Only non-engineers listening to VC-hype on podcasts think that AI can replace fully junior engineers. Here is a problem I recently asked a junior dev to solve:
Our service occasionally gets especially expensive requests that amplify to our dependencies, one of those dependencies have started complaining that our bursts of traffic are impacting other users, talk to them and propose a solution that aligns with our different requirements. Possible directions are X, Y, Z.
AI is pretty far from able to do this. A cracked out vibe coder maybe could have just added a one-off naive rate limit algorithm pulled from stack overflow or maybe pulled in an unmaintained 3rd party 'rate-limit' package and called it a day. And that would be fine for a MVP but in large organizations figuring out what to build, how to build it, and getting agreement with stakeholders is way, way more work that doing than actual implementation (which still rarely can be one-shotted and needs a lot of hand-holding and iteration to get decent solutions).
decGetAc · 20m ago
I can't tell if you're overestimating your junior devs or underestimating AI. Likely both. The current hype is a lot but some of it is true and I'm seeing everyone at all roles acknowledge this.
I don't think it's a stretch that an AI will be able to do what a junior devs does soon (2/3 years). Getting consensus on a solution out of 3 from various teams ?
There's a few integration points missing today (company docs, company access to slack, longer context) but all of that is possible today. I believe it can do as well as a job as a junior devs can at this task.
I'm genuinely curious if you have been keeping up with AI and/or working with AI for your tasks (technical, writing down different solutions, promoting about how to interact with different teams based on their team specifics)?
Caveat: I'm honestly pretty far from drinking the koolaid but it seems inevitable even if AI stopped progressing - taking what we have today and building on top of it could get us this
somerandomqaguy · 10m ago
>As Camille Fournier bluntly put it, many tech managers who shifted to "senior-only" hiring are asking for trouble: "How do people ever become 'senior engineers' if they don't start out as junior ones?"
If I were a betting man, I would wager that those managers either don't care, or are gambling that by the time senior engineers are in short supply, AI will be good enough to replace them as well.
comrade1234 · 1h ago
Hiring a junior dev is a luxury for big companies that can afford to tie up senior devs tandem coding with a junior for months, then giving easy projects to the junior dev with extensive code review and hand-holding for another year.
I don’t think anyone has the budget for that anymore - not even the big companies. It’s two years of negative $ output for the $ you put in and after those two years the junior dev leaves anyway for a more senior position.
t-writescode · 1h ago
There’s a lot to be said about this comment, but I’ll stick to two things.
1) it’s a waste of resources for seniors to be doing the work that the juniors and 2s can do. Hunting down infrequent or low priority bugs, fixing small layout issues, etc. they’re perfect for someone paid less and growing and learning the codebase.
There is *always* plenty of junior-ready work and the day a week of work to schedule, prep and help those juniors to do it pays dividends.
2) a Junior leaving because you won’t pay them, have a toxic culture or won’t give them a promotion when it’s time speaks more about a broken company culture and one of a style that’s rampant in the tech industry and business at large than it does about loyalty and willingness for the employee to stay at the company.
Good leadership and skilled organizers can easily solve the problems you’ve listed; and, even better, create a culture of longevity for all the employees at a company, not just the juniors.
Speaking as someone that has worked for companies that give a shit about their workers and who helped raise me up from a low SDE.
lolinder · 53m ago
> it’s a waste of resources for seniors to be doing the work that the juniors and 2s can do. Hunting down infrequent or low priority bugs, fixing small layout issues, etc.
These are tasks that in the current environment often get pushed back for "later" indefinitely. These tasks aren't un-resourced because the company isn't hiring juniors, the company isn't hiring juniors because they no longer have the funds for small fixes.
adgjlsfhk1 · 26m ago
The problem with this idea is that being bug free and jank free is the moat that a mature app needs. Software lives on user trust. If everyone can see that the simple things aren't being done right, why will they have faith that the complex things are?
jiggawatts · 45m ago
As a customer of these types of businesses: yes, we can tell. We do care, and we are ready to drop the shitty products of these bad companies at the first opportunity.
mjr00 · 38m ago
IMO you're way overestimating how much hand-holding juniors need. Juniors coming out of college have a decent grasp of basic tooling like git, IDEs, debuggers, and yes AI coding assistants. We just hired two recent graduates and they were both getting meaningful work done independently within 2 weeks. They still need code review and guidance, but it's not like they need a senior watching over their shoulder telling them how to write a function in python.
