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> We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I referenced above cited the same t

• weatherlite 10mo ago
  > I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.
  • giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;) While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in minutes usually, sometimes maybe an hour if its obscure enough. You just have to feed the model enough context, full stack trace, every time.
    • tenacious_tuna 10mo ago
      > Well now you get to read it. Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR. I'd worry less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the logic issues.
      • HaroldCindy 10mo ago
        We need to develop new etiquette around submitting AI-generated code for review. Using AI for code generation is one thing, but asking other people review something that you neither wrote nor read is inconsiderate of their time.
        • daheza 10mo ago
          I'm getting AI generated product requirements that they haven't read themselves. It is so frustrating. Random requirements like "this service must have a response time of 5s or less" - "A retry mechanism must be present". We have a specific SLA already for response time and the designs don't have a retry mechanism built. The bad product managers have become 10x worse because they just generate AI garbage to spray at the engineering team. We are now writing AI review process for our user stories to counter the AI generation of the product team. I'd much rather spend my time building things than having AI wars between teams.
          • _keats 10mo ago
            Wow, this describes _exactly_ what I've started to see from some PMs.
            • ryandrake 10mo ago
  • lezojeda 10mo ago
    [dead]
• devin-2030 10mo ago
  We might need a lot of young adults for war in the near future, according to some.
  • roadside_picnic 10mo ago
    Larger scale war happens when the lives of young people are more valuable as fodder for the war machine than in a field or behind a desk.
• asdff 10mo ago
  “automate it away” ironically still requires a human in the chain to determine what to automate, how, and to maintain that automation. Whether it be derived from an ai or a systemd script or an Antikythera mechanism. Now if you leave that to seniors you just ate a big chunk of their day playing shephard to a dozen plus “automated” pipelines while they still have stuff to do outside the weeds. Now you need more seniors and pretty soon they want triple what you could pay a junior and I don’t think they are 3x more prolific if the junior is managed efficiently quite frankly.
  • jjk166 10mo ago
    The process of setting up and maintaining automation should be less labor intensive than just doing it manually (or else why would you automate it?) and almost always requires a more advanced skillset than doing the manual task.
    • mooreds 10mo ago
      Required XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
• xhrpost 10mo ago
  > AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad. Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks. Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.
• gausswho 10mo ago
  Anyone reccomend an analysis, article or book or video, of this effect on the blue collar industry decades ago?
  • darkstarsys 10mo ago
    It's happening again now with robotics, self-driving vehicles and RL. Factory workers, truck drivers, construction work, order fulfillment, machinists, farm work, medical technicians and more are all very much at risk (same thing as OP: mostly junior roles getting automated). Some info at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137
• strickjb9 10mo ago
  Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand. In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing breaks down when you're basically collaborating with a model through a proxy. I think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are still valuable. But it's hard to get past "why bother mentoring when I could just use AI directly?" I don't have answers here. Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.
  • ah979 10mo ago
    I get that. I think that getting to know juniors outside of work, at a recurring meetup or event, in a setting where you can suss out their motivation level and teachability level, is _a_ way of going about it. That way, if your team is hiring juniors, you have people you have already vetted at the ready.
    • mikepurvis 10mo ago
      IMO teachability/curiosity is ultimately orthogonal to the more base question of money-motivation. In a previous role I was a principal IC trying to mentor someone who had somehow been promoted up to senior but was still regularly turning in code for review that I wouldn't have expected from an intern— it was an exhausting, mind-numbing process trying to develop some sense of engineering taste in this person, and all of this was before LLMs. This person was definitely not just there for the money; they really looked up to the top-level engineers at our org and aspired to be be there, but everything just came across as extremely shallow, like engineering cosplay: every design review or bit of feedback was soundbites from a how-to-code TED talk or something. Lots of regurgitated phrases about writing code to be "maintainable" or "elegant" but no in-the-bones feeling about what any of that actually meant. Anyway, I think a person like this is probably maximally susceptible to the fawning ego-strokes that an AI companion delivers alongside its suggestions; I think I ultimately fear that combination more than I fear a straight up mercenary for whom it's a clear transaction of money -> code.
• furyofantares 10mo ago
  I hope juniors will figure out how to use AI to do larger tasks that are still annoying for seniors to do, while seniors take on larger tasks still. I think it's just seniors are learning this stuff faster at the moment and adapting it faster to current work, but as all that changes I would guess juniors reclaim some value back. That said, you hit on something I've been feeling, the thing these models are best at by far is stuff that wasn't worth doing before.
  • QuercusMax 10mo ago
    I've been making use of copilot in VSCode to make changes in a codebase that's new to me, in a language that I can read if not necessarily write unaided - it's a dialect of SQL, so I can certainly understand what's happening, but generating new queries is very time-consuming (half of which is just stupid formatting stuff). Copilot seems to understand the style of the code in my project and so I don't have to do much work to make it conform, compared to my hand-written versions. I've also written a lot of python 2 in my career, and writing python 3 still isn't quite native-level for me - and the AI tools let me make up for my lack of knowledge of modern Python.
