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Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not

by BobbyJo 8mo ago

Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for it instead.

xorgun 8mo ago
[dead]
sunir 8mo ago
Agreed. We are still in a capital crunch so overhiring is out of fashion. People don’t remember the early 90s or the dot.bust when the same things were said. Kraft 1977 Programmers and Managers talked about this if I recall. Still the best alternate take on our industry I have ever read.
- fdgg 8mo ago
  The most likely explanation for "AI layoffs" is not that AI has caused a dramatic jump in productivity - its more that managers are running out of creativity in relation to revenue-generating and cost-reducing projects and henceforth have no use for the surplus of labour. Its much easier to maximize the stock price in the short-term by riding the 'AI' wave. There seems to be some nonsensical belief that there exists this endless stream of positive NPV projects to take. No... reality is not like that.
  - sunir 8mo ago
    That’s a strong point. I interpret that: Covid created needs that weren’t permanent and also caused overinvestment to address digitalization and remote life needs to support lockdown as well as predictions for a permanent change in the future. Either way a lot of the work to be done in software is done for a while.
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”. Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.
- whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    Until there are no more "seniors"...
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      More money for me until I retire - well actually I’m past the point where I chase more money - and then after that - it’s not my monkey and not my circus.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    Again HN bubble thinking. Most developers in the US are working at banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc in second tier cities - in the “enterprise” and are not making “$400K”. Most developers will never in their career see more than $175K inflation adjusted and I really haven’t seen comp on the top end increase in nominal terms in a decade [1] for enterprise devs. That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you see comp go from around $80K —> $115K -> $150K —> $175K, junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) -> Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+. For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on Atlanta. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K? [1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I’m at a new plateau that’s higher.
lokar 8mo ago
Yep. This is why many companies have a terminal level with “up or out “ rules. Before that level you are not fully independent and require too much supervision. No one wants a Jr engineer with 10 years of experience. I see a lot of Sr engineers get very frustrated by how much time they have to spend helping Jr engineers. But, that’s the job, or at least a big part of it. Or at least it was.
- jfreds 8mo ago
  I burnt out helping a junior on my team for the past few months. It was just terribly obvious she was feeding my responses directly into a chatbot to fix instead of actually understanding the issue. I can’t really even blame her, there isn’t much incentive to actually learn
  - hodgesrm 8mo ago
    That sounds like a bad hire, not a junior. Why didn’t your manager help fix that?
    - rsynnott 8mo ago
      I gather that quite a lot of companies are using dumb metrics which would show this as _good_ behaviour, these days.
      - lokar 8mo ago
        Sure, but the overriding metric should be the opinion of the Sr engineer who is supposed to be mentoring and supervising the Jr
        rsynnott 8mo ago
        You'd hope, but, y'know, AI mania.
    - jfreds 8mo ago
      Very bad hire. I’ve gently said as much to my manager and skip. But for some reason hiring is hard and firing is hard, and we’re a small team, so I’ve been told to just lower my standards. Yeah, I know
rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo ago
I mean, if we’re doing this, let’s be honest and go as far as mid-level engineers whose work needs constant correction, as well as the many, many senior engineers out there who are senior only because they lucked out in getting the title during the artificial dev scarcity of the ZIRP eras.
Retric 8mo ago
I’ve gotten plenty of use out of junior devs. The critical bit is what makes anyone a useful worker. I’ve found anyone that’s both dedicated and meticulous is worth the investment. Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end you need to focus on whatever they actually are capable of doing. 40+ hours a week can slowly expand even an extremely narrow skillet as long as they’re a hard worker.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  And have you compared the output of three junior devs to hiring one mid level ticket taker who isn’t that much more expensive + AI coding agents?
  - Retric 8mo ago
    You don’t want 3 Jr devs at the same time because of diminishing returns. Most projects have grunt work where attention to detail is important but experience doesn’t really help much. AI can quickly come up with alt text for images, but ensuring it’s actually useful for someone using a screen reader is a different story. 1 new Jr every 2 years works quite well for a team of 7+ developers.
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      And that junior dev will probably leave in 2 years because HR won’t allow you to give them a raise to match their market comp. But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.
      - Retric 8mo ago
        That’s not really an either or situation, you can have 7 team members with Claud Code and 1 Jr without. I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.
heresie-dabord 8mo ago
> Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks [...] not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. Junior devs are by your own explanation not useless. They are the most important human investment in your project.
