14 ms·

AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

1073 points by birdculture 11mo ago

twostorytower 11mo ago
Well, yeah. Then who will become the senior engineers in 10-15 years?
- ghc 11mo ago
  Pretty sure Anthropic is hoping the answer is Claude.
  - marcosdumay 11mo ago
    Pretty sure Antropic knows their hopes won't come true. They just won't tell you that.
- phyzix5761 11mo ago
  10-15 years? Sadly, most people are declared senior after like 2 years of work.
- tastyfreeze 11mo ago
  Obviously after 10-15 years of experience working as a developer AI will be a senior dev. Probably will get promoted to management with all that experience.
  - simonw 11mo ago
    Promoting your best engineers to management sometimes gets you a great manager, but often gets you a mediocre or just-about-competent manager at the cost of a great engineer. I'm a big fan of the "staff engineer" track as a way to avoid this problem. Your 10-15 year engineers who don't vibe with management should be able to continue earning managerial salaries and having the biggest impact possible. https://staffeng.com/about/ https://staffeng.com/about/ I'm also a fan of leadership without management. Those experienced engineers should absolutely be taking on leadership responsibilities - helping guide the organization, helping coach others, helping build better processes. But they shouldn't be stuck in management tasks like running 1-1s and looking after direct reports and spending a month every year on the annual review process.
    - grogenaut 11mo ago
      I still spend a week on annual reviews but you make great points all around.
    - RevEng 11mo ago
      This is exactly where I find myself. I've been asked several times to take on management, but I have no interest in it. I got to be a principal after 18 years of experience by being good at engineering, not management. Like you said, I can and do help with leadership through mentorship, offering guidance and advice, giving presentations on technical topics, and leading technical projects.
    - ryandrake 11mo ago
      This is a general problem that corporations have trouble with with: The struggle to separate leadership and people management. Why does the person who tells you what to do also need to be the same person who does your annual review, who also has to be the same person who leads the technical design of the project, approves your vacation, assists with your career development, and gives feedback or disciplinary correction when you mess up? Why do we always seem to bundle all these distinct roles together under "Manager"?
    - tastyfreeze 11mo ago
      Absolutely agree. Regardless, my org keeps trying to get me to take a management role after 15 years dev experience. I love my job and don't like managing people. You couldn't pay me enough to become a manager.
- jsheard 11mo ago
  You think the people deciding whether to hire more juniors are planning more than one or two quarters ahead? 10-15 years is someone else's problem.
  - steveBK123 11mo ago
    Yes, unfortunately 10-15 years is 5 sequential someones else's problems.
- philipwhiuk 11mo ago
  Stolen from your competitors, obviously.
- azemetre 11mo ago
  These people are working on destroying the planet to make more money, they absolutely do not care. Our society isn't set up to punish them, but encourage such behavior to even more extremes (see datacenter build outs causing water shortages, electricity hikes, and cancer in poor communities; nearly every politician capitulating on such actions because they don't know better).
  - riskable 11mo ago
    I wish people would get off the "AI is the worst thing for the environment" bandwagon. AI and data centers as a whole aren't even in the top 100 emitters of pollution and never will be. If you want to complain about tech companies ruining the environment, look towards policies that force people to come into the office. Pointless commutes are far, far worse for the environment than all data centers combined. Complaining about the environmental impact of AI is like plastic manufacturers putting recycling labels on plastic that is inherently not recycleable and making it seem like plastic pollution is every day people's fault for not recycling enough. AI's impact on the environment is so tiny it's comparable to a rounding error when held up against the output of say, global shipping or air travel. Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions? They're vastly worse.
    - jnd-cz 11mo ago
      Of course they aren't polluters as in generating some kind of smoke themselves. But they do consume megawatts upon megawatts of power that has to be generated somewhere. Not often you have the luxury of building near nuclear power plant. And in the end you're still releasing those megawatts as heat into the atmosphere.
    - jraph 11mo ago
      > Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions? We do too, don't worry.
    - azemetre 11mo ago
      People are allowed to reject whatever they want, I'm sorry that democracy is failing you to make slightly more money while the rest of society suffers. I'm glad people are grabbing the reigns of power back from some of the most evil people on the planet.
- otikik 11mo ago
  Anything besides next quarter does not exist.
- nextworddev 11mo ago
  AI will be the senior engineer
- DiscourseFan 11mo ago
  You can’t pretend you know where technology will take us.
focusgroup0 11mo ago
Which is a less dumb idea: replacing new grad junior devs with AI or H1Bs?
- ThrowawayTestr 11mo ago
  What about new grad H1Bs?
  - toast0 11mo ago
    Hire new grads on OPT and transition to H-1B.
- nxor 11mo ago
  [dead]
- platevoltage 11mo ago
  Better idea, replace everyone with AI, and when that doesn't work, replace the AI with H1Bs.
simonw 11mo ago
Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got-better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got... > The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...] > If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
- lanfeust6 11mo ago
  Search is easily the best feature of AI/LLMs.
  - sublinear 11mo ago
    That's arguably all it ever was. Generating content using AI is just finding a point in latent space.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - alpha_squared 11mo ago
    I kind of agree here. The mental model that works for me is "search results passed through a rock tumbler". Search results without attribution and mixed-and-matched across reputable and non-reputable sources, with a bias toward whatever source type is more common.
  - gosub100 11mo ago
    Which was trained on a pre-AI internet. What's going to happen in coming years when new tech comes out but perhaps isn't documented the same way anymore? It's not an unsolvable problem, but we could see unintended consequences like, say where you must pay the AI provider to ingest your data. Similar to buying poll space or AdSense or whatever they call it for search engines
0xdeadbeefbabe 11mo ago
4) Junior devs have an incomparably superior context window.
- nextworddev 11mo ago
  5) less attitude
Nextgrid 11mo ago
This is performative bullshit pandering to the increased skepticism around AI. He wouldn't be saying that if AI investment was still in full swing. I do agree with him about AI being a boon to juniors and pragmatic usage of AI is an improvement in productivity, but that's not news, it's been obvious since the very beginnings of LLMs.
- grogenaut 11mo ago
  So it's performative when the head of AWS says it and not news. But it's not performative when you say it and people should have listened to you in the comments?
  - Nextgrid 11mo ago
    It's performative when you talk whatever the market wants to hear rather than sticking to an opinion (no matter how flawed it is). This behavior reminds me of the cryptobros that were hailing NFTs/web3 as the next best thing since sliced bread, and when that didn't came to pass quietly moved onto the next grift (AI) with the same playbook. (also I’m just talking out of my ass on a tech forum under a pseudonym instead of going to well-publicized interviews)
frostiness 11mo ago
I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.
- mjr00 11mo ago
  I went to university 2005-2008 and I was advised by many people at the time to not go into computer science. The reasoning was that outsourced software developers in low-cost regions like India and SEA would destroy salaries, and software developers should not expect to make more than $50k/year due to the competition. Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year. This might be the professional/career version of "buy when there's blood in the streets."
  - sublinear 11mo ago
    Yup hearing big talk about competition and doom is a strong signal that there is plenty of demand. You can either bet on the new unproven thing claiming to change things overnight, or just do the existing thing that's working right now. Even if the new thing succeeds, an overnight success is even more unrealistic. The insight you gain in the meantime is valuable for you to take advantage of what that change brings. You win either way.
    - bluGill 11mo ago
      When there is no competition that is a sign there is no demand. There can sometimes be too much competition, but often there is only the illusion of too much if you don't look at quality. You can find a lot of cheap engineers in India, but if you want a good quality product you will have to pay a lot more.
  - hrimfaxi 11mo ago
    > Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year. At the end of the day, radiologists are still doctors.
smurda 11mo ago
This sounds like a comment from someone who doesn't have visibility into how good the models are getting and how close they are to fully autonomous, production-grade software development.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago
  This is an easy theory to prove; if AI was anywhere close to a senior engineer, we'd see the costs of software development drop by a corresponding amount or quality would be going up. Not to mention delivery would become faster. With LLMs being accessible to the general public I'd also expect to see this in the open-source world. I see none of that happening - software quality is actually in freefall (but AI is not to blame here, this began even before the LLM era), delivery doesn't seem to be any faster (not a surprise - writing code has basically never been the bottleneck and the push to shove AI everywhere probably slows down delivery across the board) nor cheaper (all the money spent on misguided AI initiatives actually costs more). It is a super easy bet to take with money - software development is still a big industry and if you legitimately believe AI will do 90% of a senior engineer you can start a consultancy, undercut everyone else and pocket the difference. I haven’t heard of any long-term success stories with this approach so far.
  - throw1235435 11mo ago
    TL;DR: Code is the easy part; and at least in the last few years was rarely the bottleneck so even if we get rid of coding we don't deliver infinity amount of software. The "What to build" usually takes longer than building it. The amount will only go up where coding was holding things up or the main portion of time spent in delivering software (Hint: It usually isn't even 20% of the time in delivery times in my experience). There's many other stages to the SDLC and lots of processes even before then for large scale systems. On your point about a consultancy; many of the software dev consultancies will dry up w.r.t work. There won't be success as you state -> after all if your consultancy can do it so can an LLM so why do I need you as the middleman? After all just get Claude/Gemini/etc to do it for small things; you are already seeing this effect in things like graphic design, copywriting and other small creative skills. For large things with large complexity and judgement you need domain experts and guardrails again and other non-coding jobs -> that slows things down considerably so but still better to be in those jobs than anything requiring intelligence now. As a result coding could easily be automated entirely and we may only see for example 20% increase in total "large" software velocity. As I mentioned in another comment it will be the people in the chain who produce little value but are required for other reasons (e.g. compliance, due diligence, sales, consultants, etc) that will remain and will be the bottleneck. The people that techies thought offered little value and made up inefficiencies and didn't contribute at all -> they have the last laugh in the end and they have AI to thank for that. Personally in my team I know we are seeing significant improvement to the point where hiring is no longer considered; I'm worried about our senior staff even. Anything that is labor, and not deciding "what to do" I feel I no longer need help with nearly as much. This is many components in a large public org. Feel like I only need two staff now, and that's more to understand the problem and what to do then the action of actually doing it; and a backup for accountability. If I hire more its only because we I can't keep up with the AI and am burning out, and I won't because I don't want to "hire to fire" later on if we run out of product work. It makes me anxious, and I can't recommend anyone with honesty to make this their career anymore; anything else feels more like false hope at this point.
