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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

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 10mo ago
I mean, that’s an interesting take, but “having people around to ask dumb questions” is not why most orgs hire juniors.
- lingrush4 10mo 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 10mo 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
- 47928485 10mo ago
  > My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...
  - ebiester 10mo ago
    Some of us intentionally avoid FAANG for that reason.
  - iwontberude 10mo ago
    Usually the people who question decisions are shot down because they don’t have a wholistic understanding of the decision and (respectfully) don’t have good arguments. This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business which distorts or reduces their visibility and understanding.
    - wkat4242 10mo ago
      One of the most regulated industries, aviation requires crews to go through crew management training where it's explicitly trained for lower level staff to raise concerns in spite of perceived superior knowledge. Some of the biggest accidents have happened directly due to this. Like Tenerife where the flight engineer had been listening to the radio and raised doubts about the runway being free but was ignored by the overconfident captain.
    - mikrl 10mo ago
      > This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business Is this a bad thing though? If some technical decision has downside risk, I’d reasonably expect: - the affected stakeholder to bring it up - the decision maker to assuage the stakeholder’s concern (happy path) or triage and escalate
      - iwontberude 10mo ago
        I think you are right. It's still worth encouraging people to question decisions even though most of the time it won't be the right compromise for the business.
hiddencost 10mo ago
Yikes. Sounds like you work for a toxic company. The mid and senior level engineers I know all go out of their way to ask the dumb questions. Every junior employee I've mentored, I've told them the main way they can fail is not asking questions early and often. Gotta build a culture that supports questions.
iwontberude 10mo ago
[flagged]
jppope 10mo ago
This is actually a super power I have after spending my first part of my career in sales. I was never formally trained so I just keep asking "why" until someone proves it all the way. Sales itself is also a lot about asking questions that won't come up to find the heart of the thing people actually want... which is just another side of the coin.
sailfast 10mo ago
I think the biggest challenge now becomes how more seasoned engineers teach juniors. The AI makes the ramp a lot easier but you still do best when you understand the whole stack and make mistakes. It’s damned near impossible to figure out where to spend your time wisely to correct an assumption a human made vs. an AI on a blended pull request. All of the learning that happens during PR review is at risk in this way and I’m not sure where we will get it back yet. (Outside of an AI telling you - which, to be fair, there are some good review bots out there)
- startupsfail 10mo ago
  Junior engineers now learn from AIs. And AIs now learn from RL cost functions. And RL cost functions are being set by PhDs, with little to no production grade engineering experience ;) The result is interesting. First, juniors are miserable. What used to be a good experience coding and debugging, in a state of flow is now anxiously waiting if an AI could do it or not. And senior devs are also miserable, getting apprentices used to be fun and profit, working with someone young is uplifting, and now it is gone. The code quality is going down, Zen cycle interrupted, with the RL cost functions now at the top. The only ones who are happy are hapless PhDs ;$
rsanek 10mo ago
"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- andrewmutz 10mo ago
  Completely agree with this. I got to work closely with an IBM fellow one summer and I was impressed by his willingness to ask "dumb questions" in meetings. Sometimes he was just out of the loop but more often he was just questioning some of the assumptions that others in the room had left unquestioned.
  - boston_clone 10mo ago
    Unfortunately, I found that the culture of "think." at IBM is not matched at many other organizations. Most days, I miss it. But forced RTO and only 10 days off per year is enough to keep me away ;)
- reactordev 10mo ago
  Company culture. Some companies I worked for would fire you for questioning decisions. Others, welcomed criticism. You don’t really know which environment you’re in until someone says something. Are you going to take the risk and be the first?
  - Xelbair 10mo ago
    Yes, because i would rather not work at such company and go somewhere else.
    - reactordev 10mo ago
      In this market you might not have a choice but to stick it out a while
ebiester 10mo ago
So, I think there are two models. One is a "one junior per team" model. I endorse this for exactly the reasons you speak. Another, as I recently saw, was a 70/30 model of juniors to seniors. You make your seniors as task delegators and put all implementation on the junior developers. This puts an "up or out" pressure and gives very little mentorship opportunities. if 70% of your engineers are under 4 years of experience, it can be a rough go.
- jorvi 10mo ago
  That second model is basically the hospital model. You have 1 veteran doctor overseeing 4 learning doctors. For example operating rooms do this, where they will have 4 operating rooms with 4 less experienced anesthesist and then 1 very experienced anesthesist who will rotate between the 4 and is on call for when shit hits the fan. Honestly I think everyone here is missing the forest for the trees. Juniors their main purpose isn't to "ask questions", it's to turn into capable seniors. That's also why the whole "slash our junior headcount by 3/4th" we are seeing across the industry is going to massively, massively backfire. AI / LLMs are going to hit a wall (well, they already hit it a while ago), suddenly every is scrambling for seniors but there are none because no one wanted to bear the 'burden' of training juniors to be seniors. You thought dev salaries are insane now? Wait until 4-5 years from now.