You're going to have to teach them about the unique frameworks and processes at your company, but you have to teach seniors about those things too. Unless you're doing something really unique, juniors don't need to tie up senior devs "for months". Remember they can help each other, too.
robofanatic · 1h ago
This isn’t a new phenomenon and not limited to software development. Companies know that people get trained and leave all the time. Most companies have plans for that.
rtkwe · 8m ago
The answer used to be pensions, reasonable reliable raises, and promotion from within. Workers are responding to the signals sent by companies, the way to make the best money is bouncing around every few years to get actual raises, so that's what a lot of people do.
riatin · 17m ago
> Traditionally, new developers cut their teeth on small, repetitive tasks – fixing simple bugs, writing unit tests, churning through minor feature tweaks. These tasks were mundane but crucial for skill-building. Now, a lot of that grunt work can be handled by generative AI.
To me, this is the salient point. There are more juniors coming through now who aren't learning the fundamentals, because there is a ready shortcut around the mundane tedious work. Which means they're trying to move onto higher value, higher risk areas without understanding the foundations
gokhan · 32m ago
I find it quite naive that senior devs think this will stop with juniors. TFA says "No juniors today means no seniors tomorrow ... juniors must focus on higher-level skills like debugging, system design, and effective collaboration" and yet he believes AI won’t be doing all of that by the time those juniors somehow upskill on their own.
I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS, and it already looks quite capable of debugging things independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier).
System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills. Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number of years they've been working.
The author is from Google. I’m not sure if effective collaboration is something given there, but in many companies, especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And it's usually inversely proportional to the company’s age.
What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never checked.
mjr00 · 23m ago
> What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field.
It may shock you to learn that this was true before LLMs. There was a website called "Google" which acted as a front-end for almost all recorded knowledge in human history, and putting a phrase like "best design patterns for web APIs" as a search query (the primitive name for prompts) would give you hundreds, if not thousands of real-life examples and explanations of how to accomplish your goal.
Somehow senior developers kept their jobs despite the existence of this almighty oracle. LLMs do a better job of filtering and customizing the information, but seniors will still keep their jobs.
bigfatkitten · 1h ago
The legal industry has already figured out that LLMs can draft routine documents (and make massive mistakes) as well as a graduate lawyer, but that’s not the point.
That industry has properly recognised that this is where people learn the skills to do more complex, higher value work.
bogzz · 1h ago
Maybe because law firms aren't managed by MBAs.
neilv · 13m ago
Also, a law firm partner worked all their way up as as a lawyer, but a tech company CEO probably didn't work all their way up as a software engineer (and may have never been one)?
(Understanding of the role, empathy for it, and a bit invested in thinking of the role as valuable.)
bigfatkitten · 1h ago
They are run by partners laser focused on making money, just over a longer time horizon than private equity would be. Equity partners have most of their own wealth tied to the firm.
Grads are cheap. Partners can dangle the future senior associate/partner carrot over the head of a hopeful junior for many years while that junior brings in money that goes into the partners’ pockets. The junior brings in more money as they grow professionally.
RhysabOweyn · 1h ago
For now... some states are beginning to change their laws to allow non-lawyers to own law firms.
Why shouldn't a law firm be owned by non-lawyers? That limitation seems ridiculous.
Hospitals are owned by non-doctors. Engineering firms are owned by non-engineers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the ones that fail are owned by the practitioners and the ones that succeed are led by former outsiders.
Toymaking companies are owned by adults, gynecology practices can be owned by men, wheelchair companies can be owned by those who can walk, record labels can be owned by non-vocalists, etc. Most sports teams...
Why should lawyers get special treatment?
If someone is a good operator, that's orthogonal.
Most ICs are not good at leadership, logistics, product, long term vision, etc. or at least not everything that a well-rounded CEO or owner might be. While hiring leadership from within the ranks works, it's not a necessary condition for success.
jltsiren · 29m ago
Attorneys have a special status before the law. In particular, an attorney is legally required to act in the client's legitimate interests. If there is another person in the organization above the attorney and that person is also an attorney, the same requirement extends to them. But if that person is a random MBA or shareholder, they have no such obligation, which creates a conflict of interest.