elmean 11mo ago
[flagged]
- happymellon 11mo ago
  Wow, what a shit working environment.
- nerdsniper 11mo ago
  How much do these interns get paid per hour?
  - elmean 11mo ago
    I don't understand the question, they are interns
- msdrigg 11mo ago
  I think you might have terminal brain rot
- nehal3m 11mo ago
  Am I missing some irony or sarcasm here? Aren't internships meant to spend some time teaching people the ropes in return for free hands? This sounds like a weird Jack Welch circlejerk.
  - elmean 11mo ago
    The creamé settles to the top
- jjmarr 11mo ago
  Week 1: 64 interns Week 2: 32 interns Week 3: 16 interns Week 4: 8 interns Week 5: 4 interns Week 6: 2 interns Week 7: 1 intern Week 8: 0.5 interns Is it possible to make it to the end of the summer without getting sliced in half?
  - geodel 11mo ago
twelvechess 11mo ago
Most of the apps that I use regularly fail at least once a day nowadays. I think this is a direct cause of putting AI code in production without reviewing/QA.
- RevEng 11mo ago
  While I have no particular love for AI generated code, I think this has nothing to do with AI. Software has been unreliable for over a decade. Companies have been rushing out half baked products and performing continual patches for many years. And it's our fault because we have just come to accept it.
  - rented_mule 11mo ago
    > Software has been unreliable for over a decade The "over" deserves a lot of emphasis. To this day, I save my code at least once per line that I type because of the daily (sometimes hourly) full machine crashes I experienced in the 80s and 90s.
    - daedrdev 11mo ago
      Same, I think I should just turn on autosave at this point to save my fingers
      - rightbyte 11mo ago
        I have this fear autosave might corrupt the file by trying to save while the program has hung or whatever. I don't remember which app made me think that. Maybe some old version of Matlab cleared unsaved files when hung and with autosave enabled.
- XenophileJKO 11mo ago
  My prediction is that this will actually get better, because the cost to find and fix with AI is so much lower in time investment.
echelon_musk 11mo ago
> AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' (theregister.com) 1697 points by JustExAWS 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 Does this story add anything new?
- geodel 11mo ago
  This CEO is a sales guy. He's gonna repeat same thing every few months claiming "Brand new and improved AI Prediction"
cowsandmilk 11mo ago
He said the same thing four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151
orliesaurus 11mo ago
Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a talent pipeline you break the future of your org... As someone who mentors juniors, I've seen them use AI to accelerate their learning... They ask the right questions, iterate quickly, and share what they find with the rest of us... Seniors rely on old workflows and sometimes struggle to adopt new tools... HOWEVER the AI isn't writing your culture or understanding your product context... You still need people who grow into that... So I'm not worried about AI replacing juniors... I'm more worried about companies killing their own future talent pipeline... Let the genies help, but don't throw away your apprentices.
- orliesaurus 11mo ago
  ON TOP OF IT ALL, juniors are the ones who bring novel tools to the desk MOST times...i.e. I had no clue the Google IDE gave you free unlimited credits despite the terrible UI...but a young engineer told me about it!!
  - salawat 11mo ago
    I'm just shocked people aren't clueing into the fact that tech companies are trying to build developer dependence on these things to secure a "rent" revenue stream. But hey, what do I know. It's just cloud hyper scaling all over again. Don't buy and drive your own hardware. Rent ours! Look, we built the metering and everything!
    - SketchySeaBeast 11mo ago
      I'd hope people are. It's painfully obvious this entire AI push is rent-seeking half hidden by big tech money. At some point the free money is going to go away, but the rent for every service will remain.
    - 11mo ago
tonyhart7 11mo ago
shareholder wouldn't like this
jr-throw 11mo ago
I recently pair-worked with two junior developers (on their first job, but still with like 2+ years with the company) in order to transfer the know-how of something. I realized that they are shockingly bad at most basic things. Still their PR:s look really good (on the surface). I assume they use AI to write most of the code. What they do excel in is a) cultural fit for the company and b) providing long-term context to the AIs for what needs to be done. They are essentially human filters between product/customers and the AI. They QA the AI models' output (to some extent).
rvz 11mo ago
Now with AI, I expect junior developers to learn much quicker and progress to senior very quickly. I'd now rather hire at least 1 of each to begin with, both "junior" and a "senior" developer and then additionally hire more juniors to quickly turn them into a "senior". We do not need to hire anymore outside senior developers who need to be trained on the codebase with AI, given that the junior developers catch up so quickly they already replaced the need to hire a senior developer. Therefore replacing them with AI agents was quite premature if not completely silly. In fact it makes more sense to hire far less senior developers and to instead turn juniors directly into senior developers to save lots of money and time to onboard. Problem solved.
- platevoltage 11mo ago
  If only everyone thought this way.
oulipo2 11mo ago
They know AI is inefficient and mostly just a glorified "template filler" at this point...
geodel 11mo ago
I have heard this thing quite a few times over last few months each time is Amazon or AWS CEOs. May be this time he want to replace senior engineers. That would be more useful for them as each passing year they more and more of them and in times like these they are not looking to go leave Amazon on their own.
dwa3592 11mo ago
on a separate note- If AI eats the SaaS, what will happen to AWS?
- geodel 11mo ago
  Umm.. more business. Because AI runs in cloud and consume even more resources.
  - dwa3592 11mo ago
    but which business?
johnwheeler 11mo ago
…proceeds to replace junior devs with AI
ok123456 11mo ago
So he's saying we should be replacing the seniors with fresh grads who are good at using AI tools? Not a surprising take, given Amazon's turnover rate.
- butwhyth0oo 11mo ago
  [dead]
alecco 11mo ago
Meanwhile: "Amazon announces $35 billion investment in India by 2030 to advance AI innovation, create jobs" https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-billion-india-investment https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-bill... (Dec 9 2025)
- la64710 11mo ago
  This is for data locality.
- reop2whiskey 11mo ago
  oh so CEO is probably referring to using AI to replace foreign junior devs is a bad idea. Domestic junior dev replacement is ok though
epolanski 11mo ago
My experience is that juniors have an easier time to ramp up, but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code. I fear that unless you heavily invest in them and follow them, they might be condemned to have decades of junior experience.
- PartiallyTyped 11mo ago
  I have the same experience. In my view there's two parts to learning, creation and taste, and both need to be balanced to make progress. Creation is, in essence, the process of forming pathways that enable you to do things, developing taste is the process of pruning and refining pathways to doing things better. You can't become a chef without cooking, and you can't become a great one without cultivating a taste (pun intended) for what works and what it means for something to be good. From interactions with our interns and new-grads, they lack the taste, and rely too much on the AI for generation. The consequence is that when you have conversations with them, they straggle to understand the concepts and tools they are using because they lack the familiarity that comes with creation, and they lack the skills to refine the produced code into something good.
- tayo42 11mo ago
  > but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code. You can describe pre-ai developers and like that too. It's probably my biggest complaint about some of my Co workers
  - epolanski 11mo ago
    To some extend, you're right, but I'd still say that pre AI you had to at some point to write some notes, come with a plan and read more code.
- veunes 11mo ago
  If a quick start with AI is inevitable, then mentorship and review programs need to be re-evaluated. Seniors shouldn't just check for functionality; they should actively ask juniors to explain why the AI suggested a particular solution, what the alternatives are, and what risks it entails. The focus must shift to understanding, not just generation
ubicomp 11mo ago
FINALLY.
pnathan 11mo ago
I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas. But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm. I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. Food for thought.
- JeremyNT 11mo ago
  I think seniors know enough to tell whether they need to learn or not. At least that's what I tell myself! The thing with juniors is: those who are interested in how stuff works now have tools to help them learn in ways we never did. And then it's the same as before: some hires will care and improve, others won't. I'm sure that many juniors will be happy to just churn out slop, but the stars will be motivated on their own to build deeper understanding.
- omnimus 11mo ago
  I think the temptation to use AI is so strong that it will be those who will keep learning who will be valuable in future. Maybe by asking AI to explain/teach instead of asking for solution direclty. Or not using AI at all.
  - thunky 11mo ago
    > I think the temptation to use AI is so strong that it will be those who will keep learning who will be valuable in future. AI is an excellent teacher for someone that wants to learn.
- pphysch 11mo ago
  On the contrary, being able to access (largely/verifiably) correct solutions to tangible & relevant problems is an extremely great way to learn by example. It should probably be supplemented with some good old RTFM, but it does get us somewhat beyond the "blind leading the blind" StackOverflow paradigm of most software engineering.
- deepspace 11mo ago
  > I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. That's my thought too. It's going to be a triple whammy 1. Most developers (Junior and Senior) will be drawn in by the temptation of "let the AI do the work", leading to less experience in the workforce in the long term. 2. Students will be tempted to use AI to do their homework, resulting in new grads who don't know anything. I have observed this happen first hand. 3. AI-generated (slop) code will start to pollute Github and other sources used for future LLM training, resulting in a quality collapse. I'm hoping that we can avoid the collapse somehow, but I don't see a way to stop it.