  - marcosdumay 10mo ago
    I guess Peopleware couldn't get every single thing right. A hospital model may be a good idea. One where you have a senior programmer and many junior ones doing most tasks isn't. IMO, something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines, and maybe a couple of juniors composing the team has much higher chances of success.
    - jorvi 10mo ago
      > something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons. What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgical oncologist. In the same way, you won't have devops seniors training front-end juniors.
deepGem 10mo ago
What will eventually pan out is that senior devs will be replaced with junior devs powered by AI assistants. Simply because of the reasons you stated. They will ask the dumb important questions and then after a while, will even solve for them. Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall. Take any product - nearly 50% of the features are unused and it's a genuine engineering waste to maintain those features. A junior dev spending 3 months on the code base with Claude code will figure out these hidden unwanted features, cull them or ask them to be culled. It'll take a while to navigate the hierarchy but they'll figure it out. The old guard will have no option but to move up or move out.
- throwway120385 10mo ago
  Why would Claude code help you find unused features? The end customer uses features, not the AI. I would want to know from the end customer whether a feature is unused, and a Junior with an LLM assistant is not going to be able to tell me that without adding new features to the code base.
  - deepGem 10mo ago
    Am using Claude code as an approximation here. 2 years down the line the tooling around analytics will get integrated in AU assistants and they will be absolutely able to figure out unused features.
- alwa 10mo ago
  How do you suppose the old guard are filling their days now? At some level, aren’t you describing the age-old process of maturing from junior to mid level to senior in most lines of work, and in most organizations? Isn’t that what advancing in responsibility boils down to: developing subtlety and wisdom and political credibility and organizational context? Learning where the rakes are? I wish 3 months, or even 3 years, were long enough to fully understand the whys and wherefores and politics of the organizations I cross paths with, and the jungle of systems and code supporting all the kinds of work that happen inside…
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
> They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face I strongly disagree, a Senior who cannot ask a "dumb question" is a useless developer to me. Ask away, we want to figure things out, we're not mind readers. Every good senior developer I know asks questions and admits when they don't know things. This is humility and in my eyes is a strong market for a good Senior Developer. The entire point of our job is to ask questions (to ourselves typically the most) and figure out the answers (the code). Juniors could or should ask more questions, and by the time you're a Senior, you're asking key questions no matter how dumb they sound.
- cloudfudge 10mo ago
  You're making the same point as the person you're responding to. They're saying seniors are allowed to ask dumb questions. It's junior who are often afraid to do so.
frtime2025 10mo ago
AI will replace jobs. People are putting their IT/dev budget into something, which means something else will be cut. I also don’t believe juniors, kids, seniors, staff, principals, distinguished/fellow should be replaced by AI. I think they WILL be, but they shouldn’t be. AI at Gemini 3 Flash / Claude Opus 4.5 level is capable with help and review of doing a lot of what a lot of devs do currently. It can’t do everything and will fail, but if the business doesn’t care, they’ll cut jobs. Don’t waste time trying to argue against AI to attempt to save your job. Just learn AI and do your job until you’re no longer needed to even manage it. Or, if you don’t want to, do something else.
- marcosdumay 10mo ago
  > People are putting their IT/dev budget into something, which means something else will be cut. That's not how things work in normal times. But normal times require minimally capable managers, a somewhat competitive economy, and some meritocracy in hiring. I can believe that's how things will work this time, but it's still a stupid way to do it.
dejj 10mo ago
Agree. > cargo-culting Stack Overflow What do you mean by this? I understand “cargo-culting” as building false idols, e.g. wooden headphones and runways to attract airplanes that never come.
- kjellsbells 10mo ago
  It means to copy code or instructions from a site into your own project without having any comprehension of how or why it works. example: you have a Windows problem. You search and read that "sfc /scannow" seems a popular answer to Windows problems. You run it without ever understanding what sfc does, whether the tool is relevant to your problem, etc. You are cargo culting a solution.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- kunley 10mo ago
  Cargo-cult in relation to programming exists since late 80s. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cargo-cult-programming.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cargo-cult-programming.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
- PaulStatezny 10mo ago
  I think the idea is copy-pasting code snippets from StackOverflow without comprehension of whether (and how) the code fixes the problem.
marcosdumay 10mo ago
