The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax. Why turn a junior into a senior yourself if you can get the competition to pay for it instead.
The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different.
It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.
It's a negative (from the perspective of reproduction) confluence of both social and economic developments.
E.g. the death of the traditional gender roles has inevitably reduced birth rates - for multiple reasons to boot. Because on the one hand, the women has am easier time not to commit and just sleep around, consequently becoming uninteresting to men that would've preferred to make a family... But also because biologically, men are more attracted to demure women, which on average will ultimately remove even more attraction, consequently removing even more likelihood of families being built.
But that's once again only one factor, you got others too... Like stagnant wages, which force younger people too abstain from making a family simply because the financial situation doesn't allow for it. And if it happens anyway, it's more then likely to end in a broken family instead of something positive
Another factor is the availability of choice. Dating apps are available, statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women.
Just to be clear, in case someones brain has completely rotten through and interprets any blame into my comment: neither sex is responsible for this. Our society just decided to move on from gender roles, for supposedly economic reasons.
The consequences are felt both for women and men, with both feeling less valued and miserable on average. Which understandably makes them less attractive to the other sex again.
Still not a full list of factors at play btw, there is also the builtup of micro plastics in the men's balls, harming sperm production along with normalization of pornography, reducing the sexual frustration of people and consequently making them less driven to find partners. There is also the influencer industry, purposefully encouraging para social relationships, satisfying the social urges of a lot of people, consequently reducing the likelihood of them seeking out friendships... Reducing the likelihood of meeting other people and thus reducing the likelihood of getting a natural relationship through that.
Third places have also mostly vanished, likely related to multiple of these effects to etc pp
As a regular 30s dude, definitely not 1% by any measure, app dating had its rough spots but generally was a good time, I experienced no bitterness.
Instead I met a bunch of interesting people and found my partner. We now own a house and are talking about kids.
The real toxicity here is the idea that women at large are somehow responsible for anyone's lack of dating success.
For anyone reading this who might be dating and feel disheartened- the hard truth is that you have two options: you can either blame the group of people you're trying to attract for having faulty preferences, or you can reflect and work on yourself and your approach. Only one of these has any chance of helping you.
One thing I do agree with you on: bitterness is extremely unattractive.
That being said as five foot four guy, the chance of me having any success on a dating app at the time from everything I know would have been basically 0 no matter what. “Working on myself” would have done no good. I was objectively in great shape as a part time fitness instructor and I just run my first (and last) two half marathons before I met my wife.
Some guys just haven’t won the genetic lottery to succeed on dating apps. Again I’m not bitter as one of the relatively few straight male fitness instructors, it wasn’t hard to date during my first stint of singleness
Dating is kinda like founding a startup or getting a job, in that you have to kiss a lot of frogs, but you only need to succeed once. The point's to eliminate all the unsuitable prospects in the pool and find the one that is a match for you.
That's true, but dating apps are still a pretty toxic technology. It's got kind of a McNamara fallacy baked into it, they encourage users to setup filters on easy-to-quantity aspects (height, age) in a fairly thoughtless way, and entourage superficial, consumeristic evaluations. Most people would probably benefit from IRL interactions, which present a more holistic picture.
I think this is a very likely outcome. We aren't going to get continued population growth next generation; a significant number of the people needed for it will never be born. This is going to have ripple effects across wide swaths of political and economic organization. But you'll have pockets of population that basically barricade themselves off from the wider economic world and insulate themselves from its collapse, and then the people within them, along with whatever form of social organization they happen to adopt.
But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders
https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...
Or in other words, they've been priced out of the market.
If there will be no sociofinancial niche for their children to inhabit this is in fact the rational course of action. See also: South Korean current birth rates.
For anyone wondering, the South Korean birth rate is currently ~0.7: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?c...
This doesn't really work either. Having been loved by an attachment figure (usually a parent) seems to be essential to normal psychosocial development. Without it, kids can't really form bonds or groups. They never learn to trust, and without the ability to trust, they can't work in concert with other people. They end up violent and criminal.
If you tried to do this society-wide, society would collapse. Everybody would simply try to grab what they could and kill everybody else.
I think I've seen this movie and it does not have a happy ending.
Are you gonna suggest that State enforces procreation too?
This "answer" that you are saying is this close to being an Eugenics project. A govt. which has its officers arrest/detain babies because of their race and you are saying that these are the people that the babies should be left?