aposm 11mo ago
We frequently get juniors or interns who are perfectly capable of pumping out many LoC with the use of AI in various forms - the issue is that they _don't_ actually ever learn how to think for themselves, and can't fix problems when something goes wrong or the LLM paints itself into a corner. I have found myself doing a lot more shepherding and pairing with juniors when they can't figure something out recently, because they just have not had the space to build their own skills.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
dogemaster2032 11mo ago
[flagged]
tasqyn 11mo ago
some companies doing the opposite, firing senior devs and hiring junior with AI experience
mberning 11mo ago
To me the more insidious problem is that we have juniors now that aren’t learning much because they lean on AI for everything. They are behind the curve.
par 11mo ago
Ive been managing and supporting teams for a long time and i'm sorry, but junior and mid-level devs do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to work output in big corps. I don't think AI will replace them. I don't think all these IC5 and IC6 engineers are going to be putting up 400-500 diffs a year anytime soon.
klipklop 11mo ago
I believe the idea is to not stop hiring juniors. Instead it's to replace anybody that commands a high salary with a team of cheaper juniors armed with LLM's. The idea is more about dragging down average pay than never hiring anybody. At least for now.
- stockresearcher 11mo ago
  And then all those unemployed seniors with extensive domain knowledge use AI to speedrun the creation of competition and you need to spend $$$$ to buy them out and shut them down. Solid idea.
  - klipklop 11mo ago
    They have lawyers, patents, non-competes, collusion and regulatory capture to prevent this from happening. We can also assume once these coding models get good enough they will not be shared with the general public or competitors.
zkmon 11mo ago
The third point is applicable to general demographic survival as well. Countries with most child birth rates, would ultimately win.
zkmon 11mo ago
But I think the actual reason was not addressed. The work of junior devs is exactly what can be replaced by AI, instead of the more complex abilities senior development possess.
jaredcwhite 11mo ago
The level of cynicism here is astronomical. After discovering the strategy of "fire juniors and let a few seniors manage autonomous agents" was an abject failure, now the line is "actually juniors are great because we've brainwashed them into thinking AI is cool and we don't have to pay them so much". Which makes me want to vomit. The only relevant point here is keeping a talent pipeline going, because well duh. That it even needs to be said like it's some sort of clever revelation is just another indication of the level of stupid our industry is grappling with. The. Bubble. Cannot. Burst. Soon. Enough!!
itissid 11mo ago
I gave opus an "incorrect" research task (using this slash command[1]) in my REST server to research to use SQLite + Litestream VFS can be used to create read-replicas for REST service itself. This is obviously a dangerous use of VFS[2] and a system like sqlite in general(stale reads and isolation wise speaking). Ofc it happily went ahead and used Django's DB router feature to implement `allow_relation` to return true if `obj._state.db` was a `replica` or `default` master db. Now claude had access to this[2] link and it got the daya in the research prompt using web-searcher. But that's not the point. Any Junior worth their salt — distributed systems 101 — would know _what_ was obvious, failure to pay attention to the _right_ thing. While there are ideas on prompt optimization out there [3][4], the issue is how many tokens can it burn to think about these things and come up with optimal prompt and corrections to it is a very hard problem to solve. [1] https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/blob/main/.claude/commands/research_codebase.md https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/blob/main/.claude/c... [2] https://litestream.io/guides/vfs/#when-to-use-the-vfs https://litestream.io/guides/vfs/#when-to-use-the-vfs [3] https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optimization#optimizing-test-accuracy https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optim... [4]https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa
- NewJazz 11mo ago
  I'm not sure a junior would immediately understand the risks of what you described. Even if they did well in dist sys 101 last year.
fire2dev 11mo ago
> A company that relies solely on AI to handle tasks without training new talent could find itself short of people. I kind of agree with this point from the perspective of civilisation.
alexgotoi 11mo ago
The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense. What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the right API by cargo-culting Stack Overflow, grinding through boilerplate, getting stuck for hours on a missing import. If a half-decent model can collapse that search space for them, you get to spend more of their ramp time on “here’s how our system actually fits together” instead of “here’s how for-loops work in our house style”. If you take that setup and then decide “cool, now we don’t need juniors at all”, you’re basically saying you want a company with no memory and no farm system – just an ever-shrinking ring of seniors arguing about strategy while no one actually grows into them. Always love to include a good AI x work thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
- aerhardt 11mo ago
  I mean, that’s an interesting take, but “having people around to ask dumb questions” is not why most orgs hire juniors.
  - lingrush4 11mo ago
    In my experience, juniors are absolutely terrified of asking any sort of question at all during a meeting. Senior engineers are far more likely to ask interesting, useful questions. We hire juniors so that we can offload easy but time-consuming work on them while we focus on more important or more difficult problems. We also expect that juniors will eventually gain the skills to solve the more difficult problems as a result of the experience they gain performing the easy tasks. If we stop hiring juniors now, then we won't have any good senior engineers in 5-10 years.
- tyre 11mo ago
  This is a really good and under appreciated point. My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Junior devs do that naturally (if you have the culture) because they don’t know anything already. It’s great
israrkhan 11mo ago
1. replacing junior engineers, with AI ofcourse breaks the talent pipeline. Seniors will retire one day, who is going to replace them? Are we taking the bet, that we wont need any engineer at that time? sounds dangerous. 2. Junior engineer's heavy reliance on AI tools is a problem in itself. AI tools learn from existing code that is written by senior engineers. Too much use of AI by junior engineers will result in deterioration of engineering skills. It will eventually result in AI learning from AI generated code. This is true for most other content as well, as more and more content on internet is AI generated.
danans 11mo ago
Junior vs senior is the wrong framing. It's "can use LLMs effectively" vs "can't use LLMs effectively". It's like expecting someone to know how to use source control (which at some point wasn't table stakes like it is today).
mxkopy 11mo ago
They must’ve forgot who created the first tech hype bubbles in the first place bc I’m about to replace some of these companies if I don’t get hired soon
Jerry2 11mo ago
Same story from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151
gorbachev 11mo ago
Somebody gets it.
gaptoothclan 11mo ago
old zuckerburg said 80% of junior developers would be cut in 2026, I say 80% of CEO's who replace their software engineers will be cut in 2026
nevir 11mo ago
Juniors are also more likely to be the MOST proficient/comfortable with AI tooling. Pair them with a senior so they can learn engineering best practices: And now you've also just given your senior engineers some extra experience/insights into how to more effectively leverage AI. It accelerates the org to have juniors (really: a good mix of all experience levels)
- goosejuice 11mo ago
  > Juniors are also more likely to be the MOST proficient/comfortable with AI tooling. Why? That seems unlikely to me. That's like saying juniors are likely the most comfortable with jj, zed, or vscode.
oytis 11mo ago
Am I going crazy or he already said that several months ago?
- ayewo 11mo ago
  Yes, you are not imagining things :) Discussed on HN 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151
wolfi1 11mo ago
so what is the take away message? fire only the senior devs cause they cost too much and can't use AI?
rippeltippel 11mo ago
> In fact, 30% of companies that laid off workers expecting savings ended up increasing expenses, and many had to rehire later. Such as (cough...) Amazon?
- turtletontine 11mo ago
  Source..? What exactly are you referring to?
gehsty 11mo ago
A Junior Dev is not just for Christmas, it’s for life. But more seriously are there CEOs out there who think they can replace the people starting off in their industry with AI? Who do the think will be the senior devs in 5-10yrs?
kunley 11mo ago
Btw, it's funny that certain kind of people tend to believe in common sense only when it comes from the mouth of the AWS CEO or a similar persona, and one can be ridiculed when saying the same thing as an anynomous commenter.
- mrcsharp 11mo ago
  It's always been this way with any hype cycle. This one is just the latest iteration.
  - kunley 11mo ago
    The fact it's repeated behaviour doesn't seem to make it less harmful.
gchokov 11mo ago
Watch them what they do, not what they say.
bespokedevelopr 11mo ago
Some of my friends who are senior/staff engs at various fang companies are basically convinced their jobs are at risk over the next few years due to how good the llms have gotten this year. I switched over to consulting/contracting so I don’t have the visibility like they do, but my work is heavily dependent on llms. However I don’t see it wiping out the industry but rather making people more efficient. They have much more robust tooling though around their llms and internal products that have automated much of their workflows which is I believe where the concern is coming from. They can see first hand how much of their job has turned into reviewing outputs and feeding outputs into other tools. A shift in skills but not fully automated solution yet. It’s hard to gauge where things are going and where we’ll be in 5 years. If we only get incremental improvements there’s still huge gains to be made in building out tooling ecosystems to make this all better. What does that look like for new college grads though? How much of this is really computer science if you are only an llm consumer?
- user3939382 11mo ago
  If you’re a master of the syntax fog you’re done. If you understand computation from first principles to tcp frames and transformer architecture you’re golden.
- jakub_g 11mo ago
  Staff+ work is not that much (exclusively) coding anymore, but identifying correct big things to work on and keeping focus on it, making Bob and Steve from different teams talk to each other instead of building the same stuff twice, making opinionated decisions on things, blocking harmful initiatives, finding elephant in the room and saying things out loud that no one wants to say etc. It's not really the work that LLMs currently do. I mean sure, maybe if you plug an LLM to read all emails and slacks and zoom transcripts of the entire company, it could do it at some point in the future. But would it have the same amount of influence compared to an industry & company veteran who has the company specific knowledge and experience that is nowhere written down?
- deadbabe 11mo ago
  Computer science isn’t even about code. Finding the most efficient way to pack boxes into a limited space is computer science. Code is the language. Could LLMs solve such real world problems and all their forms? If it’s in their training data, maybe.
harshaw 11mo ago