Yes, the most helpful things AIs do is to guide people into popular environments they don't know very well. Or in other words, the people that get the most value from AI are junior devs, since they still don't know very well plenty of popular environments. It's also useful for seniors that are starting something in a new environment, but those only get 1 or 2 novel contexts at a time, while everything is new for a junior. Or, in again another set of words, AI enable juniors to add more value more quickly. That makes them more valuable, not less.
deleted 10mo ago
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HeavyStorm 10mo ago
I sense a lot of hate/baggage in this post subtext. Really, juniors are only important because they ask "dumb" questions that can help remove useless abstractions? That your take?
johnfn 10mo 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. This seems almost entirely wrong to me? That anyone, at any level of seniority, can ask "dumb questions" and give signal about "nonsense abstractions" seems a property of any healthy organization. That only juniors can do this doesn't just seem wrong, it seems backwards. I would expect seniors to have the clearest idea on whether abstractions make sense, not juniors.
- t43562 10mo ago
  People who are new to the business should be able to challenge the assumptions that the business has built up over time and ceased to question. They are the most insecure, however, no knowing who will be annoyed, shown up, embarassed by that question if it suggests that some past decisions were wrong.
Waterluvian 10mo ago
That's a perplexing take based on how I've experienced the past 15 years: the more senior someone is, the more questions they tend to ask.
flyinglizard 10mo ago
Good juniors are also great at just working. Usually no family so they are able to put in a lot of attention into work and they have that innocent curiosity and can-do in them which brings a lot of positive energy.
- never_inline 10mo ago
  > put in a lot of attention into work and they have that innocent curiosity They're also good at putting company code into ChatGPT. /snark
epgui 10mo ago
I’m a senior engineer on a staff track, I am proud to ask “dumb” questions all the time, and I don’t want to work somewhere where I don’t feel safe pursuing knowledge openly and candidly.
TheGRS 10mo ago
I don't agree that this is the central value juniors provide. Its a nice tertiary value, but not why one hires them. I think the value is the later part of farming for new talent and just growing your team. I still think the central issue is the economy. There are more seniors available to fill roles, so filling out junior roles is less desirable. And perhaps "replacing juniors with AI" is just the industry's way of clumsily saving face.
citizenpaul 10mo ago
The real thing people miss is not AI replacing Juniors. Its that senior management soured on hiring juniors even a few years before AI, almost across all industries. AI is now just the scapegoat for an economy wide problem. Execs found "one neat trick", piling junior work on seniors until they quit. While not hiring replacements in order to goose short term profits. Now every company is in the same position where hiring a senior really means hiring 5 seniors to replace the one that had 5 jobs layered on over a few years. This is of course impossible for any mortal to jump into. Now they also dont even have juniors to train up to senior levels.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
I don't think many orgs learn all that much from coaching their juniors, at least after first few. Juniors are just... necessary in the balance, have to little of them and the mid and senior devs will get more and more expensive, so you hire a bunch of juniors, they get trained on job, and it balances it out. Hell, if company does it right they might underpay junior-turned-senior for decade before they notice and look how industry pay looks like!
SecretDreams 10mo ago
I'll also add the obvious answer in that real companies constantly have seniors leaving/retiring. Juniors are meant to be trained up to be the future seniors of the company. You should consistently feed and grow this pipeline unless you think you won't exist in the future or AI will replace all jobs, period.
throwaway894345 10mo ago
I think the main benefit of junior devs is that it’s the only pipeline for getting senior devs. The other benefit over AI is that most of software engineering is not writing the code, but doing all of the other stuff like working out what to build, flagging concerns, operating the software once it is running, etc.
protocolture 10mo ago
>They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face This is the only role of executives, sales people, account managers. They usually do it with complete and utter confidence too. Vibe-questioning and vibe-instructing other people without a care in the world.
never_inline 10mo ago
If that was the case I would be chilling during my junior years. Juniors are usually given either grunt or low priority work while seniors get more "important" work. OTOH, it takes a lot to get your questions on RIGHT EARS when you're a junior, so wouldn't agree with your characterization at all.
- int_19h 10mo ago
  It really depends on the workspace. Some places will give juniors serious work items specifically to grow them.
veunes 10mo ago
I agree, the routine is gone, but at what cost? Understanding "how our system fits together" means solving problems, reading code, and debugging. If those fundamental skills aren't built through "humiliating and boring" tasks, how will a junior understand how the system actually works, not just how it appears to work?
jappgar 10mo ago
I generally agree with you but AI confusion is also a good signal your abstractions are nonsense. One problem there is that people would rather believe the AI is "dumb" than face the facts.
numpad0 10mo ago
> 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. Isn't that also the explicit aim of AI replacement, as stupid as it sounds? To me, the idea appear to be separation of money and work, so that economy will be strictly the concern of a metaphorical upper floor, floating in the thin air.
rafterydj 10mo ago
plugging your AI newsletter at the end of your comment comes off as an indicator you want to farm engagement, not genuinely stimulate conversation.

