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Comment by Ifkaluva | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if this is true.

At the company where I work (one of the FAANGs), there is suddenly a large number of junior IC roles opening up. This despite the trend of the last few years to only hire L5 and above.

My read of the situation:

- junior level jobs were sacrificed as cost cutting measures, to allow larger investment in AI

- some analysts read this as “the junior levels are being automated! Evidence: there is some AI stuff, and there are no junior roles!”

- but it was never true, and now the tide is turning.

I’m not sure I ever heard anybody in my company claim that the dearth of junior openings was due to to “we are going to automate the juniors”. I think all of that narrative was external analysts trying to read the tea leaves too hard. And, wannabes like Marc Benioff pretending to be tech leaders, but that’s a helpful reminder that Benioff is simply “not serious people”.

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In addition the industry has been going through a massive correction post Covid, and all the free money drying up. Any impact AI is having is all mixed up with that.

The expectations for juniors, and how seniors work with them, will certainly change, but it's way too early to be making doomsday predictions.

Of course, that's easy for me to say when I'm not the one who just spent thousands of dollars and 4 years of their to land in an environment where getting a job is going to be challenging to say the least.

Free money did not dry up. I genuinely couldn’t imagine the upteenth saas or data startup trend continuing for another several decades towards the end of the last one. There was almost nothing left to build until AI …

There were symptoms of it right here on HN. Lots of fiddling around with framework churn, not really building anything compelling. The 2010s were not inspiring in that regard, and I personally felt like it was an unworthy field … until AI reinvigorated it (speaking entirely from a creative standpoint).

Agree, the death of the junior SWE is greatly exaggerated. (At least in FAANG)

Maybe there was some idea that if AI actually solved software engineering in a few years you wouldn't need any more SWEs. Industry is moving away from that idea this year.

The death, maybe, but not the lack of hiring. At $BIGCORP, where I work, I haven't seen an externally hired junior dev in at least 2 years in an extended team of ~100 people.

My prediction is that you will see that trend reverse soon. Have the teams become top-heavy?

My prediction is that you won't see it reverse too soon, but that AI has nothing to do with it. It's just (for now, until the AI bubble itself bursts) a convenient scapegoat for people who haven't come to grips with the broad economic malaise outside of, but not caused by, AI.

We are hiring juniors again now and haven't in the last few years.

Same, we have been in a "hiring freeze" for 4 years now. Contractor hiring via WITCH however has been booming.

I agree that AI wasn't genuinely replacing junior roles to any important extent, and the larger investment in AI is spot on. Fast Company had exactly this take in November in "AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is". https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs...

"We’ve seen this act before. When companies are financially stressed, a relatively easy solution is to lay off workers and ask those who are not laid off to work harder and be thankful that they still have jobs. AI is just a convenient excuse for this cost-cutting. "

At my company, we're actively lowering our off-shore dev count in favor or on-shore devs. We're small but we're growing so we're hiring about one junior dev a year. This alone doesn't mean anything, but adding another data point to the conversation.

That narrative never sat right with me. That all these companies decided that AI was going to replace humans suddenly? Just an obvious pit to fall in to and one that conveniently feeds the AI is taking your job meme. Your read makes MUCH more sense.

I'm with you on this, though I do think some people are true believers. Say a lie enough times, right?

But a big part of it to me is looking at the job data[0]. If you look at devs during this period you can see that during the pandemic they hired more in early to mid 2022 but currently are lower than any other industry.

Tech loves booms and busts, with hiring and everything else. But more than anything the tech industry loves optics. The market has rewarded the industry for hiring during the pandemic and in the past year it has rewarded them for laying people off "because AI". And as the new year comes around they'll get rewarded for hiring again as they "accelerate development" even more. Our industry is really good at metric hacking and getting those numbers to keep going up. As long as it looks like a good decision then people are excited and the numbers go up.

I think the problem is we've perverted ("over optimized") the market. You have to constantly have stock growth. The goal is to become the best but you lose the game by winning. I think a good example of this is from an article a read a few months ago[1]. It paints AWS in a bad light but if you pull out the real data you'll see AWS had a greater increase in absolute users than GCloud (you can also estimate easily from the article). But with the stock market it is better to be the underdog with growth than the status quo with constant income[2].

What a weird way to optimize our businesses. You are rewarded for becoming the best, but you are punished for being the best. Feels like only a matter of time before they start tanking on purpose because you can't go up anymore, so you need to make room to go up[3]. I mean we're already trading on speculation. We're beyond tech demos pushing stock up (already speculative) and now our "demos" are not even demonstrations but what we envision tech that hasn't been built to look like. That's much more speculative than something that is in beta! IDK, does anyone else feel like this is insane? How far can we keep pushing this?

[0] Go to "Sector" then add "Software Development" to the chart https://data.indeed.com/#/postings

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-target...

[2] Doesn't take a genius to figure out you'll make more money had you invested $100 in GCloud vs $100 in AWS (in this example). The percentile differential is all that matters. Being percentile punishes having a large existing userbase. You have double the percentile growth going from 1 user to 100 than from 10 million to 500 million, yet any person who isn't severely mentally incapacitated would conclude the latter is a better business.

[3] Or at least play a game of hot potato. Sounds like a collusion ring in waiting. e.g. AWS stagnates, lets Azure take a bunch of users, Azure stagnates and users switch to AWS. Gives both the ability to "grow" and I'm sure all the users will be super happy with constantly switching and all the extra costs of doing so...

i guess the ai returns are not there as soon as it was expected.