Full disclosure: I am pretty sour on the current Amazon/AWS leadership as I think, well, they couldn't lead a company out of a paper bag (former manager at AWS). Is there data that Amazon/AWS is still hiring junior devs? I've heard it's very hard to get into student programs these days but I don't have the data. My grumpy position would be Garmin saying one thing and doing another.
HeavyStorm 11mo ago
Thank God someone still has a functioning brain. You should replace devs vertically, not horizontally, otherwise, who'll be you senior dev tomorrow? Jokes aside, AI has the potential to reduce workforce across the board, but companies should strive to retain all levels staffed with humans. Also, an LLM can't fully replace even a junior, not yet at least.
AtNightWeCode 11mo ago
What a complete moron. This is why every senior dev hates these idiots in mid management. The kids know better? Yeah right. The new kids knows nothing. Recognizing how things work is not knowledge.
d--b 11mo ago
I find it a little weird that junior devs are considered not good in general. When I started working, I think I was fairly competent technically, and usually the people I hired were also pretty good straight out of uni.
deleted 11mo ago
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benjismith 11mo ago
I think the biggest injury to the hiring of junior devs happened after COVID made remote-work ubiquitous. It's a lot harder for a junior dev to get real mentorship, including the ambient kind of mentorship-by-osmosis, when everyone works alone in a sad dark room in their basement, rather than in an office with their peers and mentors. The advent of agentic coding is probably punch #2 in the one-two punch against juniors, but it's an extension of a pattern that's been unfolding for probably 5+ years now.
MSKJ 11mo ago
I would think you need Juniors to get Seniors. Or is there another way?
siliconc0w 11mo ago
"AI will replace software developers" "If your seniors are resisting AI and saying it doesn't work, replace them with AI-native engineers!" "AI will replace all junior software developers" "AI will be a tool to help junior software developers" Eventually we will get to: "AI requires and will likely to continue to require pretty heavy hand holding and is not a substitute for building and maintaining independent subject matter expertise"
butterisgood 11mo ago
correct.
shevy-java 11mo ago
Yet the big corporations all do it. So, something in the meta-explain-chain here does not work. You can not go about "this is a dumb idea", but then do it anyway - that just doesn't add up.
coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
Yes they decapitated careers now when the bubble is about to burst, well sorry.
aurizon 11mo ago
Move fast with AI, and break things, many, many things really fast
neilv 11mo ago
> “Number one, my experience is that many of the most junior folks are actually the most experienced with the AI tools. So they're actually most able to get the most out of them.” Would that experience be from cheating on their homework? Are you sure that's the skill you want to prioritize? > “Number two, they're usually the least expensive because they're right out of college, and they generally make less. So if you're thinking about cost optimization, they're not the only people you would want to optimize around.” Hahaha. Sounds like a threat. Additional context for this is that Amazon has a history of stack ranking and per-manager culling quotas, and not as much a reputation for caring about employees like Google did. > “Three, at some point, that whole thing explodes on itself. If you have no talent pipeline that you're building and no junior people that you're mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that's where we get some of the best ideas.” I thought the tech industry had given up on training and investing in juniors for long-term, since (the thinking goes) most of them will job-hop in 18 months, no matter how well you nurture. Instead, most companies are hiring for the near-term productivity they can get, very transactionally. Does AWS have good long-term retention of software engineers?
- rossdavidh 11mo ago
  A big, and little-discussed, problem across many industries is that there is no "pipeline" inside any company. Since the 1980's, the idea that you develop your own talent has fallen by the wayside. You hire it from other companies. Inside software, the issue may be bigger, but it exists in many others as well.
  - neilv 11mo ago
    Does AWS intend to have that pipeline within the company, starting with juniors, like this talk implies?
    - simgt 11mo ago
      They don't, that's why their CEO needs everyone else to believe they need to keep on hiring juniors aggressively so AWS can poach them a couple years down the line if needed
xp84 11mo ago
This is written without any acknowledgement of how short-term thinking has poisoned the entire (world of work? Capitalist system? IDK). Yes, killing your talent pipeline is a horrible idea. But that's Future CEO's problem. When we need new seniors to backfill natural attrition, we can poach them from competitors. And juniors don't make that much less money, either. Sure, there are people who do light frontend work on Wordpress sites and stuff, who make a lot less. But at my place of work, when we had junior SWEs (we either developed them into seniors in the past 3 years or let them attrition), they were making about ¾ of what seniors make. So, you can pay 4 juniors or you can pay 2-3 seniors. Arguably 1 senior using AI will be a lot more sustainable than 4 juniors burning tokens all day trying to get Cursor to do things they don't really even understand and can't evaluate effectively. Anyway I completely agree that all of this, especially eliminating the bottom 2 steps of the career ladder for engineers, is horrible for our entire industry. But our incentive structure will richly reward companies for doing this. Stock price go up. Let Future CEO worry about it.
exabrial 11mo ago
Cheaper in the short term until executives turn over, then it's the next guy's problem.
welliebobs 11mo ago
Do we really think that we're going to see all developers morph into one archetype where we all have exactly the same effective skills? Many engineers already have an area of interest where they focus, be that performance optimisation or high level architecture. It's my prediction that we're going to see more specialised skill sets become more commonplace. We'll have developers who can effectively use AI to bootstrap PoC's, developers who use AI in well established code bases to increase velocity (think asking Cursor to implement another set of REST endpoints for a new type), and developers who might choose to exclude AI from their workflows. Eventually (I hope, at least) it'll be expected that it's another tool that developers can use in their day to day and less of the Omnissiah that has come to replace us as developers.
fastball 11mo ago
Is that still true if all the junior engineers are using AI?
testemailfordg2 11mo ago
Is or Was?
mocha_nate 11mo ago
and yet...
KnuthIsGod 11mo ago
Team at a bank I know went from 13 members to 2. The remaining two are likely to be outsourced. They are trying to transition to the business side. Folks in Hyderabad can run LLMs too and data centre and infrastructure costs are lower in India.
jacquesm 11mo ago
Obviously. If you don't have junior devs you will never have senior ones either. It's implicit.
- testing22321 11mo ago
  I guess the theory is that in 5 or 10 years when that becomes a problem AI will replace the seniors too.
  - jacquesm 11mo ago
    Magical and wishful thinking in my opinion.
    - testing22321 11mo ago
      Of course lots of people think that. Lots of people are betting the other way too.
add2 11mo ago
By the way, junior devs are using AI for their work.
panny 11mo ago
Isn't it weird how nobody here cared about Silicon Valley ageism until it hurt junior developers. No, I don't have schadenfreude. I just see a bunch of people, even in this very thread, now claiming juniors somehow understand AI tools better than seniors. Even though we've all had the same amount of time to use them. At some point, admit you have a problem maybe? Maybe that will only happen after you spent 20 years staying on top of the latest tools and tech only to be told you're out of style because your hair started to grey.
rudnevr 11mo ago
I don't know, I've always thought that junior problem was mostly non-technical, kids issues: overconfidence, love for shortcuts, sense of entitlement, arrogance, lack of communication and respect of colleagues, including fellow juniors and seniors, aversion to holy wars, lack of compromise and team discipline, disrespect to existing solutions, laziness in following-up post-delivery, negligent edge case checking, being opinionated about tooling, languages and whatnot. Very little of this can be fixed with AI, and many things can be easily amplified. I mean, one junior with AI vs one senior with AI might yield comparable results, but seven juniors with AI vs seven seniors with AI should fail pretty fast.
stargrazer 11mo ago
Will these intro AI systems then mature to be senior devs who can then mentor more junior AIs? Then we won't need any devs? Isn't that the end goal, AI runs the company and we can all go fishing?
Madmallard 11mo ago
I don't really understand this comment from the CEO. Does he not understand the people making millions or billions off AI literally do not care? They fully are committed to seeing if they can do away with having to employ people all together. They want techno-feudalism. Sam Altman and the ilk are so anti-humanity seeming in interviews it's really disgusting that we allow them to be in a position of power at all.
enigma101 11mo ago
first the junior then the senior and finally the ceo...
deleted 11mo ago
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kachapopopow 11mo ago
I think the bigger problem is that if you elimitate jr devs you kind of just extend the amount of time in college required - effectively requiring to roleplay being in a real company doing real jobs until you gain the experience to go straight into a more senior job, but I mean doctors have relitively the same problem where there is no such thing as entry level because when you are responsible for human lives anything other than a senior role is often not enough.
reassess_blind 11mo ago
Junior devs become senior devs. No more junior devs = no more senior devs.
stillworks 11mo ago
And yet, they won't like it if aspiring SDEs use AI to "assist" when interviewing :D Just yesterday had a coding interview (not any FAANG) and the interviewer wanted a screen share and also checked my IDE settings to make sure "AI" was turned off. Not that I intended to or even intend to use LLM based tooling for interviews. Although having said that, if I intended to, interviewers won't find out. Interviews should always be done in person. (That took a different tangent... sorry)
veunes 11mo ago
The main problem Garman overlooks is skill degradation. AI is excellent at helping a junior quickly draft boilerplate or find the right API, but it doesn't teach the essentials: debugging, systems thinking, and reading complex code. A junior who grows up on AI "crutches" risks never learning to solve the complex, ambiguous problems that distinguish a senior engineer.
JanickSpielmann 11mo ago
If you don't invest in juniors, it will only be like 20 years until you're out of seniors.
sputr 11mo ago
Replacing juniors with AI is a fantastic idea. Let’s also replace mids while we’re at it. — A senior developer
Sheeny96 11mo ago
I, as an experienced engineer, am not afraid of the power of AI to take my job. I'm afraid of midwits who think it can, that hold the purse strings.
retinaros 11mo ago
he is saying that while doing that. if you look at who gets laid off and who gets hired guess what? l7-l6 are fired. l4-l5 hired. they most likely think replacing senior by a junior with ai is worth it financially
Zenst 11mo ago
Much like saying you can replace an accountant with a calculator in 1970. Ai coding has its place, but it has a long way to go and if anything junior devs and AI coding agents do raise a whole topic of debate. Is learning to code with AI coding agents going to make you a better programmer than one who learns to code without such tools?