5-year-old boy among four students detained by ICE, according to school leaders : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwL-OBLC7is
Also consider these people in your answer to be the slaves of the govt. because we live in a free world and yet propaganda can be so effective. I can't imagine what the propaganda can be if State raises the child.
Yes, Instead of trying to make the economy affordable so that childcare can be affordable, we go ahead and let the states raise our children.
Has even the notion of affordability become so foreign that we have forgotten it can exist?
I sincerely hope you were joking with this message and this wasn't the first thing which came into your mind.
> The same ethos makes sense with AI, it's just that every company is trying to avoid paying that training tax.
Last time when a junior dev was added to my team I had a similar thought. But then talking with management I was informed that things went beyond just training.
The company had a social responsibility pledge and understanding with the local educational institutions. They had to pledge to be part of the internship and hiring activities every year. The company could not chose to be fair weather friends and try to recruit people only when they saw fit.
The other aspect was cost. A team made of only senior engineers was costly.
The last aspect was leveling up. Unless the company has lots of levels the team might end up lots of engineers at the same level. And with the inverted funnel nature of promotions it meant some engineers might end up waiting years for the promotion.
So, it was better to have teams with some junior, intermediate and experienced engineers. That way costs and promotion flows were controlled.
Now with AI the impact might go beyond junior devs. I see even the intermediate devs being impacted. It is more likely that companies think they can replace say 1 junior + 1 intermediate with 1 junior dev with AI. Or something along those lines.
I said just the opposite - hire fewer seniors + AI and don’t hird juniors.
I’m now a staff level employee again at a 3rd party consulting company working with small and medium businesses (my preference) after taking a detour in BigTech from architectural roles at smaller companies. My quarterly strategic goals were a combination of what the CxO’s/directors defined and what I defined was in the best interest of the company. None of those goals had anything to do with larger societal issues.
But different people have different ambitions. Some might not care for comp and want to become a people manager. Decent management is aware of this "different ambition" dynamic and try to mitigate this.
Also, this doesn't solve the problem of cost. Too many engineers without their comp based on promotions will still mean costly teams. That's why a balance of junior and senior is needed.
I have never once told my manager “it would be really nice to have a few junior developers. It would really help us get this project done on time”. They do “negative work”.
Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.
That leads to my second point, in second tier cities, you see comp go from around $80K —> $115K -> $150K —> $175K, junior -> mid (pull well defined tickets off a board) -> Senior (leads larger initiatives) -> Senior+.
For instance look at what Delta airlines pays based on Atlanta.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries
Why hire a junior at $80K when you can poach a former junior now mid level ticket taker for $115K?
[1] after pivoting slightly to cloud + app dev customer facing/hands on keyboard consulting, I’m at a new plateau that’s higher.
I have. A good junior can do in a week what a senior with domain knowledge can do in a half day, with only an hour of mentoring along the way. This isn’t a great exchange rate per dollar (juniors are cheaper than seniors, but not that much cheaper) — but seniors with domain knowledge are a finite resource, you can’t get more of them for love or money, while juniors are fresh-minted every semester. The cheapest way to shipping may not go through juniors, but the fastest way usually does; and that’s completely ignoring the HUGE side benefit of building seniors “the hard way,” which is still easier than hiring.
But you don’t build seniors, you build capable mid level ticket takers who jump for more money at the first opportunity.
Even when I was working at AWS as a mid level/L5 in the Professional Services division (lower title/lot more money), I was the one who was responsible for my “workstream” on larger projects. I couldn’t say “that’s not my fault. Blame the new L4 junior consultant who just got out of the internal boot camp for new grads”.
Now that I have moved back up to a more senior position in consulting, if a project I’m leading goes sideways, I can’t tell the customer that it’s not my fault, it’s the fault of the workstream leads and the workstream leads can’t tell me, it’s the fault of the more junior consultants who work under them. They will never talk to the client. The people under the workstream leads may not even speak English.
And that’s not meant to be an insult. The workstream leads have to he able to speak passable English and they can work with people under then who only speak Spanish.
That might not be YOUR choice, it's still a choice being made at the company you work for.
You’re niavely making a moral argument as if anything about corporate America is moral.
Can you make an argument based on numbers? Every single argument I make to leadership has to have a business case
Japanese companies for example usually care more about long term. This is why US car makers like GM fire workers when business goes down, then need to rehire and potentially re-train workers. Toyota on the other hand doesn't fire workers, instead use their time for training when the business goes down. Guess which company is struggling and which one is the world leader?