  • squirrellous 10mo ago
    Some juniors do figure it out, but my experience has been that the bar for such juniors is a lot higher than pre-AI junior positions, so there is less opportunity for junior engineers overall.
• geoffmanning 10mo ago
  This assumes there will still be a demand for software developers in 5 years. I believe we'll be out of jobs much sooner than that.
• RogerL 10mo ago
  I grew up in the 70s. The hand wringing then was calculators. No one was going to be able to do math anymore! And then wrist watches with calculators came out. Everyone is going to cheat on exams, oh no! Everything turned out fine. Turns out you don't really need to be able to perform long division by hand. Sure, you should still understand the algorithm at some level, esp. if you work in STEM, but otherwise, not so much. There were losses. I recall my AP physics professors was one of the old school types (retired from industry to teach). He could find the answer to essentially any problem to about 1-2 digits of precision in his head nearly instantly. Sometimes he'd have to reach for his slide rule for harder things or to get a few more digits. Ain't no one that can do that now (for reasonable values of "no one"). And, it is a loss, in that he could catch errors nearly instantly. Good skill to have. A better skill is to be able to set up a problem for finite element analysis, write kernels for operations, find an analytic solution using Mathematica (we don't need to do integrals by hand anymore for the mot part), unleash R to validate your statistics, and so on. The latter are more valuable than the former, and so we willingly pay the cost. Our ability to crank out integrals isn't what it was, but our ability to crank out better jet engines, efficient cars, computer vision models has exploded. Worth the trade off. Recently watched an Alan Guth interview, and he made a throwaway comment, paraphrased: "I proved X in this book, well, Mathematica proved...". The point being that the proof was multiple pages per step, and while he could keep track of all the sub/superscripts and perform the Einstein sums on all the tensors correctly, why??? I'd rather he use his brain to think up new solutions to problems, not manipulate GR equations by hand. I'm ignoring AGI/singularity type events, just opining about the current tooling. Yah, the transition will be bumpy. But we will learn the skills we need for the new tools, and the old skills just won't matter as much. When they do, yah, it'll be a bit more painful, but so what, we gained so much efficiency we can afford the losses.
• andrewmutz 10mo ago
  It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation. It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have them leave as soon as they can get a better offer?
  • kulahan 10mo ago
    One would assume the solution is to simply offer a good package and retain employees with that. I returned to an old company after a few years of floating around because I realized they had the perfect mix of culture and benefits for me, even if the pay isn't massive. You're falling for the exact same fallacy experienced by failed salesmen. "Why would I bother investing time in this customer when they're just going to take my offer to another dealership for a better deal?" Answer: you offer a good deal and work with people honestly, because if you don't, you'll never get a customer.
    • andrewmutz 10mo ago
      They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire the people who've got experience.
      • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
        Everyone's kicking the can down the road and we're very soon going to hit points of "no one has experience (or are already working)". Someone needs to do the training. It doesn't seem like school and bootcamps is enough for what companies need these days.
      • kulahan 10mo ago
        People will remember this when they're more senior in their career.
    • 10mo ago
• Ferret7446 10mo ago
  This will naturally select for the people who are self driven learners. In a sense this is nothing new, just a continued progression of the raising of the bar of who is still able to contribute economic value to the market
  • samrus 10mo ago
    How will they learn without opportunity?
• frmersdog 10mo ago
  I don't know if that's it. Speaking from outside the tech space: most of my office jobs since 2012 have been "doing the easy/annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to 'waste time' dealing with." So, there are two parts to this: The first is that a lot of those tasks are non-trivial for someone who isn't a digital native (and occasionally trivial for people who are). That is to say that I often found myself doing tasks that my bosses couldn't do in a reasonable time span; they were tasks which they had ALWAYS delegated, which is another way of saying that they were tasks in which proficiency was not necessary at their level. This leads into the second part, which is that performing these tasks did not help me advance in relevant experience at all. They were not related to higher-level duties, nor did they endear me to the people who could have introduced me to such duties. My seniors had no interest in our growth as workers; anyone who wanted to see that growth had to take it into their own hands, at which point "junior-level" jobs are only worth the paycheck. I don't know if it's a senior problem generally, or something specific to this cohort of Boomer/Gen-X seniors. Gun-to-my-head, I would wager the latter. They give enough examples in other arenas of public life to lend credence to the notion that that they simply don't care what happens to their juniors, or to their companies after they leave, particularly if there is added hassle in caring. This is an accusation often lobbed at my own generation, to which I say, it's one of the few things our forebears actually did teach us. Yet again, AI is just a cover for mismanagement.
• x0x0 10mo ago
  My 2 cents: they're too expensive. We had code school grads asking for $110-$130. Meanwhile, I can hire an actual senior engineer for $200 and he/she will be easily 4x as productive and useful, while also not taking a ton of mentorship time. Since even that $110 costs $140, it's tough to understand how companies aren't taking a bath on $700/day.