1073 points by birdculture 11mo ago

twostorytower 11mo ago

Well, yeah. Then who will become the senior engineers in 10-15 years?

ghc 11mo ago
Pretty sure Anthropic is hoping the answer is Claude.
- marcosdumay 11mo ago
  Pretty sure Antropic knows their hopes won't come true. They just won't tell you that.
phyzix5761 11mo ago
10-15 years? Sadly, most people are declared senior after like 2 years of work.
tastyfreeze 11mo ago
Obviously after 10-15 years of experience working as a developer AI will be a senior dev. Probably will get promoted to management with all that experience.
- simonw 11mo ago
  Promoting your best engineers to management sometimes gets you a great manager, but often gets you a mediocre or just-about-competent manager at the cost of a great engineer. I'm a big fan of the "staff engineer" track as a way to avoid this problem. Your 10-15 year engineers who don't vibe with management should be able to continue earning managerial salaries and having the biggest impact possible. https://staffeng.com/about/ https://staffeng.com/about/ I'm also a fan of leadership without management. Those experienced engineers should absolutely be taking on leadership responsibilities - helping guide the organization, helping coach others, helping build better processes. But they shouldn't be stuck in management tasks like running 1-1s and looking after direct reports and spending a month every year on the annual review process.
  - grogenaut 11mo ago
    I still spend a week on annual reviews but you make great points all around.
  - RevEng 11mo ago
    This is exactly where I find myself. I've been asked several times to take on management, but I have no interest in it. I got to be a principal after 18 years of experience by being good at engineering, not management. Like you said, I can and do help with leadership through mentorship, offering guidance and advice, giving presentations on technical topics, and leading technical projects.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    This is a general problem that corporations have trouble with with: The struggle to separate leadership and people management. Why does the person who tells you what to do also need to be the same person who does your annual review, who also has to be the same person who leads the technical design of the project, approves your vacation, assists with your career development, and gives feedback or disciplinary correction when you mess up? Why do we always seem to bundle all these distinct roles together under "Manager"?
  - tastyfreeze 11mo ago
    Absolutely agree. Regardless, my org keeps trying to get me to take a management role after 15 years dev experience. I love my job and don't like managing people. You couldn't pay me enough to become a manager.
jsheard 11mo ago
You think the people deciding whether to hire more juniors are planning more than one or two quarters ahead? 10-15 years is someone else's problem.
- steveBK123 11mo ago
  Yes, unfortunately 10-15 years is 5 sequential someones else's problems.
philipwhiuk 11mo ago
Stolen from your competitors, obviously.
azemetre 11mo ago
These people are working on destroying the planet to make more money, they absolutely do not care. Our society isn't set up to punish them, but encourage such behavior to even more extremes (see datacenter build outs causing water shortages, electricity hikes, and cancer in poor communities; nearly every politician capitulating on such actions because they don't know better).
- riskable 11mo ago
  I wish people would get off the "AI is the worst thing for the environment" bandwagon. AI and data centers as a whole aren't even in the top 100 emitters of pollution and never will be. If you want to complain about tech companies ruining the environment, look towards policies that force people to come into the office. Pointless commutes are far, far worse for the environment than all data centers combined. Complaining about the environmental impact of AI is like plastic manufacturers putting recycling labels on plastic that is inherently not recycleable and making it seem like plastic pollution is every day people's fault for not recycling enough. AI's impact on the environment is so tiny it's comparable to a rounding error when held up against the output of say, global shipping or air travel. Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions? They're vastly worse.
  - jnd-cz 11mo ago
    Of course they aren't polluters as in generating some kind of smoke themselves. But they do consume megawatts upon megawatts of power that has to be generated somewhere. Not often you have the luxury of building near nuclear power plant. And in the end you're still releasing those megawatts as heat into the atmosphere.
  - jraph 11mo ago
    > Why don't people get this upset at airport expansions? We do too, don't worry.
  - azemetre 11mo ago
    People are allowed to reject whatever they want, I'm sorry that democracy is failing you to make slightly more money while the rest of society suffers. I'm glad people are grabbing the reigns of power back from some of the most evil people on the planet.
otikik 11mo ago
Anything besides next quarter does not exist.
nextworddev 11mo ago
AI will be the senior engineer
DiscourseFan 11mo ago
You can’t pretend you know where technology will take us.

focusgroup0 11mo ago

Which is a less dumb idea: replacing new grad junior devs with AI or H1Bs?

ThrowawayTestr 11mo ago
What about new grad H1Bs?
- toast0 11mo ago
  Hire new grads on OPT and transition to H-1B.
nxor 11mo ago
[dead]
platevoltage 11mo ago
Better idea, replace everyone with AI, and when that doesn't work, replace the AI with H1Bs.

simonw 11mo ago

Relevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got-better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got... > The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...] > If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.

lanfeust6 11mo ago
Search is easily the best feature of AI/LLMs.
- sublinear 11mo ago
  That's arguably all it ever was. Generating content using AI is just finding a point in latent space.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- alpha_squared 11mo ago
  I kind of agree here. The mental model that works for me is "search results passed through a rock tumbler". Search results without attribution and mixed-and-matched across reputable and non-reputable sources, with a bias toward whatever source type is more common.
- gosub100 11mo ago
  Which was trained on a pre-AI internet. What's going to happen in coming years when new tech comes out but perhaps isn't documented the same way anymore? It's not an unsolvable problem, but we could see unintended consequences like, say where you must pay the AI provider to ingest your data. Similar to buying poll space or AdSense or whatever they call it for search engines

0xdeadbeefbabe 11mo ago

4) Junior devs have an incomparably superior context window.

nextworddev 11mo ago
5) less attitude

Nextgrid 11mo ago

This is performative bullshit pandering to the increased skepticism around AI. He wouldn't be saying that if AI investment was still in full swing. I do agree with him about AI being a boon to juniors and pragmatic usage of AI is an improvement in productivity, but that's not news, it's been obvious since the very beginnings of LLMs.

grogenaut 11mo ago
So it's performative when the head of AWS says it and not news. But it's not performative when you say it and people should have listened to you in the comments?
- Nextgrid 11mo ago
  It's performative when you talk whatever the market wants to hear rather than sticking to an opinion (no matter how flawed it is). This behavior reminds me of the cryptobros that were hailing NFTs/web3 as the next best thing since sliced bread, and when that didn't came to pass quietly moved onto the next grift (AI) with the same playbook. (also I’m just talking out of my ass on a tech forum under a pseudonym instead of going to well-publicized interviews)

frostiness 11mo ago

I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.

mjr00 11mo ago
I went to university 2005-2008 and I was advised by many people at the time to not go into computer science. The reasoning was that outsourced software developers in low-cost regions like India and SEA would destroy salaries, and software developers should not expect to make more than $50k/year due to the competition. Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year. This might be the professional/career version of "buy when there's blood in the streets."
- sublinear 11mo ago
  Yup hearing big talk about competition and doom is a strong signal that there is plenty of demand. You can either bet on the new unproven thing claiming to change things overnight, or just do the existing thing that's working right now. Even if the new thing succeeds, an overnight success is even more unrealistic. The insight you gain in the meantime is valuable for you to take advantage of what that change brings. You win either way.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    When there is no competition that is a sign there is no demand. There can sometimes be too much competition, but often there is only the illusion of too much if you don't look at quality. You can find a lot of cheap engineers in India, but if you want a good quality product you will have to pay a lot more.
- hrimfaxi 11mo ago
  > Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year. At the end of the day, radiologists are still doctors.

smurda 11mo ago

This sounds like a comment from someone who doesn't have visibility into how good the models are getting and how close they are to fully autonomous, production-grade software development.

Nextgrid 11mo ago
This is an easy theory to prove; if AI was anywhere close to a senior engineer, we'd see the costs of software development drop by a corresponding amount or quality would be going up. Not to mention delivery would become faster. With LLMs being accessible to the general public I'd also expect to see this in the open-source world. I see none of that happening - software quality is actually in freefall (but AI is not to blame here, this began even before the LLM era), delivery doesn't seem to be any faster (not a surprise - writing code has basically never been the bottleneck and the push to shove AI everywhere probably slows down delivery across the board) nor cheaper (all the money spent on misguided AI initiatives actually costs more). It is a super easy bet to take with money - software development is still a big industry and if you legitimately believe AI will do 90% of a senior engineer you can start a consultancy, undercut everyone else and pocket the difference. I haven’t heard of any long-term success stories with this approach so far.
- throw1235435 11mo ago
  TL;DR: Code is the easy part; and at least in the last few years was rarely the bottleneck so even if we get rid of coding we don't deliver infinity amount of software. The "What to build" usually takes longer than building it. The amount will only go up where coding was holding things up or the main portion of time spent in delivering software (Hint: It usually isn't even 20% of the time in delivery times in my experience). There's many other stages to the SDLC and lots of processes even before then for large scale systems. On your point about a consultancy; many of the software dev consultancies will dry up w.r.t work. There won't be success as you state -> after all if your consultancy can do it so can an LLM so why do I need you as the middleman? After all just get Claude/Gemini/etc to do it for small things; you are already seeing this effect in things like graphic design, copywriting and other small creative skills. For large things with large complexity and judgement you need domain experts and guardrails again and other non-coding jobs -> that slows things down considerably so but still better to be in those jobs than anything requiring intelligence now. As a result coding could easily be automated entirely and we may only see for example 20% increase in total "large" software velocity. As I mentioned in another comment it will be the people in the chain who produce little value but are required for other reasons (e.g. compliance, due diligence, sales, consultants, etc) that will remain and will be the bottleneck. The people that techies thought offered little value and made up inefficiencies and didn't contribute at all -> they have the last laugh in the end and they have AI to thank for that. Personally in my team I know we are seeing significant improvement to the point where hiring is no longer considered; I'm worried about our senior staff even. Anything that is labor, and not deciding "what to do" I feel I no longer need help with nearly as much. This is many components in a large public org. Feel like I only need two staff now, and that's more to understand the problem and what to do then the action of actually doing it; and a backup for accountability. If I hire more its only because we I can't keep up with the AI and am burning out, and I won't because I don't want to "hire to fire" later on if we run out of product work. It makes me anxious, and I can't recommend anyone with honesty to make this their career anymore; anything else feels more like false hope at this point.