- BobbyJo 8mo ago
  When a junior dev stops being useless, they cease being a junior dev.
watwut 8mo ago
> Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours We havent dont it and I never seen something like that.
- BobbyJo 8mo ago
  Bummer. I was lucky enough to be that junior engineer for the first few years of my career.
  - watwut 8mo ago
    I mean, our juniors were useful. Sometimes they got easier tasks, sometimes they got tasks on non-core parts of the project where the stakes were lower. I think that when they are truly just useless, they are either on the wrong project or company do something wrong. I was useful as a junior too.
    - BobbyJo 8mo ago
      I did things, some of which were pretty useful or clever, but between telling me what to do, coaching me how to do it, reviewing what I did, and telling me what to change, I probably cost more time than I saved the first few years of my career. I almost certainly took more time from my seniors than I saved them, and the juniors I've mentored have mostly done the same for me.
hinkley 8mo ago
Why? Because I learn every time I do.
dude250711 8mo ago
> ...not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. Rather because you want them to go away, because management conveniently forgot to reduce your load to account for time spent on mentoring.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
elephanlemon 8mo ago
Strongly disagree with this. Bad junior devs might be useless, but I’ve seen good ones absolutely tear through features. Junior devs fresh out of school typically have tons of energy, haven’t been burned out, and are serious about wanting to get work done.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  And how do they compare to what a senior dev can do with Claude Code/Codex? I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI - and take time away from the senior.
  - bluefirebrand 8mo ago
    > I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI It would still be a waste of a seniors time to write that prompt. They should have more important things to spend time on
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      And it’s not a waste of their time to have to give detailed requirements and troubleshooting steps to a junior developer, constantly being interrupted, and then having to check their work thoroughly? If you have to be that detailed anyway - you might as well use AI.
      - bluefirebrand 8mo ago
        No, teaching the next generation of humans is not a waste of time I'm very sorry for you that you think that way
        raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        So exactly how am I going to convince my management to open a req for a junior developer who is not going to help us meet our quarterly goals and take time away from the other senior developers that will either have to work longer hours or do less work? I’m not going to work as a charity and neither are any of my coworkers. We are all here to exchange labor for money.
threatofrain 8mo ago
Many juniors are actually very experienced but the industry can’t see that on paper.
bdangubic 8mo ago
everyone was junior at one point, everyone. “junior” is just age mate, just age…
- BobbyJo 8mo ago
  I meant junior in terms of experience, not age, the two are just very strongly correlated for obvious reasons.
nostrademons 8mo ago
It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children. The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different. It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.
- ffsm8 8mo ago
  The Birthrate dropping has multiple causes, none of them have any relation to the topic at hand It's a negative (from the perspective of reproduction) confluence of both social and economic developments. E.g. the death of the traditional gender roles has inevitably reduced birth rates - for multiple reasons to boot. Because on the one hand, the women has am easier time not to commit and just sleep around, consequently becoming uninteresting to men that would've preferred to make a family... But also because biologically, men are more attracted to demure women, which on average will ultimately remove even more attraction, consequently removing even more likelihood of families being built. But that's once again only one factor, you got others too... Like stagnant wages, which force younger people too abstain from making a family simply because the financial situation doesn't allow for it. And if it happens anyway, it's more then likely to end in a broken family instead of something positive Another factor is the availability of choice. Dating apps are available, statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women. Just to be clear, in case someones brain has completely rotten through and interprets any blame into my comment: neither sex is responsible for this. Our society just decided to move on from gender roles, for supposedly economic reasons. The consequences are felt both for women and men, with both feeling less valued and miserable on average. Which understandably makes them less attractive to the other sex again. Still not a full list of factors at play btw, there is also the builtup of micro plastics in the men's balls, harming sperm production along with normalization of pornography, reducing the sexual frustration of people and consequently making them less driven to find partners. There is also the influencer industry, purposefully encouraging para social relationships, satisfying the social urges of a lot of people, consequently reducing the likelihood of them seeking out friendships... Reducing the likelihood of meeting other people and thus reducing the likelihood of getting a natural relationship through that. Third places have also mostly vanished, likely related to multiple of these effects to etc pp
thisisit 8mo ago
