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What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because of AI, then that is daft although I can understand a period where companies are deciding whether they still need 50 Developers instead of 20 + AI.
For me, the worst change for Juniors is remote working. I don't want the experience of newly qualified engineer being sitting in their bedroom all day chatting to people on Teams and not knowing when they can interrupt and when they can't. We used to have an office so we could at least do 2 days per week together but we don't any more. The banter, the office, the observation, the overhearing things is a critical part of both learning engineering and learning how to be part of a workplace.
This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.
[0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
Your customers aren't sitting next to you several times a week, yet they have no problem paying you and expecting you to get your job done. Sure, you might need to meet in person a couple of times a year but if you're smart enough to use a computer you can figure out how to work with someone in a different location. The issue is probably not the distance.
The sad reality for smaller companies is that we cannot compete salary-wise, which means training juniors that will leave the minute they become productive
But mostly the issue is with the market, there are only so many things you need a junior to do in a body shop that is getting squeezed
Other companies are also cash constrained and need to pivot fast to "AI"-something, which juniors wont really help with on the short-term
But the junior will do at least some real work that hopefully benefits the company while they are there. There is at least something on the "benefit" side of the cost/benefit balance to entice them.
The problem that AI creates is that it tends to eliminate even that benefit. The task I would assign to the junior as their first task, which I expect to take them some weeks on as they not only do the nominal task but acquire all the surrounding skills and knowledge to finish it, is now a prompt and the senior engineer intermittently checking in on the AI's completion of it. It's hard to justify hiring the junior and paying them for six months if the senior can do the task(s) they'll finish before they jet off to their next job in a fraction of a day or two.
I have written this from a point of view that is foreign to me to explain the problem from their point of view. I do not accept this formulation wholesale, though there are substantial kernels of truth in it that anyone who wants to convince a real person that they are wrong about this assessment will have to deal with. I'm a very long term oriented person and still believe that raising up talent within your organization is extremely important. After all, in the end, what even is your organization except the talent you have within it and the system you've built for it to operate? Unless you think you can operate without any people at all, people are a vital part of your organization and you'd better be growing the best people you can or you can expect to get beat in the long term by an organization that did invest.
But when I look out at the world, what I see operating in most people and companies is much closer to the point of view I described first. That "beat in the long term", however long it may be, is certainly longer than one quarter or even one fiscal year.
I stayed less than a year at my first two jobs. They bet wrong.
> Hiring junior engineers will solve the problem you think you have.
Now a junior takes my spec, drops it into Claude, and submits a PR a few minutes later. So I'm back to being the bottleneck -- there's constant pressure to provide specs and review code, and ultimately that process is just me having an indirect conversation with Claude (em dash is mine).
The junior is probably providing negative value, since it would be more efficient for me just to talk to Claude, and they're not learning anything, because it's really hard to learn anything by skimming code that's being pooped out by Claude.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is, I still think we need to train junior engineers. I think my best advice to juniors right now is stop using Claude so much. Use it to plan and answer questions, but you should still be writing code even it's slower. Because that's the only way they're going to learn enough to effectively guide AI and review output and get past being a net negative.
It doesn't matter how much the employee costs. Let's assume you can hire two Juniors or one Senior for the same salary. If you have to optimize for ARR per employee - you can only hire one person. And if you have the choice between hiring a Junior or hiring a Senior... you're going to hire the Senior.
Goodhart's law fully applies here.
This claim is counterintuitive to me in many business contexts - ex. for an established privately-held company issuing dividends to the owners, what incentive do owners have to emphasize ARR per employee rather than net income?
Think back to 2024 and how your job has changed over the last two years. It went from science fiction to reality. And as engineers surely we understand the concept of expotential growth. It's not just us outsiders using claude to make our code but internal anthropic engineers are using it to make claude itself better. (Probably they also use openai and gemini to double check stuff!) And that's the expotential loop. Does anyone really believe in 2028 human judgement will still be the thing?
The programming language became a lot more terse. I press the keys on the keyboard considerably less now. Otherwise, I don't see much difference. The human end hasn't changed. Neither I, nor do I expect anyone else here, was hired to be a monkey infinitely typing to produce Shakespeare in software, so the human end is what the job is and always was.
> Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
No payoff, what is the problem they think they have and why is it wrong?
> The junior engineer question rests on a few assumptions, and all of them are flawed.
No payoff, what are the assumptions and why are they flawed?
This is obviously assuming the ideology of an organization that would consider something like "We shouldn't be hiring engineers anymore" in the first place so they obviously have absolute trust in AI.
In the future, yeah maybe, when LLMs are not as dumb as they are today.
And the target programs graduate around 15-20k EECS adjacent majors a year.
It's hard to justify hiring a (choosing random college) CS@Ouachita Baptist University grad for $140K TC (50th percentile for an entry level SWE) or even $100K TC [0] (25th percentile for an entry level SWE) unless they are truly an outlier.
For example, back in college I had a buddy who really didn't want to take our OS class because it was hard, so he used transferology and found an OS class offered by some random Christian university in Texas where the class assignments were either writing biblical analogies for system programming concepts like memory management or basic fizzbuzz level assignments. My alma mater's CS program ended up blacklisting that college when admin was working on transferring the credits for that class and began reviewing the class's curriculum.
While that is an extreme example, outside of target programs, the quality bar drops dramatically, and an entire generation of grads are truly unemployable at the current prevailing wages.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
There is a temptation to declare a conspiracy against Millennials and Zoomers, but it's probably more likely that our "job creators" are just that stupid and self-interested.
The problem is that universities, seemingly on a global scale, decided to run on economic incentives instead of academic ones. There are way too many people just doing degrees they have no interesting in learning about because university is just a way to a better job, and guess what, that "better job" no longer exists... and yet, year after year we have more and more people that have no clue what their credentials claim they should know by heart.
Every startup I know that hired some level of jr's and encouraged them to use AI found themselves in a code review bottleneck for basic code quality and architecture decisions. Many startups I know are largely forgoing jr devs.
Code quality regarding evolvability, reliability, maintainability is still part of the development process. All of the people who claimed src code is just assembly on Twitter some months ago have started chiming in that they were wrong.
I do wonder what this does to the talent pipeline like mentioned in the post.
Everything sounds like AI now when you squint just a bit.
Did they ever? SO wasn't around during my junior days so I never got to experience it from that angle, but it looked like it would have been an incredible resource for those who juniored in its heyday. However, I never found it to be successful in delivering to the problems I encountered as a senior.
Anything to back up this claim? SO is dead, senior engineers don't use it. Why are junior more likely to understand and use AI tools than senior? I would counter with "senior are more likely to properly use and keep AI in check than junior".
Most of the work today is manual testing and feeding the bugs back into the LLMs.
I've tried 3 experiments so far, and have given it serious effort. They're all terrible.
The reason they're terrible is that it's a skill issue. I don't have 3D skills. I don't know the lingo, I don't know how to describe my problems, and I don't know when the agent is shooting itself in the foot.