So to get back to your leadership: if they only care about the next quarter, then sure no number will convince them. The company might be dead in a few years but they don't care.
Don't worry, just leave all your problems for someone else to fix. I'm sure that won't have any lasting consequences at all.
I give a company 40 hours a week and all of my 30 years of industry experience and they give me money (and in a former life RSUs)
“Whoever said money can’t solve your problems Must not have had enough money to solve them”
(Partially joking, I make the same post BigTech as a “staff consultant” as an L5 I did mentor as an intern and when they first came back as an L4. Nothing eye popping. But decent)
Now at my 45 years, I couldn't care less for whatever grand objective the current company I work for has. I exchange my knowledge and time for hard cash, and let the owners , ceo and whatnot run with their grandiose vision.
I only want to be left alone.
We all get here. It's funny when we turn back.
Once directors and CxOs know that you are completely aligned with the business goals and ignore everything else that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”, they trust your judgement and basically leave you alone.
Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors.
- Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good while).
- The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.
- In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring" era.
>Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.
That's how companies fail.
It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you command more devs, you get more leverage.
> The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.
This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see “salary compression and inversion”
> That's how companies fail.
The company failing in the long term is really not any current employees main concern unless you are a founder if the average tenure is 3-5 years. Even the stock market doesn’t care about the long term viability of a company.
BigTech for instance can afford dead weight. Amazon has an internship program and for those who come back or through their non traditional programs for their internal consulting division (AWS Professional Services) they have a 3 (6?) month training program.
In ProServe at least (former employee) even for their l5/L6 employees, they have the 3 month training program - “AWSome Builder” where you simulate a customer project and have to pass.
After leaving AWS and being hired as a staff consultant by a third party company, they put me on a plane two weeks in to meet with a customer. They don’t even hire less than senior+ people in the US.
That counts temps, people who weren't a good fit and were let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of which bring the average down (but are not "hopping").
Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.
Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.
You're making the stronger claim.
Experience says most absolutely don't jump ship every 2-3 years in the kind of companies I mentioned. Now, if you think companies are playing a rotating musical chairs game and are majority new people every 5 years, ...
I can’t go to management - who when I was working as a tech lead pre 2020 - were CTOs, Directors, founders and at times having to talk to the PE owners without solid data.
Your benefiting from the work of peopke who did worry about what will happen 10, or even 20 30 years down the line. People like you are why the rides gonna stop
In fact the only reason I got my job there was because a recruiter reached out to me about an SDE job on the retail side. There was no way in hell that I was going to sell my big house in the burbs of Atlanta (at the time), uproot my life after Covid and work for Amazon. I knew what I would be getting into.
She then told me about a “permanently remote”,”field by design” role at AWS ProServe. I was like sure why not?
Not that I’m a line level manager - I’m just a high level IC who is at the same position on the org chart as a line level manager
I worked for two companies as a lead and the first thing I did to make things better is - nothing. I asked questions and understand the why.
But what company have you worked for that you only have to understand code? There is code, underlying architecture, dependencies between teams, database schemas and the politics?
I also never said anything about only understanding code. I explicitly mentioned politics. But understanding your particular companies politics isn't necessarily helpful, probably because the politics are shit. So, if you go from one toxic company to another company, you might make it more toxic.
Junior people also tend to have the humility to know they’re inexperienced and lacking insight, so they tend to be more willing to “follow” the senior employees rather than attempt to leave their mark as a leader. “Too many cooks in the kitchen” and all that jazz.
I bet you a senior could do with one good prompt to Claude what a junior would take a day to do before AI - and take time away from the senior.
It would still be a waste of a seniors time to write that prompt. They should have more important things to spend time on
If you have to be that detailed anyway - you might as well use AI.
I'm very sorry for you that you think that way
I’m not going to work as a charity and neither are any of my coworkers. We are all here to exchange labor for money.
Even when I was at a startup before 2020 and I did have the ear of the CTO and the founders I knew my ultimate mission was to do what was needed to get acquired and before that I knew exactly what my mission was when k was hired to lead the tech initiatives as we were acquiring companies “find efficiencies” and go public.
Or do you think I could have convince anyone of anything as an L5 at AWS in the middle between architect at a startup and my current company?