> Junior devs have always been useless > The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Last time when a junior dev was added to my team I had a similar thought. But then talking with management I was informed that things went beyond just training. The company had a social responsibility pledge and understanding with the local educational institutions. They had to pledge to be part of the internship and hiring activities every year. The company could not chose to be fair weather friends and try to recruit people only when they saw fit. The other aspect was cost. A team made of only senior engineers was costly. The last aspect was leveling up. Unless the company has lots of levels the team might end up lots of engineers at the same level. And with the inverted funnel nature of promotions it meant some engineers might end up waiting years for the promotion. So, it was better to have teams with some junior, intermediate and experienced engineers. That way costs and promotion flows were controlled. Now with AI the impact might go beyond junior devs. I see even the intermediate devs being impacted. It is more likely that companies think they can replace say 1 junior + 1 intermediate with 1 junior dev with AI. Or something along those lines.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  Then don’t base comp on promotions - problem solved.
  - collingreen 8mo ago
    This kind of flippant approach is equally valid as "just use ai", "let other companies train the juniors", and "don't give promotions just hire new juniors + ai". All of these have obvious problems from their overly myopic viewpoint.
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      How is that flippant? I went from an “architect” over the entire cloud developmrnt strategy at a 60 person startup making $160K in 2020 to working at AWS ProServe making $220K (cash + signing bonus + RSUs) as an L5 (mid level - no longer there). Do you think I cared about my title? I said just the opposite - hire fewer seniors + AI and don’t hird juniors. I’m now a staff level employee again at a 3rd party consulting company working with small and medium businesses (my preference) after taking a detour in BigTech from architectural roles at smaller companies. My quarterly strategic goals were a combination of what the CxO’s/directors defined and what I defined was in the best interest of the company. None of those goals had anything to do with larger societal issues.
torginus 8mo ago
I think the idea of 'junior' needs to be refined a bit. By the time I got my first job I've been coding for years, and have built rather substantial things. In fact, in terms of pure coding ability, I was probably past the initial, fast part of my growth. As should have others, which the university education system should have made sure. The fact that some people come out of 4+ years of software engineering education utterly clueless means that they somehow managed to dodge having to build anything, I think means that they will never get good at any point in time, as they either were very talented at dodging having to build things, and I don't think that talent is going to abandon them, or they couldn't really grasp the basics in an environment designed for just that. With that said, I think you can see for most juniors, what you can expect out of them in terms of pure coding ability - sure a lot of them have room to grow, but I've met so many great people who were very young, yet were useful from day one. In fact, if you have the willingness to grind away at some problem, that puts you ahead of a significant amount of the pack. I have had the misfortune of working with people who lacked any demonstrable skill, and had coping strategies for having to deal with any sort of hardship. Getting useful work out of them was a challenge in of itself. These people managed to get the years in to be considered senior, and are probably dispensing their wisdom 'mentoring' juniors somewhere else, and are no longer expected to actually contribute to meaningful issues.
- seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
  I'm not sure if enthusiasts are the exception rather than the norm? I've noticed in the last few years, a lot of junior engineers do not have much active coding experience outside of their university education, they aren't the traditional "obsessed with computers and programming as kids".
  - bluefirebrand 8mo ago
    There has been a much higher demand for software developers over the past 10-15 years than there are people who are obsessed with computers and programming If you look at the general topic shift on HN over the years it's obvious most people are getting into tech because they want power and money, not for love of tech
coffeebeqn 8mo ago
I’ve had some who are useful almost out of school. The amount of tickets is always growing and have someone pick up those “when things calm down I swear I’ll address this” tickets is always helpful. If they can’t get anything done by themselves in the codebase then it gets much harder. I do also think that some people have completely forgotten all the context they didn’t have when they started off xx years ago so mentoring is not always very good
epsylon 8mo ago
> Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. I don't know, I've known kids who can run circles around a lot of seniors, whether it's knowledge, coding chops or just intuition. The reason a newcomer takes a week to complete a task that requires two hours is because the senior has already learn all the ins and outs of the crappy software lifetime processes (usually dealing with half broken build / code review / ticket systems)
- BobbyJo 8mo ago
  > I don't know, I've known kids who can run circles around a lot of seniors Those kids are rasing 3M seed rounds to make AI tell fart jokes or something now. I'm talking about the middle 80% of new grads.
forrestpitz 8mo ago
> Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for it instead. Reminds me a bit of the quote The manager says "what if I train them and they leave?" And the response is "what if you don't and they stay". Leaving unskilled and underdeveloped people in you organization is a recipe for disaster.
AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
Exactly this Why train a junior human when I can train a junior robot that I can copy-paste that can’t quit and has infinite margins?