aerhardt 10mo ago

I mean, that’s an interesting take, but “having people around to ask dumb questions” is not why most orgs hire juniors.

lingrush4 10mo 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 10mo 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

47928485 10mo ago
> My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...
- ebiester 10mo ago
  Some of us intentionally avoid FAANG for that reason.
- iwontberude 10mo ago
  Usually the people who question decisions are shot down because they don’t have a wholistic understanding of the decision and (respectfully) don’t have good arguments. This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business which distorts or reduces their visibility and understanding.
  - wkat4242 10mo ago
    One of the most regulated industries, aviation requires crews to go through crew management training where it's explicitly trained for lower level staff to raise concerns in spite of perceived superior knowledge. Some of the biggest accidents have happened directly due to this. Like Tenerife where the flight engineer had been listening to the radio and raised doubts about the runway being free but was ignored by the overconfident captain.
  - mikrl 10mo ago
    > This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business Is this a bad thing though? If some technical decision has downside risk, I’d reasonably expect: - the affected stakeholder to bring it up - the decision maker to assuage the stakeholder’s concern (happy path) or triage and escalate
    - iwontberude 10mo ago
      I think you are right. It's still worth encouraging people to question decisions even though most of the time it won't be the right compromise for the business.

hiddencost 10mo ago

Yikes. Sounds like you work for a toxic company. The mid and senior level engineers I know all go out of their way to ask the dumb questions. Every junior employee I've mentored, I've told them the main way they can fail is not asking questions early and often. Gotta build a culture that supports questions.

iwontberude 10mo ago

[flagged]

jppope 10mo ago

This is actually a super power I have after spending my first part of my career in sales. I was never formally trained so I just keep asking "why" until someone proves it all the way. Sales itself is also a lot about asking questions that won't come up to find the heart of the thing people actually want... which is just another side of the coin.