It's about money, and the actual solution would be to lower pay at senior level and give it to juniors, with some lock in agreed by the junior in exchange for this grace.
I doubt the vast majority will agree to this.
Meanwhile, I've never once seen a coding agent give a brilliant solution or design to just about anything, and anything with the barest whiff of undefined-ness will simply zero in on your existing biases.
This whole thread reads like absolute insanity to me. I love getting new junior devs. They do great work.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/boto3/latest/
Or do the same for IAC - same surface area - and use Terraform on one project, CloudFormation on another, and the CDK on a third and to generate code for you when you give them the correct architecture. It took me a day to do that before AI depending on the architectural complexity and I know AWS well (trust me on this). How long would it take me to delegate that to a junior dev? It took ChatGPT 2 minutes before I started using Claude just by my pasting a well labeled architecture diagram and explaining the goal.
It took me about 8 hours total to vibe code an internal web tool with a lot of features that if I had estimated before AI, I would have said a mid level developer would have taken two weeks at least. It wasn’t complex - just a CRUD app with Cognito authentication. How long would it have taken a junior developer?
I'd gladly take a junior dev to do any of that work there, because they can think for themself and not hang onto any bias you unknowingly build into the prompt like it's a religion.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
Junior - everything is spelled out in excruciating detail, the what and the how. They are going to be slow, not know best practices, constantly bug other developers and you srs going to have to correct them a lot.
Mid level developer - little ambiguity on the business case or their role in it. They are really good coders in their domain. They have the experience to turn well defined business requirements into code. You don’t have to explain the “how” to them just the what. They should have the ability to break an assigned “epic” based on the business requirements to well defined stories and be a single responsible individual for that Epic maybe working with juniors depending on the deliverable or other mid level developers.
A senior developer works at a higher level of ambiguity and a larger scope, the business may know they want something. But neither the business or technical requirements are well defined. Think of a team lead.
Senior+ - more involved with strategy.
If I have to define everything in great detail anyway, why not just use AI? It can do it faster, cheaper, more correct and the iteration is faster. I would go as far as saying in my recent coding agent experience, a coding agent is realistically 100x faster than a junior developer since you have to give both of them well defined tasks.
My experience with Claude code and codex recently is that even the difference between a mid level developer and a coding agent is taste when it comes to user facing development, knowing funky action at a distance, and knowing the business, with a mid level developer you can assume shared context and history with an ability to learn.
So again, why do I need to hire a junior developer in the age of AI?
As an Entry Level Engineer, you’ll be expected to develop and maintain lower complexity components under the guidance and tutelage of more experienced team members.
> If I have to define everything in great detail anyway, why not just use AI?
You don't have to define everything. And to do so is detrimental to their growth. If you're their mentor, you're supposed to give them problems, not recipes. And guidance may be as little as an hint or pointing them to some resource, not giving them the solution outright. The goal is not to get a problem solved (that's just a nice-to have), the goal is to nuture a future colleague.
Why should I hire a junior who doesn’t know the what or the how. Instead of hiring a mid level developer who could be an excellent developer who can turn business requirements into code and is more than likely better at certain things than I am since they live and breathe it everyday and can both do the work without supervision and can offer valuable advice and say something that might convince me that I didn’t think things clearly?
Reminding you that the difference above a mid level developer and a “senior”/“senior+” is scope and ambiguity not necessarily technical depth in one area.
What does a junior developer bring to the table that I should use my open req on?
I'm not saying you should. It's the business model that will answer that question. But the traditional wisdom was that juniors are not costly and have few obligations tying them down. And juniors don't stay junior.
And some may know the what and the how, at least technically. What they may lack may be just how to develop their skills further to be useful in a professional settings. It's easy to learn programming languages, tools, libraries and frameworks when you have a lot of free time. And they're not asking to be your protégés, you're just training them to be useful for your team.
1- You need a ton of internal knowledge so it doesn't really matter what they know past the basics.
2- Testing gets expensive with seniors
3- You can't get mid-senior level employees you like. I see very often companies having really high requirements for hiring leading to the only candidates passing being friends of employees. Juniors pass easier via the 'he's motivated to learn' path.
4- Juniors bring a motivation with them. Seniors tend to generally care less so a couple of energetic juniors can get them moving a bit quicker. Especially if you find a good one, since a senior really doesn't want to get outperformed by a fresh graduate. Also, since they usually suck at politics, it's easier to prod them about why things aren't working than the seniors who've played the blame game for 20 years and have perfected the art of dodging responsibility.