FAANG has shedded between 81,000 and 87,000 workers in the past 5 years; I suspect a significant chunk of these jobs aren't coming back.

Seems to me the companies are mostly in a holding pattern: sure, if an important project needs more bodies, it's probably okay to hire. I suspect that lots of teams have to make do until further notice.

Are some teams using AI instead of hiring junior engineers? I don't think there's any doubt about that. It's also a trial period to better understand what the value-add is.

Based on listening to engineers on various podcasts, almost all of them describe the current level of AI agents as being equivalent to a junior engineer: they're eager and think they know a lot but they also have a lot to learn. But we're getting closer to the point where a well-thought out Skill [1] can do a pretty convincing job of replacing a junior engineer.

But—at the rate AI is improving, a company that doesn't adopt AI for software engineering will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to its peers.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...

    Meta (Facebook)

    2022: ~11,000 employees (13% of workforce)
    2023: ~10,000 employees plus 5,000 open positions eliminated
    2024: Multiple smaller rounds totaling ~100-200 employees
    2025: ~3,600 employees (5% of workforce, performance-based cuts)
    Total: Approximately 24,700-25,000 employees

    Amazon

    2022: ~10,000 employees
    2023: ~17,000 employees (split between multiple rounds)
    2024: Smaller targeted cuts
    2025: ~14,000 employees announced
    Total: Approximately 41,000+ employees

    Google (Alphabet)

    2023: ~12,000 employees (6% of workforce)
    2024: Multiple smaller rounds, hundreds of employees
    2025: Several hundred in Cloud division and other areas
    Total: Approximately 15,000-20,000 employees

    Apple
    Apple has been an outlier among FAANG companies:

    2022-2023: Minimal layoffs (hiring freeze instead)
    2024: ~700+ employees (primarily from canceled Apple Car project and microLED display teams)
    2025: Small cuts in sales and other divisions
    Total: Approximately 800-1,000 employees (significantly less than peers)

    Netflix

    2022: ~450 employees across two rounds (150 + 300)
    2023: Smaller targeted cuts in animation and drama divisions
    2024-2025: Minimal additional cuts
    Total: Approximately 500-600 employees

    Overall FAANG Totals

    Across all five companies over the past 5 years: approximately 81,000-87,000 workers
    have been laid off, with the vast majority occurring in 2022-2023
    during the post-pandemic correction period.

> Based on listening to engineers on various podcasts, almost all of them describe the current level of AI agents as being equivalent to a junior engineer: they're eager and think they know a lot but they also have a lot to learn. But we're getting closer to the point where a well-thought out Skill [1] can do a pretty convincing job of replacing a junior engineer.

The people that comment as such are either so disconnected from the software development process or so bought in on the hype that they are forgetting what the point of a junior role is in the first place.

If you hire a junior and they're exactly as capable as a junior 3 years later (about how far we're in now) many organizations would consider letting that employee go. The point of hiring a junior is that you get a (relative to the market) cheap investment with a long-term payoff. Within 1-2 years if they are any good, they will not be very junior any more (depending on domain, of course). There is no such promise or guarantee with AI, and employing an army of junior engineers that can't really "learn" is not a future I want to live in as a mid-career senior-ish person.

Of course, you can say "oh, it'll improve, don't worry" but I live in the present and I simply do not see that. I "employ" a bunch of crappy agents I have to constantly babysit only to output more work "units" I could before at the cost of some quality. If I had spent the money on a junior I would only have to babysit for the first little while and then they can be more autonomous. Even if they can improve beyond this, relying on the moat of "AI" provider companies to make this happen is not exactly comfortable either.

> The point of hiring a junior is that you get a (relative to the market) cheap investment with a long-term payoff.

This is only a consideration if you can pay enough to keep the junior for the long term pay off.

Companies that aren't offering Big Tech compensation find it very difficult to compete on this.

The best juniors will get a job paying more than your company can offer in 2 years. The worst juniors will remain the "still haven't progressed beyond what they could do after the first month."

In this situation, unless the company can continue to offer pay increases to match what Big Tech can offer, it is disadvantageous to hire a junior developer.

This is absolutely FUD.

Most engineers don't work at FAANG. Most _good_ engineers DONT work at FAANG. FAANG is still composed of almost all good engineers. Most software engineers are NOT _good_.

All of these things are simultaneously true.

Most of your junior engineering hires will never develop to FAANG levels, and as such are never in positions to seriously only hypercompete for those FAANG salaries. There vast majority of devs, even in the US, that are perfectly adequate (note, not great, adequate) to act as developers for non-FAANG companies for non-FAANG wages. This is the kind of developer universities are churning out at insane rates.

Sorry, but this overwhelmingly has not been my experience in nearly a decade working in tech. Even if you get 2-3 years out of a junior before they jump ship to a "big tech" (not as easy or common as you make it sound, by the way, especially during the last few years of layoffs and hiring freezes), you likely have reaped far more benefits at a low cost relative to the market than the ramp-up time investment in the junior. Furthermore, the talent pipeline here benefits everyone - even if they jump ship elsewhere, because you could not promote or otherwise mentor them into staying, you can also hire these "jump ship" engineers on the other side of the pipeline.

When this dries up because the market stops investing in junior engineers, you're left with absolutely nothing after a mere handful of years. I worry about this future a lot. Luckily I am in a shop that does not mind hiring them (now is a super good time to find junior talent at a good price too).

One of those companies sent me a linkedin request with a specific role. I searched on their website and there were very few roles and none like the one they proposed. So they are doing stealth hiring now. You can't let the world know you need people when you are supposed to use AI.

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