by BobbyJo 8mo ago

xorgun 8mo ago

[dead]

sunir 8mo ago

Agreed. We are still in a capital crunch so overhiring is out of fashion. People don’t remember the early 90s or the dot.bust when the same things were said. Kraft 1977 Programmers and Managers talked about this if I recall. Still the best alternate take on our industry I have ever read.

fdgg 8mo ago
The most likely explanation for "AI layoffs" is not that AI has caused a dramatic jump in productivity - its more that managers are running out of creativity in relation to revenue-generating and cost-reducing projects and henceforth have no use for the surplus of labour. Its much easier to maximize the stock price in the short-term by riding the 'AI' wave. There seems to be some nonsensical belief that there exists this endless stream of positive NPV projects to take. No... reality is not like that.
- sunir 8mo ago
  That’s a strong point. I interpret that: Covid created needs that weren’t permanent and also caused overinvestment to address digitalization and remote life needs to support lockdown as well as predictions for a permanent change in the future. Either way a lot of the work to be done in software is done for a while.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago

What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion. A junior developer just isn’t worth the investment. I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”. Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

whattheheckheck 8mo ago
Welcome to capitalism. Hire seniors and pay them 400k
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  Until there are no more "seniors"...
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    More money for me until I retire - well actually I’m past the point where I chase more money - and then after that - it’s not my monkey and not my circus.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  Again HN bubble thinking. Most developers in the US are working at banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc in second tier cities - in the “enterprise” and are not making “$400K”. Most developers will never in their career see more than $175K inflation adjusted and I really haven’t seen comp on the top end increase in nominal terms in a decade [1] for enterprise devs. That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you see comp go from around $80K —> $115K -> $150K —> $175K, junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) -> Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+. For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on Atlanta. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K? [1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I’m at a new plateau that’s higher.

lokar 8mo ago

Yep. This is why many companies have a terminal level with “up or out “ rules. Before that level you are not fully independent and require too much supervision. No one wants a Jr engineer with 10 years of experience. I see a lot of Sr engineers get very frustrated by how much time they have to spend helping Jr engineers. But, that’s the job, or at least a big part of it. Or at least it was.

jfreds 8mo ago
I burnt out helping a junior on my team for the past few months. It was just terribly obvious she was feeding my responses directly into a chatbot to fix instead of actually understanding the issue. I can’t really even blame her, there isn’t much incentive to actually learn
- hodgesrm 8mo ago
  That sounds like a bad hire, not a junior. Why didn’t your manager help fix that?
  - rsynnott 8mo ago
    I gather that quite a lot of companies are using dumb metrics which would show this as _good_ behaviour, these days.
    - lokar 8mo ago
      Sure, but the overriding metric should be the opinion of the Sr engineer who is supposed to be mentoring and supervising the Jr
      - rsynnott 8mo ago
        You'd hope, but, y'know, AI mania.
  - jfreds 8mo ago
    Very bad hire. I’ve gently said as much to my manager and skip. But for some reason hiring is hard and firing is hard, and we’re a small team, so I’ve been told to just lower my standards. Yeah, I know

rTX5CMRXIfFG 8mo ago

I mean, if we’re doing this, let’s be honest and go as far as mid-level engineers whose work needs constant correction, as well as the many, many senior engineers out there who are senior only because they lucked out in getting the title during the artificial dev scarcity of the ZIRP eras.

Retric 8mo ago

I’ve gotten plenty of use out of junior devs. The critical bit is what makes anyone a useful worker. I’ve found anyone that’s both dedicated and meticulous is worth the investment. Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end you need to focus on whatever they actually are capable of doing. 40+ hours a week can slowly expand even an extremely narrow skillet as long as they’re a hard worker.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
And have you compared the output of three junior devs to hiring one mid level ticket taker who isn’t that much more expensive + AI coding agents?
- Retric 8mo ago
  You don’t want 3 Jr devs at the same time because of diminishing returns. Most projects have grunt work where attention to detail is important but experience doesn’t really help much. AI can quickly come up with alt text for images, but ensuring it’s actually useful for someone using a screen reader is a different story. 1 new Jr every 2 years works quite well for a team of 7+ developers.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    And that junior dev will probably leave in 2 years because HR won’t allow you to give them a raise to match their market comp. But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.
    - Retric 8mo ago
      That’s not really an either or situation, you can have 7 team members with Claud Code and 1 Jr without. I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.

heresie-dabord 8mo ago

> Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks [...] not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. Junior devs are by your own explanation not useless. They are the most important human investment in your project.

