times you end up with someone who has trouble even making a commit or with writing basic syntax, who just "picked" software as a career at some point in college for the salary. This has been my experience anywhere that doesnt have FAANG level cash to be hiring the top graduates at 150k+.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  >You can luck out and land the 1 in 10 who just gets it and has the knack and has been coding since they were 12. But 9/10 times you end up with someone who has trouble even making a commit or with writing basic syntax, who just "picked" software as a career at some point in college for the salary. This has been my experience anywhere that doesnt have FAANG level cash to be hiring the top graduates at 150k+. This is crazy to hear as someone who has been coding in one form or another since 14, and was driven into becoming a scrappy freelancer because no one would give me the time of day. Where are these kids who can't make a commit, or know basic syntax even coming from?
  - wonger_ 1y ago
    Maybe they played the interview game well? Or knew the right people at the right time?

varelse 1y ago

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kristianc 1y ago

> Indeed, companies that try to staff only with experienced devs face a pipeline problem. Without juniors today, there are no seniors tomorrow. This one seems like a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Defecting (hiring only seniors) is rational in isolation, but if everyone defects, everyone loses. What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.

tiew9Vii 1y ago
Provide an environment and incentives so that people enjoy working for your company and don’t want to leave.
- deleted 1y ago
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hamandcheese 1y ago
> if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway. But if companies aren't hiring juniors like they used to, shouldn't retention be a lot easier?
kunzhi 1y ago
> What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway. I find these statements so damning and self-incriminating. It's an open admission that the junior should expect to be treated poorly.
theshrike79 1y ago
This is the way. Our company hires a bunch of juniors from different fields every year, we keep the best ones and let the others off with recommendations (if warranted and in most cases they are).

codr7 1y ago

Using AI certainly isn't expected in any teams I'm leading; not that I'm going to forbid anyone to use a tool, but I will warn everyone about depending on it and the requirement for verification/understanding.

gokhan 1y ago

I find it quite naive that senior devs think this will stop with juniors. TFA says "No juniors today means no seniors tomorrow ... juniors must focus on higher-level skills like debugging, system design, and effective collaboration" and yet he believes AI won’t be doing all of that by the time those juniors somehow upskill on their own. I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS, and it already looks quite capable of debugging things independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier). System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills. Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number of years they've been working. The author is from Google. I’m not sure if effective collaboration is something given there, but in many companies, especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And it's usually inversely proportional to the company’s age. What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never checked.

mjr00 1y ago
> What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. It may shock you to learn that this was true before LLMs. There was a website called "Google" which acted as a front-end for almost all recorded knowledge in human history, and putting a phrase like "best design patterns for web APIs" as a search query (the primitive name for prompts) would give you hundreds, if not thousands of real-life examples and explanations of how to accomplish your goal. Somehow senior developers kept their jobs despite the existence of this almighty oracle. LLMs do a better job of filtering and customizing the information, but seniors will still keep their jobs.

siliconc0w 1y ago

Only non-engineers listening to VC-hype on podcasts think that AI can replace fully junior engineers. Here is a problem I recently asked a junior dev to solve: Our service occasionally gets especially expensive requests that amplify to our dependencies, one of those dependencies have started complaining that our bursts of traffic are impacting other users, talk to them and propose a solution that aligns with our different requirements. Possible directions are X, Y, Z. AI is pretty far from able to do this. A cracked out vibe coder maybe could have just added a one-off naive rate limit algorithm pulled from stack overflow or maybe pulled in an unmaintained 3rd party 'rate-limit' package and called it a day. And that would be fine for a MVP but in large organizations figuring out what to build, how to build it, and getting agreement with stakeholders is way, way more work that doing than actual implementation (which still rarely can be one-shotted and needs a lot of hand-holding and iteration to get decent solutions).

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haiku2077 1y ago
The problem you proposed would be a mid level or senior dev type problem on most organizations' job role descriptions. In most organizations junior devs are not expected to design solutions for open ended problems on their own.
- azemetre 1y ago
  Why not? How else do you get these skills without doing it?
  - jlawer 1y ago
    Job / Position description means something more... It means that your expected to do the task and perform well at it or you will be let go. Generally you don't put those skills in a Junior PD, but you would expect a Junior to take on these tasks if they hope to progress. The Mid level PD would have it listed and as the junior shows they can meet each and every additional skill, the option of a promotion becomes available.

coryvirok 1y ago

This has led me to wonder if this is the last generation of "senior" devs. The thinking goes, if it takes a couple of years to educate and train a junior dev on average and LLMs can increasingly replace junior devs... There is no need for a company to hire junior devs, starving the ecosystem of talent that would have otherwise gone onto becoming senior. In a world where the average work is the first to be displaced (due to training data availability), the last to be replaced are the ones furthest from distribution mean...

riatin 1y ago

> Traditionally, new developers cut their teeth on small, repetitive tasks – fixing simple bugs, writing unit tests, churning through minor feature tweaks. These tasks were mundane but crucial for skill-building. Now, a lot of that grunt work can be handled by generative AI. To me, this is the salient point. There are more juniors coming through now who aren't learning the fundamentals, because there is a ready shortcut around the mundane tedious work. Which means they're trying to move onto higher value, higher risk areas without understanding the foundations

somerandomqaguy 1y ago

>As Camille Fournier bluntly put it, many tech managers who shifted to "senior-only" hiring are asking for trouble: "How do people ever become 'senior engineers' if they don't start out as junior ones?" If I were a betting man, I would wager that those managers either don't care, or are gambling that by the time senior engineers are in short supply, AI will be good enough to replace them as well.

throw234234234 1y ago
It is a low likelihood and low severity risk for an individual manager/actor in any event with some potential mitigations (i.e. pay a little more if the time comes). Going by this and other forum's posts lately the mood seems to be that the tech industry is in structural decline due to AI - so as a manager who may buy into that I won't take this risk all that seriously. Anyway as an average single company anything you do won't move the needle much - those people you train can move on anyway so that isn't a good way to cover that risk. Even if I have to pay more later, which is an unlikely outcome potentially given AI, that's tomorrow's problem and it affects my competitors and other companies as well most probably so I'm not at a relative disadvantage. Unless I'm a very big employer of tech I'm not going to affect future market dynamics either way as a single team. However if the market is in structural decline and jobs will whittle away - maybe its better we don't hire juniors? They may thank us when they settle in another career with better long term prospects if what many posts are starting to say - that AI will kill the industry slowly. Better the hiring pool shrink to adjust to future expected demand than have higher unemployment and worse issues later.

root_axis 1y ago

It won't just kill junior devs - it's killing senior roles as well - right now. Of course, developers are still needed, but the people who are doing the hiring and firing don't really care about that, they just expect more productivity with a smaller workforce, something that's been pretty common even prior to the advent of LLMs.

rsynnott 1y ago

I'm curious just how much of this "senior only hiring" stuff is a _narrative_ thing vs an actual reality. Many small startups _never_ really hired junior people, preferring to only take people who had some experience. To some extent, taking juniors and _turning them into_ seniors has always been more of a big-company thing than a small-company thing (which makes _sense_; it's expensive). I'd be curious whether there's actual data showing a shift, or if it's just vibes.

disgruntledphd2 1y ago
I feel like I've worked with (and heard about) more companies trying the senior only thing in the last few years (Covid and beyond). That could be a bias in my sampling of people I know and work with though. I do think hiring only seniors is generally a bad idea unless you want only seniors who are content cranking out tickets and code. That, to my mind, isn't what you want a senior for, but apparently much of the market disagrees with me.

andrewkyren066 1y ago

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