elmean 11mo ago

[flagged]

happymellon 11mo ago
Wow, what a shit working environment.
nerdsniper 11mo ago
How much do these interns get paid per hour?
- elmean 11mo ago
  I don't understand the question, they are interns
msdrigg 11mo ago
I think you might have terminal brain rot
nehal3m 11mo ago
Am I missing some irony or sarcasm here? Aren't internships meant to spend some time teaching people the ropes in return for free hands? This sounds like a weird Jack Welch circlejerk.
- elmean 11mo ago
  The creamé settles to the top
jjmarr 11mo ago
Week 1: 64 interns Week 2: 32 interns Week 3: 16 interns Week 4: 8 interns Week 5: 4 interns Week 6: 2 interns Week 7: 1 intern Week 8: 0.5 interns Is it possible to make it to the end of the summer without getting sliced in half?
- geodel 11mo ago

twelvechess 11mo ago

Most of the apps that I use regularly fail at least once a day nowadays. I think this is a direct cause of putting AI code in production without reviewing/QA.

RevEng 11mo ago
While I have no particular love for AI generated code, I think this has nothing to do with AI. Software has been unreliable for over a decade. Companies have been rushing out half baked products and performing continual patches for many years. And it's our fault because we have just come to accept it.
- rented_mule 11mo ago
  > Software has been unreliable for over a decade The "over" deserves a lot of emphasis. To this day, I save my code at least once per line that I type because of the daily (sometimes hourly) full machine crashes I experienced in the 80s and 90s.
  - daedrdev 11mo ago
    Same, I think I should just turn on autosave at this point to save my fingers
    - rightbyte 11mo ago
      I have this fear autosave might corrupt the file by trying to save while the program has hung or whatever. I don't remember which app made me think that. Maybe some old version of Matlab cleared unsaved files when hung and with autosave enabled.
XenophileJKO 11mo ago
My prediction is that this will actually get better, because the cost to find and fix with AI is so much lower in time investment.

echelon_musk 11mo ago

> AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' (theregister.com) 1697 points by JustExAWS 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 Does this story add anything new?

geodel 11mo ago
This CEO is a sales guy. He's gonna repeat same thing every few months claiming "Brand new and improved AI Prediction"

cowsandmilk 11mo ago

He said the same thing four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151

orliesaurus 11mo ago

Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a talent pipeline you break the future of your org... As someone who mentors juniors, I've seen them use AI to accelerate their learning... They ask the right questions, iterate quickly, and share what they find with the rest of us... Seniors rely on old workflows and sometimes struggle to adopt new tools... HOWEVER the AI isn't writing your culture or understanding your product context... You still need people who grow into that... So I'm not worried about AI replacing juniors... I'm more worried about companies killing their own future talent pipeline... Let the genies help, but don't throw away your apprentices.

orliesaurus 11mo ago
ON TOP OF IT ALL, juniors are the ones who bring novel tools to the desk MOST times...i.e. I had no clue the Google IDE gave you free unlimited credits despite the terrible UI...but a young engineer told me about it!!
- salawat 11mo ago
  I'm just shocked people aren't clueing into the fact that tech companies are trying to build developer dependence on these things to secure a "rent" revenue stream. But hey, what do I know. It's just cloud hyper scaling all over again. Don't buy and drive your own hardware. Rent ours! Look, we built the metering and everything!
  - SketchySeaBeast 11mo ago
    I'd hope people are. It's painfully obvious this entire AI push is rent-seeking half hidden by big tech money. At some point the free money is going to go away, but the rent for every service will remain.
  - 11mo ago

tonyhart7 11mo ago

shareholder wouldn't like this

jr-throw 11mo ago

I recently pair-worked with two junior developers (on their first job, but still with like 2+ years with the company) in order to transfer the know-how of something. I realized that they are shockingly bad at most basic things. Still their PR:s look really good (on the surface). I assume they use AI to write most of the code. What they do excel in is a) cultural fit for the company and b) providing long-term context to the AIs for what needs to be done. They are essentially human filters between product/customers and the AI. They QA the AI models' output (to some extent).

rvz 11mo ago

Now with AI, I expect junior developers to learn much quicker and progress to senior very quickly. I'd now rather hire at least 1 of each to begin with, both "junior" and a "senior" developer and then additionally hire more juniors to quickly turn them into a "senior". We do not need to hire anymore outside senior developers who need to be trained on the codebase with AI, given that the junior developers catch up so quickly they already replaced the need to hire a senior developer. Therefore replacing them with AI agents was quite premature if not completely silly. In fact it makes more sense to hire far less senior developers and to instead turn juniors directly into senior developers to save lots of money and time to onboard. Problem solved.

platevoltage 11mo ago
If only everyone thought this way.

oulipo2 11mo ago

They know AI is inefficient and mostly just a glorified "template filler" at this point...

geodel 11mo ago

I have heard this thing quite a few times over last few months each time is Amazon or AWS CEOs. May be this time he want to replace senior engineers. That would be more useful for them as each passing year they more and more of them and in times like these they are not looking to go leave Amazon on their own.

dwa3592 11mo ago

on a separate note- If AI eats the SaaS, what will happen to AWS?

geodel 11mo ago
Umm.. more business. Because AI runs in cloud and consume even more resources.
- dwa3592 11mo ago
  but which business?

johnwheeler 11mo ago

…proceeds to replace junior devs with AI

ok123456 11mo ago

So he's saying we should be replacing the seniors with fresh grads who are good at using AI tools? Not a surprising take, given Amazon's turnover rate.

butwhyth0oo 11mo ago
[dead]

alecco 11mo ago

Meanwhile: "Amazon announces $35 billion investment in India by 2030 to advance AI innovation, create jobs" https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-billion-india-investment https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-35-bill... (Dec 9 2025)

la64710 11mo ago
This is for data locality.
reop2whiskey 11mo ago
oh so CEO is probably referring to using AI to replace foreign junior devs is a bad idea. Domestic junior dev replacement is ok though

epolanski 11mo ago

My experience is that juniors have an easier time to ramp up, but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code. I fear that unless you heavily invest in them and follow them, they might be condemned to have decades of junior experience.

PartiallyTyped 11mo ago
I have the same experience. In my view there's two parts to learning, creation and taste, and both need to be balanced to make progress. Creation is, in essence, the process of forming pathways that enable you to do things, developing taste is the process of pruning and refining pathways to doing things better. You can't become a chef without cooking, and you can't become a great one without cultivating a taste (pun intended) for what works and what it means for something to be good. From interactions with our interns and new-grads, they lack the taste, and rely too much on the AI for generation. The consequence is that when you have conversations with them, they straggle to understand the concepts and tools they are using because they lack the familiarity that comes with creation, and they lack the skills to refine the produced code into something good.
tayo42 11mo ago
> but never get better at proper engineering (analysis) and development processes (debug). They also struggle to read and review code. You can describe pre-ai developers and like that too. It's probably my biggest complaint about some of my Co workers
- epolanski 11mo ago
  To some extend, you're right, but I'd still say that pre AI you had to at some point to write some notes, come with a plan and read more code.
veunes 11mo ago
If a quick start with AI is inevitable, then mentorship and review programs need to be re-evaluated. Seniors shouldn't just check for functionality; they should actively ask juniors to explain why the AI suggested a particular solution, what the alternatives are, and what risks it entails. The focus must shift to understanding, not just generation

ubicomp 11mo ago

FINALLY.

pnathan 11mo ago

I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas. But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm. I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. Food for thought.

JeremyNT 11mo ago
I think seniors know enough to tell whether they need to learn or not. At least that's what I tell myself! The thing with juniors is: those who are interested in how stuff works now have tools to help them learn in ways we never did. And then it's the same as before: some hires will care and improve, others won't. I'm sure that many juniors will be happy to just churn out slop, but the stars will be motivated on their own to build deeper understanding.
omnimus 11mo ago
I think the temptation to use AI is so strong that it will be those who will keep learning who will be valuable in future. Maybe by asking AI to explain/teach instead of asking for solution direclty. Or not using AI at all.
- thunky 11mo ago
  > I think the temptation to use AI is so strong that it will be those who will keep learning who will be valuable in future. AI is an excellent teacher for someone that wants to learn.
pphysch 11mo ago
On the contrary, being able to access (largely/verifiably) correct solutions to tangible & relevant problems is an extremely great way to learn by example. It should probably be supplemented with some good old RTFM, but it does get us somewhat beyond the "blind leading the blind" StackOverflow paradigm of most software engineering.
deepspace 11mo ago
> I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. That's my thought too. It's going to be a triple whammy 1. Most developers (Junior and Senior) will be drawn in by the temptation of "let the AI do the work", leading to less experience in the workforce in the long term. 2. Students will be tempted to use AI to do their homework, resulting in new grads who don't know anything. I have observed this happen first hand. 3. AI-generated (slop) code will start to pollute Github and other sources used for future LLM training, resulting in a quality collapse. I'm hoping that we can avoid the collapse somehow, but I don't see a way to stop it.

