Junior Roles Aren't Going Away
iamcharliegraham.substack.com
iamcharliegraham.substack.com
To me, the idea that a Junior Developer would understand CS at that level or get there without writing code every day for a very long time seems highly unlikely.
What am I not understanding?
I suspect we're going to see something similar with Junior talent across the board. A lot of the barriers to actually getting to the core of software engineering for example are going away, and you're going to be able to get orders of magnitude more trial and error attempts in than you previously could in the same amount of time.
I'm not trying to relate this back to the AI/junior/senior developer question, I'm just curious about the dynamic in poker since you seem to know what you're talking about.
Another analogy that might work is chess. I’ve only ever played “classical” chess and when my son got interested in playing I would crush him every time. Up until the point he got into bullet chess and was literally grinding out dozens of games a day where I’d casually play a game of classical chess like once or twice a month. His confidence and ability skyrocketed and I’m not even a challenge for him anymore. Now I’m not a real chess player, and there are areas of his game that are definitely weak compared to classical chess players who have played as many games as he has. But to turn around so quickly from not being able to win a game against me to dominating me in every game was impressive.
There are definitely online players who lack the skills you're describing, but that's not as much of a problem as you think. You can hide tells just by shutting up and staying still while you're in the action.
The other half of that is reading other people's tells, and online poker is more helpful there than you'd think. Most of reading other people (especially at relatively low-mid levels) is about reading the story they're telling with their action rather than reading their face/words/etc.
Classic example is: There are two hearts on the board on the flop and the person calls your bet. Turn comes, not a heart, person calls again. River comes, not a heart, person suddenly bets big to try to get you to fold, because they had two hearts and failed to make their flush.
Bigger picture, you read their style of play. Are they playing a lot of hands or very few? Passive or very active? None of these things require reading the person's mannerisms, and you can practice all of them very well online (though online you also run tracking software that gives you stats on opponents, which helps when you're playing a bunch of tables at a time).
Writing this out makes me miss online poker. Shame the games are terrible now (and I also have a child and business as opposed to the endless free time of my twenties, to be fair).
For me, there was definitely a high level of anxiety and nerves when I sat down at a table for the first time again after playing online for a while. But it gets easier and easier to shake that off and just get into the flow of watching betting patterns (which is the main thing you have to work with online) which to me was always the primary source of tells rather than anything physical. So maybe in my case the answer to your question is yes haha :) though it didn't seem to impact me negatively much.
To put things bluntly: at any tournament, 90% of the players after the first round will be players who learned in-person. Only a handful of online players (like Moneymaker) have made a successful transition to professional poker.
The theory is the roles would disappear because now the seniors can just send AI agents off to do the gruntwork instead of having to hire juniors or spend time on it themselves. It doesn't take into account if everyone does this then no one is training new seniors.
I don't need an L4 to crack out some dirty code now, I'll let an agent do it so the L4 can level their skills up grinding harder problems.
Prompting until you get a somewhat working solution is boring af. I dont want to tell an LLM what to code i want to do it myself. In every bullet point he has the AI word in it.
I don't believe a word of this. If you replaced your marketers and designers with ChatGPT and a SVG generator, then you shouldn't act surprised when your marketing doesn't work. Your entire thesis statement of "AI agents do remove roles" is unfounded if you refuse to show us metrics to qualitatively compare the success of AI versus human marketing.
How do you know that AI isn't the reason your startups fail to find traction in an AI-saturated market? Do any of your businesses exhibit self-evident runaway success because of AI? It doesn't even sound like you're measuring.
With that in mind, if you just need average to good, AI can do a good job at a tiny fraction of the cost. So the average to good roles will start getting replaced.
As examples, the sites tellmel.ai, and rivalsee.com for example were created without needing a UI or frontend designer. In the past I would have needed to hire a UI employee or consultant to do either of those at a very large expense (especially for the really good ones).
That said I'm glad this founder is able to micromanage his AI, they sound like a very problematic person to actually work with as an engineer, and if screaming into the void of AI means he is no longer sending vague poorly worded demands, I guess that alone might be worth it
If AI was amazing senior level engr, it would be a different story.
During my internship my placement suggested on the feedback form at the end of term a focus on more upcoming skills like Flash, Silverlight, and Aero. 3 years ago we'd be telling students to learn blockchain. My education, which included foundational aspects like OS, ended up being more important when containers came around, even when it was "obvious" that Windows was the only OS anyone will use now.
Universities are higher level foundations just like elementary and high school. Not job training. Best course is to get you four year, and then take a year or two for bootcamps and/or community college to get whatever is currently hot and disposable.
No place that's hiring will give you the time of day until you already have the word "Senior" in your title. But no one can explain where Seniors are supposed to come from though.
I hired a junior engineering a few years ago. And have done every few years for about a decade.
I work at a mid-size, PE-owned company that's been around for 50+ years, that operates in the enterprise SaaS space. Junior roles aren't going anywhere. But, the expectations of those junior hires will change (as they have evolved since I was junior myself, way back in the 90s).
Will AI change how we hire and retain talent? Of course.
How exactly are people supposed to reach a senior level if they aren't allowed to be junior developers first?
If no one will employ you to formally give you a verifiable senior title, how exactly is that supposed to happen?
That's basically what this field is turning into.
Edit: Missed this was in response to “extinct for a long time” which makes more sense. It is true that it is an entirely different world than three years ago.
But my belief is those companies will soon realize that some of the people who they thought were junior are pretty adept at AI management - more adept than the senior people. And that skill will suddenly be more in demand than how well you can code an optimized sorting algorithm.
Some will get there faster than others of course. But AI is changing things so quickly that it may happen faster than we think, given the state right now.
But it is infuriating to see people suggest that there is such a thing as junior level positions and that companies actually want to hire junior level people. That has been absolutely false for a very long time.
Yeah the joke is companies want to hire someone who is already an expert in that role who is curious and a fast learner, without realizing that if someone is already an expert who is curious and a fast learner, they probably want a different role to grow into.
I'm just (I think justifiably) a little salty because not that long ago LEARN TO CODE!!! was the mantra for those who wanted to step up into a middle class life and now every executive and their mother is frothing at the mouth over shoehorning AI into anything and everything and pulling up what little of the career ladder exists while they're at it.
The expected knowledge of a junior will shift senior, thanks to AI broadening what one person can do.
The amount one junior can accomplish will increase thanks to AI.
These things have been trends for decades. AI just keeps them going.