The End Of Jr Engineers

Seriously though. Even if you quit watching. Watch the end and my response. I do get quite frustrated and maybe lose my cool

Yep, these youngsters picked a terrible time to be born. Rookie error, better luck next time.

My entire life comes down to that meme "I should have been gaining experience and buying a home back in 1999 instead of being a toddler"

Respect for prime for being an advocate of hope. These opportunists who'd rather add into the perception of doom just to sell you something do not deserve any of our attention. There are still hope out there for junior engineers.

I felt like globalization and localized pay is a much bigger challenge to overcome than LLM. I’ve seen job listings with ZERO open positions in the U.S. but then I switch my VPN location to India and magically 50+ listings appear for engineering in any path you want to go down. I converted the average salary to dollars and realized they are hiring full time engineers for $500 a month. That makes me more depressed than LLM.

Companies now: "need a senior developer who can work with a peanut salary of jr. developer"

Without junior developers you cannot have senior developers. Same with every other industry. You get rid of juniors altogether and you will have killed an industry in 30 years. So…not really sure how they would handle that.

He works in company that does AI assistant, wow what a suprise

Lawyer here: large law firm, was a software engineer for years before law school, I'm on my 100+ attorney law firm's technology scouting committee. We've reviewed and used many AI products targeted at law. It's not even CLOSE to replacing junior associates. Hell, it isn't even close to replacing summer interns. Like with coding, it can make some tasks more productive. But much more than in coding it can be worse than a waste of time (lead you astray, etc.)

Why are people pretending sr developers just spawn into existence each quarter? Juniors become seniors after some time and experience, without them this whole industry just collapses. Your not replacing jrs until you can replace everyone

This article really just reads as "Oh sorry kid, you can't find a job? Well that's because senior devs like me convinced enough people that we could replace you with AI. But that's just a skill issue on your end, so in the meantime you should try to get better. Also, I happen to sell a book on how to replace you better, go buy it." Like, I don't understand those people who are shoulder-deep in the LLM hype. I don't see how their AI god is going to replacing any junior developer anytime soon: you need to babysit it, check each and every line of its output, distrust it, reword your question 4 to 5 times and chop each problem up into tiny bite-sized pieces. I guess you can ask another AI to help you with that, but now you need to babysit two AIs. Meanwhile, a junior developer will just take longer to complete a task and might ask you for guidance if they realize they're stuck. And if you're worried about letting a junior developer write the architecture of your app, then you should also equally worry about letting an AI do that.

“A job you’ll enjoy”… a job that will pay the bills while you work on some sick projects.

I'm a senior engineer with over a decade of experience. The death of a junior engineer is the death of fresh minds and innovative solutions.

This reminds me of those crypto articles talking about how crypto will replace every single type of banking transaction in the next couple of years.

The problem with replacing juniors with LLMs is that you won't be training up any new juniors, and all your seniors will retire and/or die, and you'll be left with a competency crisis that will make the current one we're going through look like a joke.

This is going to be lost in the comments for sure, but contrast what Yegge is saying with the advice Kurt Vonnegut gave to high school students: “What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.” This — experience becoming and make your soul grow — is what AI grifters are robbing you of.

For all Jr here : You're gonna wake up and work hard at it Don't let your dreams be dreams Make your dreams come true Nothing is impossible Yes, you can Just do it

Today if you do not resource juniors, tomorrow you won't have seniors

I actually teared up a little when you mentioned about never stealing hope from anyone. Well said.

13:01 As a data scientist, I think I'm able to also write and deploy a classifier and multi-class prediction model in 1 day... eventually. The big hurdle with that task is not to create the model, but evaluate if the output is really useful for the business problem. Usually the first version of the model misclassify some important class for the business or their accuracy metrics are very low so you need to return to the model and feed them with some differente features or tweak (hyper-)parameters to make the prediction better. That's why is that informal saying that "80% of data science is data preparation" because is pretty common that you need to return to that first part of the process for solving some problem down the prediction pipeline. The senior leve intern will be able to do that, even if it takes them several weeks for the first version, and I don't think the LLM will be able to do it.