Other true professions have similar but lesser requirements. Some leadership positions in a hospital require an MD. Not because the MD makes you a better leader, but because the position involves making medical decisions. In an engineering company, some decisions must be made by a civil engineer. And so on.
The requirements for attorneys are stricter, because the law is a special case before the law. While other fields exist within the system, the law is the system itself.
bigfatkitten · 1h ago
It’s because there are financial and other accountability requirements unique to law firms (dealing with trust money etc) that are tied directly to the legal professional obligations of the person in charge of the firm.
tomrod · 35m ago
How many things have private equity ruined?
Now imagine you are given less than judicious representation by the only law firm in town.
morkalork · 23m ago
This is a whole thing with pharmacies not owned by pharmacists, veterinarian clinics not owned by vets, dental clinics not owned by dentists and yes, people have noticed the perversion of incentives.
CPLX · 59m ago
Because lawyers occupy a quasi-public role in our legal system. They aren’t entirely separate from the system itself. The legal system depends on the enforcement of ethics and responsibility in a way that might be incompatible with a purely profit motive.
This point is arguable of course. On one hand legal services are expensive and often inaccessible for many. On the other hand more aggressive competition and consolidation has absolutely ruined society in a couple situations, medicine being the obvious example.
So there’s more than one point of view on this.
abdullahkhalids · 38m ago
Bits About Money says similar things about banks: "A recurring theme of this column is that banks are privately funded public infrastructure." [1]. So laws around them are quite strict and different from regular companies.
Or because bad légal documents become obvious immediately, while bad code has a 2-3 year incubation period.
bigfatkitten · 1h ago
Not always. Contracts for example sometimes contain landmines that lay undiscovered for a decade or more.
A key difference is that law is an actual profession. It has qualification, continuing professional development and licensing requirements, and personal consequences for getting it wrong. None of these things are true for software development.
margalabargala · 1h ago
I would argue they are pretty similar. It's not hard for a bad clause in a contract to get overlooked at first and then become a problem years later. Example:
I’m pretty fluent in both worlds and they are actually highly equivalent on this one specific point.
In both cases it looks perfect and it works right up until it doesn’t, usually for the same reason, entering an unanticipated state.
i_am_jl · 1h ago
I am not understanding the joke.
arcanemachiner · 1h ago
They're saying that the language in such a document could be read and discovered almost immediately, whereas the logic bomb sitting inside a bunch of poorly written code may take years before it finally explodes.
i_am_jl · 53m ago
...while ignoring that flaws in legal documents are not always immediately obvious, and bugs in code are not always difficult to discover.
matt_s · 1h ago
This aligns with my thinking that juniors can leverage AI to become seniors much faster than people without AI but there are important concepts about learning debugging, learning how the underlying technologies work, etc. that is crucial to becoming a senior dev. Just using AI to pump out code without knowing the details of how it works will not end up going well for the long haul.
latentsea · 39m ago
Seniors can also leverage AI to become juniors too.
aspenmayer · 19m ago
Dogfooding is encouraged for our top dogs, underdogs, and even random strays we find. In our vision of the future on the internet, everyone is a dog.
coryvirok · 28m ago
This has led me to wonder if this is the last generation of "senior" devs. The thinking goes, if it takes a couple of years to educate and train a junior dev on average and LLMs can increasingly replace junior devs... There is no need for a company to hire junior devs, starving the ecosystem of talent that would have otherwise gone onto becoming senior.
In a world where the average work is the first to be displaced (due to training data availability), the last to be replaced are the ones furthest from distribution mean...
kristianc · 38m ago
> Indeed, companies that try to staff only with experienced devs face a pipeline problem. Without juniors today, there are no seniors tomorrow.
This one seems like a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Defecting (hiring only seniors) is rational in isolation, but if everyone defects, everyone loses. What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.
tiew9Vii · 34m ago
Provide an environment and incentives so that people enjoy working for your company and don’t want to leave.
hamandcheese · 34m ago
> if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.
But if companies aren't hiring juniors like they used to, shouldn't retention be a lot easier?
kunzhi · 30m ago
> What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.
I find these statements so damning and self-incriminating. It's an open admission that the junior should expect to be treated poorly.
jbmsf · 42m ago
We have one junior dev in a team about a dozen. They have had other roles with us, both at the current job and previous ones. We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of leverage.