sailfast 10mo ago

I think the biggest challenge now becomes how more seasoned engineers teach juniors. The AI makes the ramp a lot easier but you still do best when you understand the whole stack and make mistakes. It’s damned near impossible to figure out where to spend your time wisely to correct an assumption a human made vs. an AI on a blended pull request. All of the learning that happens during PR review is at risk in this way and I’m not sure where we will get it back yet. (Outside of an AI telling you - which, to be fair, there are some good review bots out there)

startupsfail 10mo ago
Junior engineers now learn from AIs. And AIs now learn from RL cost functions. And RL cost functions are being set by PhDs, with little to no production grade engineering experience ;) The result is interesting. First, juniors are miserable. What used to be a good experience coding and debugging, in a state of flow is now anxiously waiting if an AI could do it or not. And senior devs are also miserable, getting apprentices used to be fun and profit, working with someone young is uplifting, and now it is gone. The code quality is going down, Zen cycle interrupted, with the RL cost functions now at the top. The only ones who are happy are hapless PhDs ;$

rsanek 10mo ago

"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.

deleted 10mo ago
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andrewmutz 10mo ago
Completely agree with this. I got to work closely with an IBM fellow one summer and I was impressed by his willingness to ask "dumb questions" in meetings. Sometimes he was just out of the loop but more often he was just questioning some of the assumptions that others in the room had left unquestioned.
- boston_clone 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, I found that the culture of "think." at IBM is not matched at many other organizations. Most days, I miss it. But forced RTO and only 10 days off per year is enough to keep me away ;)
reactordev 10mo ago
Company culture. Some companies I worked for would fire you for questioning decisions. Others, welcomed criticism. You don’t really know which environment you’re in until someone says something. Are you going to take the risk and be the first?
- Xelbair 10mo ago
  Yes, because i would rather not work at such company and go somewhere else.
  - reactordev 10mo ago
    In this market you might not have a choice but to stick it out a while

ebiester 10mo ago

So, I think there are two models. One is a "one junior per team" model. I endorse this for exactly the reasons you speak. Another, as I recently saw, was a 70/30 model of juniors to seniors. You make your seniors as task delegators and put all implementation on the junior developers. This puts an "up or out" pressure and gives very little mentorship opportunities. if 70% of your engineers are under 4 years of experience, it can be a rough go.

jorvi 10mo ago
That second model is basically the hospital model. You have 1 veteran doctor overseeing 4 learning doctors. For example operating rooms do this, where they will have 4 operating rooms with 4 less experienced anesthesist and then 1 very experienced anesthesist who will rotate between the 4 and is on call for when shit hits the fan. Honestly I think everyone here is missing the forest for the trees. Juniors their main purpose isn't to "ask questions", it's to turn into capable seniors. That's also why the whole "slash our junior headcount by 3/4th" we are seeing across the industry is going to massively, massively backfire. AI / LLMs are going to hit a wall (well, they already hit it a while ago), suddenly every is scrambling for seniors but there are none because no one wanted to bear the 'burden' of training juniors to be seniors. You thought dev salaries are insane now? Wait until 4-5 years from now.
- marcosdumay 10mo ago
  I guess Peopleware couldn't get every single thing right. A hospital model may be a good idea. One where you have a senior programmer and many junior ones doing most tasks isn't. IMO, something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines, and maybe a couple of juniors composing the team has much higher chances of success.
  - jorvi 10mo ago
    > something closer to a real hospital team, where you have experts of different disciplines That is not how hospitals work. The surgery departement won't have a crack team of different disciplines to teach budding surgeons everything. They'll only have veteran surgeons to guide less-experienced surgeons. What you will have is interdepartmental cooperation / hand-off, and you'll have multi-discipline roles like surgical oncologist. In the same way, you won't have devops seniors training front-end juniors.

deepGem 10mo ago

What will eventually pan out is that senior devs will be replaced with junior devs powered by AI assistants. Simply because of the reasons you stated. They will ask the dumb important questions and then after a while, will even solve for them. Now that their minds are free from routine and boilerplate work, they will start asking more 'whys' which will be very good for the organization overall. Take any product - nearly 50% of the features are unused and it's a genuine engineering waste to maintain those features. A junior dev spending 3 months on the code base with Claude code will figure out these hidden unwanted features, cull them or ask them to be culled. It'll take a while to navigate the hierarchy but they'll figure it out. The old guard will have no option but to move up or move out.