BobbyJo 8mo ago
When a junior dev stops being useless, they cease being a junior dev.

watwut 8mo ago

> Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours We havent dont it and I never seen something like that.

BobbyJo 8mo ago
Bummer. I was lucky enough to be that junior engineer for the first few years of my career.
- watwut 8mo ago
  I mean, our juniors were useful. Sometimes they got easier tasks, sometimes they got tasks on non-core parts of the project where the stakes were lower. I think that when they are truly just useless, they are either on the wrong project or company do something wrong. I was useful as a junior too.
  - BobbyJo 8mo ago
    I did things, some of which were pretty useful or clever, but between telling me what to do, coaching me how to do it, reviewing what I did, and telling me what to change, I probably cost more time than I saved the first few years of my career. I almost certainly took more time from my seniors than I saved them, and the juniors I've mentored have mostly done the same for me.

hinkley 8mo ago

Why? Because I learn every time I do.

dude250711 8mo ago

> ...not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. Rather because you want them to go away, because management conveniently forgot to reduce your load to account for time spent on mentoring.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

elephanlemon 8mo ago

Strongly disagree with this. Bad junior devs might be useless, but I’ve seen good ones absolutely tear through features. Junior devs fresh out of school typically have tons of energy, haven’t been burned out, and are serious about wanting to get work done.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
And how do they compare to what a senior dev can do with Claude Code/Codex? I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI - and take time away from the senior.
- bluefirebrand 8mo ago
  > I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI It would still be a waste of a seniors time to write that prompt. They should have more important things to spend time on
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    And it’s not a waste of their time to have to give detailed requirements and troubleshooting steps to a junior developer, constantly being interrupted, and then having to check their work thoroughly? If you have to be that detailed anyway - you might as well use AI.
    - bluefirebrand 8mo ago
      No, teaching the next generation of humans is not a waste of time I'm very sorry for you that you think that way
      - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        So exactly how am I going to convince my management to open a req for a junior developer who is not going to help us meet our quarterly goals and take time away from the other senior developers that will either have to work longer hours or do less work? I’m not going to work as a charity and neither are any of my coworkers. We are all here to exchange labor for money.

threatofrain 8mo ago

Many juniors are actually very experienced but the industry can’t see that on paper.

bdangubic 8mo ago

everyone was junior at one point, everyone. “junior” is just age mate, just age…

BobbyJo 8mo ago
I meant junior in terms of experience, not age, the two are just very strongly correlated for obvious reasons.

nostrademons 8mo ago

It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children. The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different. It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.

ffsm8 8mo ago
The Birthrate dropping has multiple causes, none of them have any relation to the topic at hand It's a negative (from the perspective of reproduction) confluence of both social and economic developments. E.g. the death of the traditional gender roles has inevitably reduced birth rates - for multiple reasons to boot. Because on the one hand, the women has am easier time not to commit and just sleep around, consequently becoming uninteresting to men that would've preferred to make a family... But also because biologically, men are more attracted to demure women, which on average will ultimately remove even more attraction, consequently removing even more likelihood of families being built. But that's once again only one factor, you got others too... Like stagnant wages, which force younger people too abstain from making a family simply because the financial situation doesn't allow for it. And if it happens anyway, it's more then likely to end in a broken family instead of something positive Another factor is the availability of choice. Dating apps are available, statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women. Just to be clear, in case someones brain has completely rotten through and interprets any blame into my comment: neither sex is responsible for this. Our society just decided to move on from gender roles, for supposedly economic reasons. The consequences are felt both for women and men, with both feeling less valued and miserable on average. Which understandably makes them less attractive to the other sex again. Still not a full list of factors at play btw, there is also the builtup of micro plastics in the men's balls, harming sperm production along with normalization of pornography, reducing the sexual frustration of people and consequently making them less driven to find partners. There is also the influencer industry, purposefully encouraging para social relationships, satisfying the social urges of a lot of people, consequently reducing the likelihood of them seeking out friendships... Reducing the likelihood of meeting other people and thus reducing the likelihood of getting a natural relationship through that. Third places have also mostly vanished, likely related to multiple of these effects to etc pp