But it's hard to imagine committing to the training without the history.
ramesh31 · 29m ago
>We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of leverage.
This is the problem, early career devs are extremely bimodal in skill distribution.
You can luck out and land the 1 in 10 who just gets it and has the knack and has been coding since they were 12. But 9/10 times you end up with someone who has trouble even making a commit or with writing basic syntax, who just "picked" software as a career at some point in college for the salary. This has been my experience anywhere that doesnt have FAANG level cash to be hiring the top graduates at 150k+.
codr7 · 38m ago
Using AI certainly isn't expected in any teams I'm leading; not that I'm going to forbid anyone to use a tool, but I will warn everyone about depending on it and the requirement for verification/understanding.
ghiculescu · 48m ago
The real issue is wage expectations. In 2 ways
1) For the last decade many juniors have had unreasonable salary expectations that have often still been met. Now there is an alternative that's a lot cheaper and doesn't come with an attitude.
2) It's generally agreed that for the first year or 2 in your career you aren't that useful; after that you start to add lots of value quickly. But salary expectations don't double when you go from a junior to an intermediate - maybe they go up 25%. It's clearly much better value to hire only seniors if you can find them.
I'm not saying these are right or wrong but a whole article about juniors that doesn't mention wages, and just tries to implore companies to "do the right thing", misses the point.
codr7 · 42m ago
Not only does your fancy AI junior randomly spew bullshit back at you; that happens with humans as well; but it keeps doing it, never learning anything.
Managing one or several of these idiots has to be the worst job ever invented.
Our service occasionally gets especially expensive requests that amplify to our dependencies, one of those dependencies have started complaining that our bursts of traffic are impacting other users, talk to them and propose a solution that aligns with our different requirements. Possible directions are X, Y, Z.
AI is pretty far from able to do this. A cracked out vibe coder maybe could have just added a one-off naive rate limit algorithm pulled from stack overflow or maybe pulled in an unmaintained 3rd party 'rate-limit' package and called it a day. And that would be fine for a MVP but in large organizations figuring out what to build, how to build it, and getting agreement with stakeholders is way, way more work that doing than actual implementation (which still rarely can be one-shotted and needs a lot of hand-holding and iteration to get decent solutions).
I don't think it's a stretch that an AI will be able to do what a junior devs does soon (2/3 years). Getting consensus on a solution out of 3 from various teams ?
There's a few integration points missing today (company docs, company access to slack, longer context) but all of that is possible today. I believe it can do as well as a job as a junior devs can at this task.
I'm genuinely curious if you have been keeping up with AI and/or working with AI for your tasks (technical, writing down different solutions, promoting about how to interact with different teams based on their team specifics)?
Caveat: I'm honestly pretty far from drinking the koolaid but it seems inevitable even if AI stopped progressing - taking what we have today and building on top of it could get us this
If I were a betting man, I would wager that those managers either don't care, or are gambling that by the time senior engineers are in short supply, AI will be good enough to replace them as well.
I don’t think anyone has the budget for that anymore - not even the big companies. It’s two years of negative $ output for the $ you put in and after those two years the junior dev leaves anyway for a more senior position.
1) it’s a waste of resources for seniors to be doing the work that the juniors and 2s can do. Hunting down infrequent or low priority bugs, fixing small layout issues, etc. they’re perfect for someone paid less and growing and learning the codebase.
There is *always* plenty of junior-ready work and the day a week of work to schedule, prep and help those juniors to do it pays dividends.
2) a Junior leaving because you won’t pay them, have a toxic culture or won’t give them a promotion when it’s time speaks more about a broken company culture and one of a style that’s rampant in the tech industry and business at large than it does about loyalty and willingness for the employee to stay at the company.
Good leadership and skilled organizers can easily solve the problems you’ve listed; and, even better, create a culture of longevity for all the employees at a company, not just the juniors.
Speaking as someone that has worked for companies that give a shit about their workers and who helped raise me up from a low SDE.
These are tasks that in the current environment often get pushed back for "later" indefinitely. These tasks aren't un-resourced because the company isn't hiring juniors, the company isn't hiring juniors because they no longer have the funds for small fixes.
You're going to have to teach them about the unique frameworks and processes at your company, but you have to teach seniors about those things too. Unless you're doing something really unique, juniors don't need to tie up senior devs "for months". Remember they can help each other, too.