aposm 11mo ago

We frequently get juniors or interns who are perfectly capable of pumping out many LoC with the use of AI in various forms - the issue is that they _don't_ actually ever learn how to think for themselves, and can't fix problems when something goes wrong or the LLM paints itself into a corner. I have found myself doing a lot more shepherding and pairing with juniors when they can't figure something out recently, because they just have not had the space to build their own skills.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

dogemaster2032 11mo ago

[flagged]

tasqyn 11mo ago

some companies doing the opposite, firing senior devs and hiring junior with AI experience

mberning 11mo ago

To me the more insidious problem is that we have juniors now that aren’t learning much because they lean on AI for everything. They are behind the curve.

par 11mo ago

Ive been managing and supporting teams for a long time and i'm sorry, but junior and mid-level devs do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to work output in big corps. I don't think AI will replace them. I don't think all these IC5 and IC6 engineers are going to be putting up 400-500 diffs a year anytime soon.

klipklop 11mo ago

I believe the idea is to not stop hiring juniors. Instead it's to replace anybody that commands a high salary with a team of cheaper juniors armed with LLM's. The idea is more about dragging down average pay than never hiring anybody. At least for now.

stockresearcher 11mo ago
And then all those unemployed seniors with extensive domain knowledge use AI to speedrun the creation of competition and you need to spend $$$$ to buy them out and shut them down. Solid idea.
- klipklop 11mo ago
  They have lawyers, patents, non-competes, collusion and regulatory capture to prevent this from happening. We can also assume once these coding models get good enough they will not be shared with the general public or competitors.

zkmon 11mo ago

The third point is applicable to general demographic survival as well. Countries with most child birth rates, would ultimately win.

zkmon 11mo ago

But I think the actual reason was not addressed. The work of junior devs is exactly what can be replaced by AI, instead of the more complex abilities senior development possess.

jaredcwhite 11mo ago

The level of cynicism here is astronomical. After discovering the strategy of "fire juniors and let a few seniors manage autonomous agents" was an abject failure, now the line is "actually juniors are great because we've brainwashed them into thinking AI is cool and we don't have to pay them so much". Which makes me want to vomit. The only relevant point here is keeping a talent pipeline going, because well duh. That it even needs to be said like it's some sort of clever revelation is just another indication of the level of stupid our industry is grappling with. The. Bubble. Cannot. Burst. Soon. Enough!!

itissid 11mo ago

I gave opus an "incorrect" research task (using this slash command[1]) in my REST server to research to use SQLite + Litestream VFS can be used to create read-replicas for REST service itself. This is obviously a dangerous use of VFS[2] and a system like sqlite in general(stale reads and isolation wise speaking). Ofc it happily went ahead and used Django's DB router feature to implement `allow_relation` to return true if `obj._state.db` was a `replica` or `default` master db. Now claude had access to this[2] link and it got the daya in the research prompt using web-searcher. But that's not the point. Any Junior worth their salt — distributed systems 101 — would know _what_ was obvious, failure to pay attention to the _right_ thing. While there are ideas on prompt optimization out there [3][4], the issue is how many tokens can it burn to think about these things and come up with optimal prompt and corrections to it is a very hard problem to solve. [1] https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/blob/main/.claude/commands/research_codebase.md https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/blob/main/.claude/c... [2] https://litestream.io/guides/vfs/#when-to-use-the-vfs https://litestream.io/guides/vfs/#when-to-use-the-vfs [3] https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optimization#optimizing-test-accuracy https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optim... [4]https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa

NewJazz 11mo ago
I'm not sure a junior would immediately understand the risks of what you described. Even if they did well in dist sys 101 last year.

fire2dev 11mo ago

> A company that relies solely on AI to handle tasks without training new talent could find itself short of people. I kind of agree with this point from the perspective of civilisation.

alexgotoi 11mo ago

The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense. What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the right API by cargo-culting Stack Overflow, grinding through boilerplate, getting stuck for hours on a missing import. If a half-decent model can collapse that search space for them, you get to spend more of their ramp time on “here’s how our system actually fits together” instead of “here’s how for-loops work in our house style”. If you take that setup and then decide “cool, now we don’t need juniors at all”, you’re basically saying you want a company with no memory and no farm system – just an ever-shrinking ring of seniors arguing about strategy while no one actually grows into them. Always love to include a good AI x work thread in my https://hackernewsai.com/ https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.

aerhardt 11mo ago
I mean, that’s an interesting take, but “having people around to ask dumb questions” is not why most orgs hire juniors.
- lingrush4 11mo ago
  In my experience, juniors are absolutely terrified of asking any sort of question at all during a meeting. Senior engineers are far more likely to ask interesting, useful questions. We hire juniors so that we can offload easy but time-consuming work on them while we focus on more important or more difficult problems. We also expect that juniors will eventually gain the skills to solve the more difficult problems as a result of the experience they gain performing the easy tasks. If we stop hiring juniors now, then we won't have any good senior engineers in 5-10 years.
tyre 11mo ago
This is a really good and under appreciated point. My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Junior devs do that naturally (if you have the culture) because they don’t know anything already. It’s great

israrkhan 11mo ago

1. replacing junior engineers, with AI ofcourse breaks the talent pipeline. Seniors will retire one day, who is going to replace them? Are we taking the bet, that we wont need any engineer at that time? sounds dangerous. 2. Junior engineer's heavy reliance on AI tools is a problem in itself. AI tools learn from existing code that is written by senior engineers. Too much use of AI by junior engineers will result in deterioration of engineering skills. It will eventually result in AI learning from AI generated code. This is true for most other content as well, as more and more content on internet is AI generated.

danans 11mo ago

Junior vs senior is the wrong framing. It's "can use LLMs effectively" vs "can't use LLMs effectively". It's like expecting someone to know how to use source control (which at some point wasn't table stakes like it is today).

mxkopy 11mo ago

They must’ve forgot who created the first tech hype bubbles in the first place bc I’m about to replace some of these companies if I don’t get hired soon

Jerry2 11mo ago

Same story from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151

gorbachev 11mo ago

Somebody gets it.

gaptoothclan 11mo ago

old zuckerburg said 80% of junior developers would be cut in 2026, I say 80% of CEO's who replace their software engineers will be cut in 2026

nevir 11mo ago

Juniors are also more likely to be the MOST proficient/comfortable with AI tooling. Pair them with a senior so they can learn engineering best practices: And now you've also just given your senior engineers some extra experience/insights into how to more effectively leverage AI. It accelerates the org to have juniors (really: a good mix of all experience levels)

goosejuice 11mo ago
> Juniors are also more likely to be the MOST proficient/comfortable with AI tooling. Why? That seems unlikely to me. That's like saying juniors are likely the most comfortable with jj, zed, or vscode.

oytis 11mo ago

Am I going crazy or he already said that several months ago?

ayewo 11mo ago
Yes, you are not imagining things :) Discussed on HN 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151

wolfi1 11mo ago

so what is the take away message? fire only the senior devs cause they cost too much and can't use AI?

rippeltippel 11mo ago

> In fact, 30% of companies that laid off workers expecting savings ended up increasing expenses, and many had to rehire later. Such as (cough...) Amazon?

turtletontine 11mo ago
Source..? What exactly are you referring to?

gehsty 11mo ago

A Junior Dev is not just for Christmas, it’s for life. But more seriously are there CEOs out there who think they can replace the people starting off in their industry with AI? Who do the think will be the senior devs in 5-10yrs?

kunley 11mo ago

Btw, it's funny that certain kind of people tend to believe in common sense only when it comes from the mouth of the AWS CEO or a similar persona, and one can be ridiculed when saying the same thing as an anynomous commenter.

mrcsharp 11mo ago
It's always been this way with any hype cycle. This one is just the latest iteration.
- kunley 11mo ago
  The fact it's repeated behaviour doesn't seem to make it less harmful.

gchokov 11mo ago

Watch them what they do, not what they say.

bespokedevelopr 11mo ago

Some of my friends who are senior/staff engs at various fang companies are basically convinced their jobs are at risk over the next few years due to how good the llms have gotten this year. I switched over to consulting/contracting so I don’t have the visibility like they do, but my work is heavily dependent on llms. However I don’t see it wiping out the industry but rather making people more efficient. They have much more robust tooling though around their llms and internal products that have automated much of their workflows which is I believe where the concern is coming from. They can see first hand how much of their job has turned into reviewing outputs and feeding outputs into other tools. A shift in skills but not fully automated solution yet. It’s hard to gauge where things are going and where we’ll be in 5 years. If we only get incremental improvements there’s still huge gains to be made in building out tooling ecosystems to make this all better. What does that look like for new college grads though? How much of this is really computer science if you are only an llm consumer?

user3939382 11mo ago
If you’re a master of the syntax fog you’re done. If you understand computation from first principles to tcp frames and transformer architecture you’re golden.
jakub_g 11mo ago
Staff+ work is not that much (exclusively) coding anymore, but identifying correct big things to work on and keeping focus on it, making Bob and Steve from different teams talk to each other instead of building the same stuff twice, making opinionated decisions on things, blocking harmful initiatives, finding elephant in the room and saying things out loud that no one wants to say etc. It's not really the work that LLMs currently do. I mean sure, maybe if you plug an LLM to read all emails and slacks and zoom transcripts of the entire company, it could do it at some point in the future. But would it have the same amount of influence compared to an industry & company veteran who has the company specific knowledge and experience that is nowhere written down?
deadbabe 11mo ago
Computer science isn’t even about code. Finding the most efficient way to pack boxes into a limited space is computer science. Code is the language. Could LLMs solve such real world problems and all their forms? If it’s in their training data, maybe.

harshaw 11mo ago

Full disclosure: I am pretty sour on the current Amazon/AWS leadership as I think, well, they couldn't lead a company out of a paper bag (former manager at AWS). Is there data that Amazon/AWS is still hiring junior devs? I've heard it's very hard to get into student programs these days but I don't have the data. My grumpy position would be Garmin saying one thing and doing another.