thisisit 8mo ago

> Junior devs have always been useless > The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Last time when a junior dev was added to my team I had a similar thought. But then talking with management I was informed that things went beyond just training. The company had a social responsibility pledge and understanding with the local educational institutions. They had to pledge to be part of the internship and hiring activities every year. The company could not chose to be fair weather friends and try to recruit people only when they saw fit. The other aspect was cost. A team made of only senior engineers was costly. The last aspect was leveling up. Unless the company has lots of levels the team might end up lots of engineers at the same level. And with the inverted funnel nature of promotions it meant some engineers might end up waiting years for the promotion. So, it was better to have teams with some junior, intermediate and experienced engineers. That way costs and promotion flows were controlled. Now with AI the impact might go beyond junior devs. I see even the intermediate devs being impacted. It is more likely that companies think they can replace say 1 junior + 1 intermediate with 1 junior dev with AI. Or something along those lines.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
Then don’t base comp on promotions - problem solved.
- collingreen 8mo ago
  This kind of flippant approach is equally valid as "just use ai", "let other companies train the juniors", and "don't give promotions just hire new juniors + ai". All of these have obvious problems from their overly myopic viewpoint.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    How is that flippant? I went from an “architect” over the entire cloud developmrnt strategy at a 60 person startup making $160K in 2020 to working at AWS ProServe making $220K (cash + signing bonus + RSUs) as an L5 (mid level - no longer there). Do you think I cared about my title? I said just the opposite - hire fewer seniors + AI and don’t hird juniors. I’m now a staff level employee again at a 3rd party consulting company working with small and medium businesses (my preference) after taking a detour in BigTech from architectural roles at smaller companies. My quarterly strategic goals were a combination of what the CxO’s/directors defined and what I defined was in the best interest of the company. None of those goals had anything to do with larger societal issues.

torginus 8mo ago

I think the idea of 'junior' needs to be refined a bit. By the time I got my first job I've been coding for years, and have built rather substantial things. In fact, in terms of pure coding ability, I was probably past the initial, fast part of my growth. As should have others, which the university education system should have made sure. The fact that some people come out of 4+ years of software engineering education utterly clueless means that they somehow managed to dodge having to build anything, I think means that they will never get good at any point in time, as they either were very talented at dodging having to build things, and I don't think that talent is going to abandon them, or they couldn't really grasp the basics in an environment designed for just that. With that said, I think you can see for most juniors, what you can expect out of them in terms of pure coding ability - sure a lot of them have room to grow, but I've met so many great people who were very young, yet were useful from day one. In fact, if you have the willingness to grind away at some problem, that puts you ahead of a significant amount of the pack. I have had the misfortune of working with people who lacked any demonstrable skill, and had coping strategies for having to deal with any sort of hardship. Getting useful work out of them was a challenge in of itself. These people managed to get the years in to be considered senior, and are probably dispensing their wisdom 'mentoring' juniors somewhere else, and are no longer expected to actually contribute to meaningful issues.

seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
I'm not sure if enthusiasts are the exception rather than the norm? I've noticed in the last few years, a lot of junior engineers do not have much active coding experience outside of their university education, they aren't the traditional "obsessed with computers and programming as kids".
- bluefirebrand 8mo ago
  There has been a much higher demand for software developers over the past 10-15 years than there are people who are obsessed with computers and programming If you look at the general topic shift on HN over the years it's obvious most people are getting into tech because they want power and money, not for love of tech

coffeebeqn 8mo ago

I’ve had some who are useful almost out of school. The amount of tickets is always growing and have someone pick up those “when things calm down I swear I’ll address this” tickets is always helpful. If they can’t get anything done by themselves in the codebase then it gets much harder. I do also think that some people have completely forgotten all the context they didn’t have when they started off xx years ago so mentoring is not always very good

epsylon 8mo ago

> Junior devs have always been useless. You used to give them tasks that take them a week or two even though a senior engineer could do it in a couple hours, not because you wanted them to contribute, but because you wanted them to learn to contribute. I don't know, I've known kids who can run circles around a lot of seniors, whether it's knowledge, coding chops or just intuition. The reason a newcomer takes a week to complete a task that requires two hours is because the senior has already learn all the ins and outs of the crappy software lifetime processes (usually dealing with half broken build / code review / ticket systems)

BobbyJo 8mo ago
> I don't know, I've known kids who can run circles around a lot of seniors Those kids are rasing 3M seed rounds to make AI tell fart jokes or something now. I'm talking about the middle 80% of new grads.

forrestpitz 8mo ago

> Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for it instead. Reminds me a bit of the quote The manager says "what if I train them and they leave?" And the response is "what if you don't and they stay". Leaving unskilled and underdeveloped people in you organization is a recipe for disaster.

AndrewKemendo 8mo ago

Exactly this Why train a junior human when I can train a junior robot that I can copy-paste that can’t quit and has infinite margins?