franciscomt

I agree with the sentiment. But is that exclusive to junior engineers? Curious if you think that the same problem exists with senior engineers or not.

Thanks. How do you think that lowers the value of an intern, can you explain it?

You're right that pre-AI that feature would not have been given to an intern (because they wouldn't be able to own it). So pre-AI, customers had a problem, we paid the intern, but could not solve the problem. Post-AI, the same problem exist, we pay the same intern. The customer problem is solved.

They surely cannot. But they can own simple problems end to end.

That’s a good point. My whole career has been in product/tech led companies.

But I agree that now it’s something people can catch up. The point is that I think it will make a difference if you’re someone that never coded manually vs someone that is (un)learning after having a full career pre-AI. Is not much different that people who started working with computers and others who had to learn how to deal with them late in their career.

I think it’s an oversimplification to say that using AI for se dev is a trivial skill. You can see it even now with some people chatting with Claude and others running multiple agents in a loop. There’s skill in that.

I agree. Although I think that was never the job. Even without AI, the practice of subdividing work into coding tasks was not a good one.

AI just made it obvious.

Author here. My last post on this reached the front page, and the main objection was that after AI, the junior's marginal value is gone: if a junior just passes specs to an AI tool and PRs back, why pay the salary?

That deserved a real answer, so I wrote this post. Short version: that describes a problem with how the role is structured, not what juniors can do. Push back welcome.

Author here. Good points. You are correct that there is an increasing trend for dismissing the value of junior engineers. And that is the argument: I don't think it makes sense, even in the short term.

I'm not saying juniors are more important than other engineers. A company still has to train them and still has to provide support as they get more tenured. But the idea that it is not worth hiring them is incorrect.

My main point is that juniors are replaceable when all they are trusted with is coding a specific task. This was true before AI to a great extent, but especially with AI, juniors can actually own (small) problems, and the cost to train them has gone down. And then you have also all the additional benefits of building future tenure and leadership.

I wrote up the fuller argument as a follow-up to this thread: https://franciscotrindade.me/blog/the-kids-are-really-alrigh...