  • icedchai 10mo ago
    Yep, the value isn't there. I'm on a very lopsided team, about 5 juniors to 1 senior. Almost all of the senior time is being consumed in "mentorship", mostly slogging through AI slop laden code reviews. There have been improvements, but it's taking a long time.
    • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
      Have you considered regulting AI use, or is it just easier to be mad at the workers and do nothing?
      • icedchai 10mo ago
        Yes, we are working on some guidelines, but there are layers of bureaucracy...
        • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
          That's fair. I'm sorry for being snippy. It just feels weird how my junior years always felt like I was on the edge of a needle for being fired because I didn't work "fast enough". Then I hear stories of this vibe coded slop and everyone seeks to be shrugging in confusion. Its even more frustrating knowing those people went through a overly long gauntlet and prevailed over hundreds of other qualified would-be engineers. Its so weird just seeing an entire pipeline built around minimizing this situation utterly fail.
  • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    If you're hiring in SF or NY, then the problem explains itself. Even a single young new grad needs that much to so live. you can't have rent at 3.5k a month and not expect 6 figures when requiring in-office work. old wisdom of "30% of salary goes to rent" suggest that that kind of housing should only be rented if you're making 140k. Anyone complaining about junior costs in these areas needs to join in bringing housing prices down.
• zingar 10mo ago
  Do you mind giving some examples of the work that annoys seniors?
  • ansgri 10mo ago
    For me the most annoying would be a technically correct solution that completely ignores the “higher-level style” of the surrounding code, at the same time defending the chosen solution by referencing some “best practices” that are not really applicable there for some higher-level reasons, or by insignificant performance concerns. Incidentally, LLMs often produce similar problems, only one doesn’t need to politely argue with them.
  • twosdai 10mo ago
    Writing unit tests, manual validation work, manual testing. Automating Deployments of infrastructure, DNS work, tracking down annoying one off bugs, fixing and validating dependency issues. Basically this type of maintenance work for any sufficiently complex codebase. (Over 20k LOC) When I was an QA intern / Software Dev Intern. I did all of that junk.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    • sevenseacat 10mo ago
      I don't think I'd trust a senior that didn't do at least some of those things themselves. I mean, they just want to write code without testing it? Or fixing the bugs that come out of it?
      • twosdai 10mo ago
        Writing automated tests is not the same thing as testing it. Senior engineers write a lot of code, write some tests, do some manual validation. But its usually far from complete. Other roles in a software team can handle making a complete test suite for a project, and making sure that it covers all of the required end user functionality. In some shops they will push all of these together into a "fullstack" kind of role, in other software shops they will have dedicated team members who's job it is to handle some of this burden. Interns historically filled in the glue for this.
• amarant 10mo ago
  My hottest take on this is that it might be healthy for the business. During the recent boom everyone and their grandmother's dog got a job as software engineers, and some aren't really fit for it. AI provides a bar. You need to be at least better than AI at coding to become a professional. It'll take genuine interest in the technology to surpass AI and clear that bar. The next generation of software professionals will be smaller, but unencumbered by incompetents. Their smaller number will be compensated by AI that can take care of the mundane tasks, and with any luck it's capabilities will only increase. Surely I'm not the only one who's had colleagues with 10+years experience who can't manage to check out a new branch in git? We've been hiring people we shouldn't have hired.
  • _aavaa_ 10mo ago
    The only problem is that people need to earn a living while they’re trying to get better than that bar. Is there bar is set at a competent mid level engineer, people entering the industry need a path from algorithms 101 to above that bar which involves getting paid.
• asdfman123 10mo ago
  They have this exact problem with scientific glassblowing, and it's been decades in the making. Manufacturing improvements now mean that you can buy almost everything from a factory, and only need experienced glassblowers for fancy, one-off stuff. But that means there's no need for entry-level glassblowers, and everyone in the field with any significant experience is super old. The pipeline has been dead for a while now.
• fundad 10mo ago
  I entered the job market in late 2000. There was no reason to hire a junior engineer when every hiring manager and senior engineer knew 10 friends who recently lost their jobs. I found work on less desirable projects and yes it affected my career trajectory and it sucked. Starting out has always sucked for most people.
• smiley1437 10mo ago
  > mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally. Tech companies are betting that in 5 years, AI should be good enough to replace mid-levels. Rinse and repeat with seniors 5 years after that. Hard to say if that bet will pay off, or what the endgame would be; just the CEO commanding an company of AIs?
  • samrus 10mo ago
    High risk bets like that cause bubbles. If that bet doesnt pay off then there will be a talent crisis that the american tech industry may not recover from
• deleted 10mo ago
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• checker659 10mo ago
  I think the current grads are going to be shafted either way. In 5 years, there might be more opening for "fresh" young grads and the companies will prefer them over the young people who're just graduating.
• JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad Plenty of skilled work requires a master’s or PhD. CS, for those who want a safe, secure job, looks like it’s going that way.