HeavyStorm 11mo ago

Thank God someone still has a functioning brain. You should replace devs vertically, not horizontally, otherwise, who'll be you senior dev tomorrow? Jokes aside, AI has the potential to reduce workforce across the board, but companies should strive to retain all levels staffed with humans. Also, an LLM can't fully replace even a junior, not yet at least.

AtNightWeCode 11mo ago

What a complete moron. This is why every senior dev hates these idiots in mid management. The kids know better? Yeah right. The new kids knows nothing. Recognizing how things work is not knowledge.

d--b 11mo ago

I find it a little weird that junior devs are considered not good in general. When I started working, I think I was fairly competent technically, and usually the people I hired were also pretty good straight out of uni.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

benjismith 11mo ago

I think the biggest injury to the hiring of junior devs happened after COVID made remote-work ubiquitous. It's a lot harder for a junior dev to get real mentorship, including the ambient kind of mentorship-by-osmosis, when everyone works alone in a sad dark room in their basement, rather than in an office with their peers and mentors. The advent of agentic coding is probably punch #2 in the one-two punch against juniors, but it's an extension of a pattern that's been unfolding for probably 5+ years now.

MSKJ 11mo ago

I would think you need Juniors to get Seniors. Or is there another way?

siliconc0w 11mo ago

"AI will replace software developers" "If your seniors are resisting AI and saying it doesn't work, replace them with AI-native engineers!" "AI will replace all junior software developers" "AI will be a tool to help junior software developers" Eventually we will get to: "AI requires and will likely to continue to require pretty heavy hand holding and is not a substitute for building and maintaining independent subject matter expertise"

butterisgood 11mo ago

correct.

shevy-java 11mo ago

Yet the big corporations all do it. So, something in the meta-explain-chain here does not work. You can not go about "this is a dumb idea", but then do it anyway - that just doesn't add up.

coolThingsFirst 11mo ago

Yes they decapitated careers now when the bubble is about to burst, well sorry.

aurizon 11mo ago

Move fast with AI, and break things, many, many things really fast

neilv 11mo ago

> “Number one, my experience is that many of the most junior folks are actually the most experienced with the AI tools. So they're actually most able to get the most out of them.” Would that experience be from cheating on their homework? Are you sure that's the skill you want to prioritize? > “Number two, they're usually the least expensive because they're right out of college, and they generally make less. So if you're thinking about cost optimization, they're not the only people you would want to optimize around.” Hahaha. Sounds like a threat. Additional context for this is that Amazon has a history of stack ranking and per-manager culling quotas, and not as much a reputation for caring about employees like Google did. > “Three, at some point, that whole thing explodes on itself. If you have no talent pipeline that you're building and no junior people that you're mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that's where we get some of the best ideas.” I thought the tech industry had given up on training and investing in juniors for long-term, since (the thinking goes) most of them will job-hop in 18 months, no matter how well you nurture. Instead, most companies are hiring for the near-term productivity they can get, very transactionally. Does AWS have good long-term retention of software engineers?

rossdavidh 11mo ago
A big, and little-discussed, problem across many industries is that there is no "pipeline" inside any company. Since the 1980's, the idea that you develop your own talent has fallen by the wayside. You hire it from other companies. Inside software, the issue may be bigger, but it exists in many others as well.
- neilv 11mo ago
  Does AWS intend to have that pipeline within the company, starting with juniors, like this talk implies?
  - simgt 11mo ago
    They don't, that's why their CEO needs everyone else to believe they need to keep on hiring juniors aggressively so AWS can poach them a couple years down the line if needed

xp84 11mo ago

This is written without any acknowledgement of how short-term thinking has poisoned the entire (world of work? Capitalist system? IDK). Yes, killing your talent pipeline is a horrible idea. But that's Future CEO's problem. When we need new seniors to backfill natural attrition, we can poach them from competitors. And juniors don't make that much less money, either. Sure, there are people who do light frontend work on Wordpress sites and stuff, who make a lot less. But at my place of work, when we had junior SWEs (we either developed them into seniors in the past 3 years or let them attrition), they were making about ¾ of what seniors make. So, you can pay 4 juniors or you can pay 2-3 seniors. Arguably 1 senior using AI will be a lot more sustainable than 4 juniors burning tokens all day trying to get Cursor to do things they don't really even understand and can't evaluate effectively. Anyway I completely agree that all of this, especially eliminating the bottom 2 steps of the career ladder for engineers, is horrible for our entire industry. But our incentive structure will richly reward companies for doing this. Stock price go up. Let Future CEO worry about it.

exabrial 11mo ago

Cheaper in the short term until executives turn over, then it's the next guy's problem.

welliebobs 11mo ago

Do we really think that we're going to see all developers morph into one archetype where we all have exactly the same effective skills? Many engineers already have an area of interest where they focus, be that performance optimisation or high level architecture. It's my prediction that we're going to see more specialised skill sets become more commonplace. We'll have developers who can effectively use AI to bootstrap PoC's, developers who use AI in well established code bases to increase velocity (think asking Cursor to implement another set of REST endpoints for a new type), and developers who might choose to exclude AI from their workflows. Eventually (I hope, at least) it'll be expected that it's another tool that developers can use in their day to day and less of the Omnissiah that has come to replace us as developers.

fastball 11mo ago

Is that still true if all the junior engineers are using AI?

testemailfordg2 11mo ago

Is or Was?

mocha_nate 11mo ago

and yet...

KnuthIsGod 11mo ago

Team at a bank I know went from 13 members to 2. The remaining two are likely to be outsourced. They are trying to transition to the business side. Folks in Hyderabad can run LLMs too and data centre and infrastructure costs are lower in India.

jacquesm 11mo ago

Obviously. If you don't have junior devs you will never have senior ones either. It's implicit.

testing22321 11mo ago
I guess the theory is that in 5 or 10 years when that becomes a problem AI will replace the seniors too.
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  Magical and wishful thinking in my opinion.
  - testing22321 11mo ago
    Of course lots of people think that. Lots of people are betting the other way too.

add2 11mo ago

By the way, junior devs are using AI for their work.

panny 11mo ago

Isn't it weird how nobody here cared about Silicon Valley ageism until it hurt junior developers. No, I don't have schadenfreude. I just see a bunch of people, even in this very thread, now claiming juniors somehow understand AI tools better than seniors. Even though we've all had the same amount of time to use them. At some point, admit you have a problem maybe? Maybe that will only happen after you spent 20 years staying on top of the latest tools and tech only to be told you're out of style because your hair started to grey.

rudnevr 11mo ago

I don't know, I've always thought that junior problem was mostly non-technical, kids issues: overconfidence, love for shortcuts, sense of entitlement, arrogance, lack of communication and respect of colleagues, including fellow juniors and seniors, aversion to holy wars, lack of compromise and team discipline, disrespect to existing solutions, laziness in following-up post-delivery, negligent edge case checking, being opinionated about tooling, languages and whatnot. Very little of this can be fixed with AI, and many things can be easily amplified. I mean, one junior with AI vs one senior with AI might yield comparable results, but seven juniors with AI vs seven seniors with AI should fail pretty fast.

stargrazer 11mo ago

Will these intro AI systems then mature to be senior devs who can then mentor more junior AIs? Then we won't need any devs? Isn't that the end goal, AI runs the company and we can all go fishing?

Madmallard 11mo ago

I don't really understand this comment from the CEO. Does he not understand the people making millions or billions off AI literally do not care? They fully are committed to seeing if they can do away with having to employ people all together. They want techno-feudalism. Sam Altman and the ilk are so anti-humanity seeming in interviews it's really disgusting that we allow them to be in a position of power at all.

enigma101 11mo ago

first the junior then the senior and finally the ceo...

deleted 11mo ago

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kachapopopow 11mo ago

I think the bigger problem is that if you elimitate jr devs you kind of just extend the amount of time in college required - effectively requiring to roleplay being in a real company doing real jobs until you gain the experience to go straight into a more senior job, but I mean doctors have relitively the same problem where there is no such thing as entry level because when you are responsible for human lives anything other than a senior role is often not enough.

reassess_blind 11mo ago

Junior devs become senior devs. No more junior devs = no more senior devs.

stillworks 11mo ago

And yet, they won't like it if aspiring SDEs use AI to "assist" when interviewing :D Just yesterday had a coding interview (not any FAANG) and the interviewer wanted a screen share and also checked my IDE settings to make sure "AI" was turned off. Not that I intended to or even intend to use LLM based tooling for interviews. Although having said that, if I intended to, interviewers won't find out. Interviews should always be done in person. (That took a different tangent... sorry)

veunes 11mo ago

The main problem Garman overlooks is skill degradation. AI is excellent at helping a junior quickly draft boilerplate or find the right API, but it doesn't teach the essentials: debugging, systems thinking, and reading complex code. A junior who grows up on AI "crutches" risks never learning to solve the complex, ambiguous problems that distinguish a senior engineer.

JanickSpielmann 11mo ago

If you don't invest in juniors, it will only be like 20 years until you're out of seniors.

sputr 11mo ago

Replacing juniors with AI is a fantastic idea. Let’s also replace mids while we’re at it. — A senior developer

Sheeny96 11mo ago

I, as an experienced engineer, am not afraid of the power of AI to take my job. I'm afraid of midwits who think it can, that hold the purse strings.

retinaros 11mo ago

he is saying that while doing that. if you look at who gets laid off and who gets hired guess what? l7-l6 are fired. l4-l5 hired. they most likely think replacing senior by a junior with ai is worth it financially

Zenst 11mo ago

Much like saying you can replace an accountant with a calculator in 1970. Ai coding has its place, but it has a long way to go and if anything junior devs and AI coding agents do raise a whole topic of debate. Is learning to code with AI coding agents going to make you a better programmer than one who learns to code without such tools?