Well, maybe you've been blessed with a better pool of juniors than the ones I've worked with. The ones I've worked with require exactly what an AI would require -- completely defined tickets with no ambiguity, lots of deliberate review, no guarantees that what they produce is bug-free.

At least with AI if it's not working out you just shut it off and it's done. If it's a person's livelihood that process takes a huge burden on all involved.

I think it is less about junior engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.

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...

Totally agree about remote work for juniors. Even as a senior I feel like it's diminished some of my skills, in spite of all the benefits it brings.

I agree with you about juniors and remote work - but like everything else: just figure it out.

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.

> What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do?

I used to use the new hires to hold expertise so that I can spend a weekend at the beach without getting paged. That was the true selfish incentive in spending negative productivity where it takes me more time to teach than to do.

AI absorbs knowledge that the company can keep when I leave.

This used to be a capacity and bandwidth issue, as well as a timing issue with spare time.

I couldn't spend 9 PM to 11 PM on an odd Thu doing this with a human.

> we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months

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

Agreed wfh to me is just generally bad for any creative work but for a new person it must be taking aways years of development.

I guess a lot of this depends on whether you consider juniors to be part of your talent pool. Unless you are retaining them, it is just subsidizing industry at large to train them.

I stayed less than a year at my first two jobs. They bet wrong.

I think you really want to look at this in terms of the fact that it was already getting difficult to convince companies to hire junior engineers. They already don't want to pay for the inevitable several months of training before they're working at full speed. They want someone to be productive for the money now. And senior engineers are probably more productive per $ than juniors, even if the seniors are getting paid more. It doesn't help that a lot of people in our industry like to switch jobs every two years (which is, of course, further not helped by the reluctance of companies to give raises rather than hire new), which means there's a good chance they'll do nothing but pay their training only for some other company to harness the benefits. And companies, especially publicly traded companies, want decisions to benefit the company in the next quarter, and while that may not be immediately on everyone's mind during the hiring discussion it does trickle down.

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.

The goal is prevent homegrown talent, and give a reason to import H2B of offshore.

You’re in a whirlwind of propaganda at the moment. The talking points and takes are mostly planted. Even the title has an inner circle nod to it.

Do you think that its possible to raise the bar for junior engineers such that "you have AI now, so I need you to own farther up the review chain yourself"? I feel like I could answer either way. No, you need reps on projects to have that kind of judgement, that's what makes a senior. But also yes, while it will take the junior way longer to do that kind of review, they have the time to do it now, and its now the bottleneck so it makes sense to put their effort into that portion.

This, pretty much exactly what I've been noticing too. Feel for the juniors though, its rough trying to learn when the tool in front of you can just spit the whole answer out. I still think they're worth it, but tbh I just don't have a good answer yet for how to actually use them well, maybe just takes time to figure that out.

Double negative title implies clickbait :)

I'm just staring at the title, wondering how this offensive, double-and-a-half-negative phrase made it all the way to the frontpage. I'm going to skip this one for that obvious reason.

When you say the "whole industry", which industry are you referring to? The entire technology sector? Venture-backed companies specifically? Growth-stage VC-backed specifically?

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?

Maybe if hypothetically all stakeholders express all of their concerns and desires clearly in channels AI can pick up constantly.

> Think back to 2024 and how your job has changed over the last two years.

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.

For now that won't work, based on my experience with LLMs, you still need a very senior engineer to prompt and review what was produced by the agent. A junior wouldn't have the experience to identify the flaws/issues.

In the future, yeah maybe, when LLMs are not as dumb as they are today.

There are too many new grads and the quality bar outside of target programs has dropped nor never existed to begin with.

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...

Seniors don’t use SO anymore, it virtually died if you look at traffic. The reason the market is so tough for juniors isn’t because seniors are bad at chat or agent workflows, it’s quite the opposite of what you say.

"junior engineers are more likely to understand and use AI tools, and quickly become more performant than their senior engineers asking questions on stack overflow"

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".

I've been programming for 15 years, but I've never really taken the plunge into 3D work. Always wanted to. So I figure, now that coding agents are so powerful, let's see if I can make something!

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.

Is this a poorly instructed llm? Or a poorly constructed thought?