Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

1) The game is not ending, it's changing. AI can sling a lot of code but we still need engineers that actually understand what the hell is going on. That's always been the bottleneck. It could eliminate junior positions, but seniors are fine for now.

2) It's been a hard lesson for me to learn because I'm naturally a contrarian, but you are hired to do what management wants you to do. If you resist, your best bet is to hope they don't notice or care, but it's not going to change much.

View on HN

If you eliminate juniors over the next few years, there will be no seniors for the future when the current seniors retire.

Yep, I'm a fan of the current crop of AI tools because they are incredibly useful to me, but I have deep concerns about the pipeline problem.

Then pay will go up again for those mid-level developers who still remain, and companies will again overhire and overtrain like we saw during COVID years. “We won’t have any seniors in ten years!!1!” is a handwringy problem that self solves by the free market.

The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.

No, it's a "tragedy of the commons" problem, for lack of a less dramatic phrase.

If you ran a software company, would you want to train juniors who are slower than AI and much more expensive? Who would just jump ship in two years?

It wouldn't make sense to. "Someone" should do it: someone other than you.

I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?

People used to stay at companies longer than a couple years

Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they're familiar with but not think out of the box.

Hiring a mediocre senior is much worse than hiring a grad because they will never get any better, and it's very hard to know at hiring time that they're mediocre.

I 100% agree.

I’ve only had 1-2 juniors who “didn’t get any better” compared to the scores of senior engineers I wouldn’t trust to anything on their own.

Most juniors with investment from the organization and senior engineers will become competent quickly. That will eventually free up seniors.

I'd also add that top-heavy engineering organizations are sometimes incapable of delivering anything useful because everyone wants to work on the hard problems, establish the frameworks, define the processes, and so on, and no one wants to operate the damn business. It's good to have a mix of perspectives in a team.

Fully agree actually. Not sure its a counterpoint at all really, but its a great point. My comment wasn't intended to be "juniors were never worth it", but instead "juniors WERE worth it before but not because they produced amazing ROI themselves, why does the introduction of an LLM change that?" I'm solidly against the narrative that now all of a sudden juniors aren't worth hiring anymore because a senior with an LLM = 100x engineer.

> hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI

Yes, exactly. It's been a problem for a while, and it's worse now.

I'm worried it will go from "it's hard for juniors" to "it's nearly impossible for juniors."

Please go ahead and train juniors on your free time. Put your resources where your mouth is.

They're making the bet that seniors won't be needed by then. I think it's a bad bet, but it makes sense to follow through if 40% of the economy is already being occupied by this tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com