throwway120385 10mo ago
Why would Claude code help you find unused features? The end customer uses features, not the AI. I would want to know from the end customer whether a feature is unused, and a Junior with an LLM assistant is not going to be able to tell me that without adding new features to the code base.
- deepGem 10mo ago
  Am using Claude code as an approximation here. 2 years down the line the tooling around analytics will get integrated in AU assistants and they will be absolutely able to figure out unused features.
alwa 10mo ago
How do you suppose the old guard are filling their days now? At some level, aren’t you describing the age-old process of maturing from junior to mid level to senior in most lines of work, and in most organizations? Isn’t that what advancing in responsibility boils down to: developing subtlety and wisdom and political credibility and organizational context? Learning where the rakes are? I wish 3 months, or even 3 years, were long enough to fully understand the whys and wherefores and politics of the organizations I cross paths with, and the jungle of systems and code supporting all the kinds of work that happen inside…

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

> They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face I strongly disagree, a Senior who cannot ask a "dumb question" is a useless developer to me. Ask away, we want to figure things out, we're not mind readers. Every good senior developer I know asks questions and admits when they don't know things. This is humility and in my eyes is a strong market for a good Senior Developer. The entire point of our job is to ask questions (to ourselves typically the most) and figure out the answers (the code). Juniors could or should ask more questions, and by the time you're a Senior, you're asking key questions no matter how dumb they sound.

cloudfudge 10mo ago
You're making the same point as the person you're responding to. They're saying seniors are allowed to ask dumb questions. It's junior who are often afraid to do so.

frtime2025 10mo ago

AI will replace jobs. People are putting their IT/dev budget into something, which means something else will be cut. I also don’t believe juniors, kids, seniors, staff, principals, distinguished/fellow should be replaced by AI. I think they WILL be, but they shouldn’t be. AI at Gemini 3 Flash / Claude Opus 4.5 level is capable with help and review of doing a lot of what a lot of devs do currently. It can’t do everything and will fail, but if the business doesn’t care, they’ll cut jobs. Don’t waste time trying to argue against AI to attempt to save your job. Just learn AI and do your job until you’re no longer needed to even manage it. Or, if you don’t want to, do something else.

marcosdumay 10mo ago
> People are putting their IT/dev budget into something, which means something else will be cut. That's not how things work in normal times. But normal times require minimally capable managers, a somewhat competitive economy, and some meritocracy in hiring. I can believe that's how things will work this time, but it's still a stupid way to do it.

dejj 10mo ago

Agree. > cargo-culting Stack Overflow What do you mean by this? I understand “cargo-culting” as building false idols, e.g. wooden headphones and runways to attract airplanes that never come.

kjellsbells 10mo ago
It means to copy code or instructions from a site into your own project without having any comprehension of how or why it works. example: you have a Windows problem. You search and read that "sfc /scannow" seems a popular answer to Windows problems. You run it without ever understanding what sfc does, whether the tool is relevant to your problem, etc. You are cargo culting a solution.
deleted 10mo ago
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kunley 10mo ago
Cargo-cult in relation to programming exists since late 80s. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cargo-cult-programming.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cargo-cult-programming.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
PaulStatezny 10mo ago
I think the idea is copy-pasting code snippets from StackOverflow without comprehension of whether (and how) the code fixes the problem.

marcosdumay 10mo ago

Yes, the most helpful things AIs do is to guide people into popular environments they don't know very well. Or in other words, the people that get the most value from AI are junior devs, since they still don't know very well plenty of popular environments. It's also useful for seniors that are starting something in a new environment, but those only get 1 or 2 novel contexts at a time, while everything is new for a junior. Or, in again another set of words, AI enable juniors to add more value more quickly. That makes them more valuable, not less.

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HeavyStorm 10mo ago

I sense a lot of hate/baggage in this post subtext. Really, juniors are only important because they ask "dumb" questions that can help remove useless abstractions? That your take?

johnfn 10mo 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. This seems almost entirely wrong to me? That anyone, at any level of seniority, can ask "dumb questions" and give signal about "nonsense abstractions" seems a property of any healthy organization. That only juniors can do this doesn't just seem wrong, it seems backwards. I would expect seniors to have the clearest idea on whether abstractions make sense, not juniors.

t43562 10mo ago
People who are new to the business should be able to challenge the assumptions that the business has built up over time and ceased to question. They are the most insecure, however, no knowing who will be annoyed, shown up, embarassed by that question if it suggests that some past decisions were wrong.

