Should junior engineers be worried about AI?
alanhollis.com
alanhollis.com
> I've set small projects for my newer engineers to get their teeth stuck into, something they will find rewarding, challenging, and fun.
> But now I have to reconcile that with the thought that I could "just" ask ChatGPT to do it instead
The only way I can find to read that is that the author tends to assign tasks that are mostly writing boilerplate code to junior devs, which, sure, is a perfectly good use of otherwise less-productive junior engineers. It sure as hell isn't something I would agree is "rewarding, challenging, and fun" -- and I can't imagine that the author actually agrees with his own sentiment, either. If GPT can generate it then it wasn't the kind of task that a junior dev would have profited from taking (not much to learn from just tweaking boilerplate!).
Punting work like that to juniors rather than shielding them from it is...pretty much the definition of a bad engineering manager in my book. If nothing else, it's a great way to burn out your junior devs early and/or keep them from learning how to grow into more capable engineers who can handle work that couldn't be done by an LLM.
The skill of the engineering manager is indeed finding tasks that continue to be rewarding, challenging, fun as the developer progresses.
I'm delighted to hear that! But that doesn't really counter my argument, which is that if a task can be done by an LLM it wasn't a good fit for a junior anyway. Being able to just fling basic tasks over the wall to GPT is great, and should free up time for non-junior devs -- but since those tasks wouldn't have helped grow the junior devs in the first place it doesn't really affect them or their trajectory. Unless you were just using them to churn through drudgework in the first place, in which case I guess great, you can just purge them from your org at no net loss since they'd have burned out soon enough anyway.
If anything I'd turn the thesis of your title on its head: should engineering leads be worried that AI will take away the last bits of code they should have still been writing?
(Betteridge's law, of course, still applies).
Should we therefore always just outsource tasks because the work could do be done faster? does that mean that the experience of doing something that could be done by someone else is less valuable?
ChatGPT could likely answer every leetcode question going? Does that mean there's zero value in a human attempting to answer these questions?
Give your juniors real, interesting work and keep the GPT-level tasks away from them, and they'll actually improve.
> Does that mean there's zero value in a human attempting to answer these questions?
Your hiring process may vary, but mine sure says "yep, zero value in leetcode."
I have never once stated that the work the juniors are doing isn't real or interesting, that's an assumption you've made, and I'm trying to state the contrary?