this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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I think it goes further than that. There's two things happening with regard to AI and software development.
1: Stack overflow has become less common as a resource to solve problems. This, as you say has a problem of input into LLMs for future problems to solve.
2: Junior developers are being hired less because of AI. I assume the idea is that seniors will use AI in the same way they would usually use juniors. Except, they've done what business always does. Not think one bit about the future. Today's senior developers are yesterdays junior developers.
The combination of AI performance drop due to point 1, and the lack of new developers because of point 2 makes for potentially, a bad future for the profession.
As a senior developer I have no idea how I'd get an AI to autonomously keep a small subsystem maintained. If I was replacing junior developers, that's what it has to do.
Everybody in my team gets to own something. What you own depends on your capability. You learn by doing. No dogsbodies doing busy work.
This is a point I try to constantly make when people don't understand why 2 people have the same title but don't really have the same job, especially in technical fields.
No two people have the same set of skills, so we all end up taking on the tasks we're more capable of than the next person.
I don't think developers are doing it. It's managers making this kind of decision I'd say.
Oh I like this.
It works great if nobody ever leaves or dies or takes vacation. We try to discourage siloization of projects and emphasize cross-training - it makes the job more interesting, gives people more/better tools to solve problems with, etc. And anytime the business objects we mention the project where X left and how painful it is to get new anything added/enhanced because none of those tenets were involved.
However, all bets are off with offshore contractors. Some want to learn, some simply don’t care and will do the bare minimum.
This is how my work has been and it allowed me to touch every part of the repo while still a junior dev and gain lots of experience. So I also like that. But lately I'm trying to specialize more and go deep into things, and I like the idea of being an expert on something. So I appreciate the trade-offs.
As a guy who was replaced by offshore contractors, and who hasn't had a single interview in 7 months while offshore contractors are (probably) still getting lots of work... I find this observation both heartening and disheartening.
One of my bosses has a concept of “T-shaped developers”, which means you know everything a little, and have depth on one thing.
7months: ouch, sorry to hear. I wish I had some words of wisdom to share.
Where are you seeing this? I've not seen any evidence of that, yet.
I've been told about companies in the same field as mine with a hiring freeze on juniors. So it's kinda second hand.
Im a consultant senior dev and devops engineer. Ive worked for over 100 companies in the last 10 years on various engagements. Ive worked for multiple companies and clients at the same time through some consulting agencies. Ive worked for startups and FAANG companys. Ive also worked as a technical PM and EM for these same companies and hired hundreds of engineers.
Junior dev market is 100% in its last death throws before finally officially being pronounced dead. The job market has vanished so thoroughly between AI and offshoring in a high fed-rate economy, even though we just started rate cutting, by the time we feel the effects, AI will have further killed juniors without ever returning.
I dislike it, because i want to train people not machines, but the average junior dev is so bad its insane and not only have companies found that out, senior engineers have too. Many people like to TALK about mentoring new engineers.... the reality is, few actually do. It takes significantly less time to correct chatgpt and claude code then it does to have a junior take 2-5 days and write it all wrong, and they interrupt your work to ask you a million questions again and again.
I just had a contract with a startup company... 40 million series B company with a simple fucking CRUD app.... their engineering team? 35 SENIOR ONLY engineers. The least senior of which was an IC3 our of IC6 senior engineer.
This does tally up with what I've been hearing. Where I'm at there's been a few hires straight into senior. I've not heard of an official junior freeze. At the same time it's been a long time since I've seen a new one.
The problem, as I commented prior, is that if we no longer bring in junior devs to gain this kind of experience, we lose the flow of junior -> senior. But in most places, the people making the decisions won't consider anything beyond the end of the current fin year.