I don't know, I've known kids who can run circles around a lot of seniors, whether it's knowledge, coding chops or just intuition. The reason a newcomer takes a week to complete a task that requires two hours is because the senior has already learn all the ins and outs of the crappy software lifetime processes (usually dealing with half broken build / code review / ticket systems)
Those kids are rasing 3M seed rounds to make AI tell fart jokes or something now. I'm talking about the middle 80% of new grads.
I see a lot of Sr engineers get very frustrated by how much time they have to spend helping Jr engineers. But, that’s the job, or at least a big part of it.
Or at least it was.
If at that point it's clear (to me) the situation is not salvageable, it's a management issue, I've done my job.
Kraft 1977 Programmers and Managers talked about this if I recall. Still the best alternate take on our industry I have ever read.
There seems to be some nonsensical belief that there exists this endless stream of positive NPV projects to take. No... reality is not like that.
Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end you need to focus on whatever they actually are capable of doing. 40+ hours a week can slowly expand even an extremely narrow skillet as long as they’re a hard worker.
1 new Jr every 2 years works quite well for a team of 7+ developers.
But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.
I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.
I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, which means a larger percentage of what’s left over is more cheaply done by Jr’s working without AI assistance.
Fascinating. I am finding the exact opposite, like complete 180
Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of developers do, but I’ve seen what amounts to several thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because teams leverage the tools they have.
The point obviously still stands, and no I am not suggesting using Jr devs for physical labor alone is worth adding them to the team. Rather that “Work” includes a very wide variety of tasks that need to get done.
this part I find fascinating. most places I worked (30 years in, 10 as a contractor so quite a lot) the distinction between Jr, Mid and Sr falls exactly into the kind of works that they do. I, as a Senior, often work on hard shit, Jrs are not (yet) entrusted with those problems and work on entirely different set of problems. I cannot compute how AI makes everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, problems I am solving today few people on my team are working on and then same goes down the "pyramid"
Automation always runs into diminishing returns for similar reasons. If 99.99% of a workload is embarrassingly parallel, what remains becomes important once you can throw enough cores at the problem.
You’ll see a guy in a multi million dollar crane lifting multi ton objects and then people using ropes attached to that same load for final positioning etc. What you don’t see is people using ropes to lift bricks 20 stories by hand as the crane lifts multi ton pallets of bricks as automation is taking care of that kind of task.
Junior devs are by your own explanation not useless. They are the most important human investment in your project.
We havent dont it and I never seen something like that.
I was useful as a junior too.
I almost certainly took more time from my seniors than I saved them, and the juniors I've mentored have mostly done the same for me.
Rather because you want them to go away, because management conveniently forgot to reduce your load to account for time spent on mentoring.
Reminds me a bit of the quote
The manager says "what if I train them and they leave?" And the response is "what if you don't and they stay". Leaving unskilled and underdeveloped people in you organization is a recipe for disaster.
Why train a junior human when I can train a junior robot that I can copy-paste that can’t quit and has infinite margins?
As should have others, which the university education system should have made sure.
The fact that some people come out of 4+ years of software engineering education utterly clueless means that they somehow managed to dodge having to build anything, I think means that they will never get good at any point in time, as they either were very talented at dodging having to build things, and I don't think that talent is going to abandon them, or they couldn't really grasp the basics in an environment designed for just that.
With that said, I think you can see for most juniors, what you can expect out of them in terms of pure coding ability - sure a lot of them have room to grow, but I've met so many great people who were very young, yet were useful from day one.
In fact, if you have the willingness to grind away at some problem, that puts you ahead of a significant amount of the pack. I have had the misfortune of working with people who lacked any demonstrable skill, and had coping strategies for having to deal with any sort of hardship. Getting useful work out of them was a challenge in of itself.
These people managed to get the years in to be considered senior, and are probably dispensing their wisdom 'mentoring' juniors somewhere else, and are no longer expected to actually contribute to meaningful issues.
If you look at the general topic shift on HN over the years it's obvious most people are getting into tech because they want power and money, not for love of tech
I think that is a bit presumptuous, even if there is a hint of truth there. Just because a kid didn't grow up around computers and programming shouldn't exclude them from the tech path or mark them as imposters/pretenders.
I agree it definitely distorts the market because what else are kids to do?