Waterluvian 10mo ago

That's a perplexing take based on how I've experienced the past 15 years: the more senior someone is, the more questions they tend to ask.

flyinglizard 10mo ago

Good juniors are also great at just working. Usually no family so they are able to put in a lot of attention into work and they have that innocent curiosity and can-do in them which brings a lot of positive energy.

never_inline 10mo ago
> put in a lot of attention into work and they have that innocent curiosity They're also good at putting company code into ChatGPT. /snark

epgui 10mo ago

I’m a senior engineer on a staff track, I am proud to ask “dumb” questions all the time, and I don’t want to work somewhere where I don’t feel safe pursuing knowledge openly and candidly.

TheGRS 10mo ago

I don't agree that this is the central value juniors provide. Its a nice tertiary value, but not why one hires them. I think the value is the later part of farming for new talent and just growing your team. I still think the central issue is the economy. There are more seniors available to fill roles, so filling out junior roles is less desirable. And perhaps "replacing juniors with AI" is just the industry's way of clumsily saving face.

citizenpaul 10mo ago

The real thing people miss is not AI replacing Juniors. Its that senior management soured on hiring juniors even a few years before AI, almost across all industries. AI is now just the scapegoat for an economy wide problem. Execs found "one neat trick", piling junior work on seniors until they quit. While not hiring replacements in order to goose short term profits. Now every company is in the same position where hiring a senior really means hiring 5 seniors to replace the one that had 5 jobs layered on over a few years. This is of course impossible for any mortal to jump into. Now they also dont even have juniors to train up to senior levels.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago

I don't think many orgs learn all that much from coaching their juniors, at least after first few. Juniors are just... necessary in the balance, have to little of them and the mid and senior devs will get more and more expensive, so you hire a bunch of juniors, they get trained on job, and it balances it out. Hell, if company does it right they might underpay junior-turned-senior for decade before they notice and look how industry pay looks like!

SecretDreams 10mo ago

I'll also add the obvious answer in that real companies constantly have seniors leaving/retiring. Juniors are meant to be trained up to be the future seniors of the company. You should consistently feed and grow this pipeline unless you think you won't exist in the future or AI will replace all jobs, period.

throwaway894345 10mo ago

I think the main benefit of junior devs is that it’s the only pipeline for getting senior devs. The other benefit over AI is that most of software engineering is not writing the code, but doing all of the other stuff like working out what to build, flagging concerns, operating the software once it is running, etc.

protocolture 10mo ago

>They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face This is the only role of executives, sales people, account managers. They usually do it with complete and utter confidence too. Vibe-questioning and vibe-instructing other people without a care in the world.

never_inline 10mo ago

If that was the case I would be chilling during my junior years. Juniors are usually given either grunt or low priority work while seniors get more "important" work. OTOH, it takes a lot to get your questions on RIGHT EARS when you're a junior, so wouldn't agree with your characterization at all.

int_19h 10mo ago
It really depends on the workspace. Some places will give juniors serious work items specifically to grow them.

veunes 10mo ago

I agree, the routine is gone, but at what cost? Understanding "how our system fits together" means solving problems, reading code, and debugging. If those fundamental skills aren't built through "humiliating and boring" tasks, how will a junior understand how the system actually works, not just how it appears to work?

jappgar 10mo ago

I generally agree with you but AI confusion is also a good signal your abstractions are nonsense. One problem there is that people would rather believe the AI is "dumb" than face the facts.

numpad0 10mo ago

> 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. Isn't that also the explicit aim of AI replacement, as stupid as it sounds? To me, the idea appear to be separation of money and work, so that economy will be strictly the concern of a metaphorical upper floor, floating in the thin air.

rafterydj 10mo ago

plugging your AI newsletter at the end of your comment comes off as an indicator you want to farm engagement, not genuinely stimulate conversation.