To me, this is the salient point. There are more juniors coming through now who aren't learning the fundamentals, because there is a ready shortcut around the mundane tedious work. Which means they're trying to move onto higher value, higher risk areas without understanding the foundations
I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS, and it already looks quite capable of debugging things independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier).
System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills. Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number of years they've been working.
The author is from Google. I’m not sure if effective collaboration is something given there, but in many companies, especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And it's usually inversely proportional to the company’s age.
What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never checked.
It may shock you to learn that this was true before LLMs. There was a website called "Google" which acted as a front-end for almost all recorded knowledge in human history, and putting a phrase like "best design patterns for web APIs" as a search query (the primitive name for prompts) would give you hundreds, if not thousands of real-life examples and explanations of how to accomplish your goal.
Somehow senior developers kept their jobs despite the existence of this almighty oracle. LLMs do a better job of filtering and customizing the information, but seniors will still keep their jobs.
That industry has properly recognised that this is where people learn the skills to do more complex, higher value work.
(Understanding of the role, empathy for it, and a bit invested in thinking of the role as valuable.)
Grads are cheap. Partners can dangle the future senior associate/partner carrot over the head of a hopeful junior for many years while that junior brings in money that goes into the partners’ pockets. The junior brings in more money as they grow professionally.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-wants-to-be-the-first-acco...
Hospitals are owned by non-doctors. Engineering firms are owned by non-engineers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the ones that fail are owned by the practitioners and the ones that succeed are led by former outsiders.
Toymaking companies are owned by adults, gynecology practices can be owned by men, wheelchair companies can be owned by those who can walk, record labels can be owned by non-vocalists, etc. Most sports teams...
Why should lawyers get special treatment?
If someone is a good operator, that's orthogonal.
Most ICs are not good at leadership, logistics, product, long term vision, etc. or at least not everything that a well-rounded CEO or owner might be. While hiring leadership from within the ranks works, it's not a necessary condition for success.
Other true professions have similar but lesser requirements. Some leadership positions in a hospital require an MD. Not because the MD makes you a better leader, but because the position involves making medical decisions. In an engineering company, some decisions must be made by a civil engineer. And so on.
The requirements for attorneys are stricter, because the law is a special case before the law. While other fields exist within the system, the law is the system itself.
Now imagine you are given less than judicious representation by the only law firm in town.
This point is arguable of course. On one hand legal services are expensive and often inaccessible for many. On the other hand more aggressive competition and consolidation has absolutely ruined society in a couple situations, medicine being the obvious example.
So there’s more than one point of view on this.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-bran...
A key difference is that law is an actual profession. It has qualification, continuing professional development and licensing requirements, and personal consequences for getting it wrong. None of these things are true for software development.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/think-commas-don-t-matt...
In both cases it looks perfect and it works right up until it doesn’t, usually for the same reason, entering an unanticipated state.
In a world where the average work is the first to be displaced (due to training data availability), the last to be replaced are the ones furthest from distribution mean...
This one seems like a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Defecting (hiring only seniors) is rational in isolation, but if everyone defects, everyone loses. What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.
But if companies aren't hiring juniors like they used to, shouldn't retention be a lot easier?
I find these statements so damning and self-incriminating. It's an open admission that the junior should expect to be treated poorly.
But it's hard to imagine committing to the training without the history.
This is the problem, early career devs are extremely bimodal in skill distribution.
You can luck out and land the 1 in 10 who just gets it and has the knack and has been coding since they were 12. But 9/10 times you end up with someone who has trouble even making a commit or with writing basic syntax, who just "picked" software as a career at some point in college for the salary. This has been my experience anywhere that doesnt have FAANG level cash to be hiring the top graduates at 150k+.
1) For the last decade many juniors have had unreasonable salary expectations that have often still been met. Now there is an alternative that's a lot cheaper and doesn't come with an attitude.
2) It's generally agreed that for the first year or 2 in your career you aren't that useful; after that you start to add lots of value quickly. But salary expectations don't double when you go from a junior to an intermediate - maybe they go up 25%. It's clearly much better value to hire only seniors if you can find them.
I'm not saying these are right or wrong but a whole article about juniors that doesn't mention wages, and just tries to implore companies to "do the right thing", misses the point.
Managing one or several of these idiots has to be the worst job ever invented.