[HN Gopher] AI Won't Kill Junior Devs - But Your Hiring Strategy...
___________________________________________________________________
AI Won't Kill Junior Devs - But Your Hiring Strategy Might
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 32 points
Date : 2025-05-18 19:14 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (addyo.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (addyo.substack.com)
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| The legal industry has already figured out that LLMs can draft
| routine documents (and make massive mistakes) as well as a
| graduate lawyer, but that's not the point.
|
| That industry has properly recognised that this is where people
| learn the skills to do more complex, higher value work.
| bogzz wrote:
| Maybe because law firms aren't managed by MBAs.
| RhysabOweyn wrote:
| For now... some states are beginning to change their laws to
| allow non-lawyers to own law firms.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-wants-to-be-the-first-
| acco...
| echelon wrote:
| Why shouldn't a law firm be owned by non-lawyers? That
| limitation seems ridiculous.
|
| Hospitals are owned by non-doctors. Engineering firms are
| owned by non-engineers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
| doesn't. Sometimes the ones that fail are owned by the
| practitioners and the ones that succeed are led by former
| outsiders.
|
| Toymaking companies are owned by adults, gynecology
| practices can be owned by men, wheelchair companies can be
| owned by those who can walk, record labels can be owned by
| non-vocalists, etc. Most sports teams...
|
| Why should lawyers get special treatment?
|
| If someone is a good operator, that's orthogonal.
|
| Most ICs are not good at leadership, logistics, product,
| long term vision, etc. or at least not everything that a
| well-rounded CEO or owner might be. While hiring leadership
| from within the ranks works, it's not a necessary condition
| for success.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| It's because there are financial and other accountability
| requirements unique to law firms (dealing with trust
| money etc) that are tied directly to the legal
| professional obligations of the person in charge of the
| firm.
| CPLX wrote:
| Because lawyers occupy a quasi-public role in our legal
| system. They aren't entirely separate from the system
| itself. The legal system depends on the enforcement of
| ethics and responsibility in a way that might be
| incompatible with a purely profit motive.
|
| This point is arguable of course. On one hand legal
| services are expensive and often inaccessible for many.
| On the other hand more aggressive competition and
| consolidation has absolutely ruined society in a couple
| situations, medicine being the obvious example.
|
| So there's more than one point of view on this.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Bits About Money says similar things about banks: "A
| recurring theme of this column is that banks are
| privately funded public infrastructure." [1]. So laws
| around them are quite strict and different from regular
| companies.
|
| [1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-
| bank-bran...
| tomrod wrote:
| How many things have private equity ruined?
|
| Now imagine you are given less than judicious
| representation by the only law firm in town.
| morkalork wrote:
| This is a whole thing with pharmacies not owned by
| pharmacists, veterinarian clinics not owned by vets,
| dental clinics not owned by dentists and yes, people have
| noticed the perversion of incentives.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Attorneys have a special status before the law. In
| particular, an attorney is legally required to act in the
| client's legitimate interests. If there is another person
| in the organization above the attorney and that person is
| also an attorney, the same requirement extends to them.
| But if that person is a random MBA or shareholder, they
| have no such obligation, which creates a conflict of
| interest.
|
| Other true professions have similar but lesser
| requirements. Some leadership positions in a hospital
| require an MD. Not because the MD makes you a better
| leader, but because the position involves making medical
| decisions. In an engineering company, some decisions must
| be made by a civil engineer. And so on.
|
| The requirements for attorneys are stricter, because the
| law is a special case before the law. While other fields
| exist within the system, the law is the system itself.
| hengheng wrote:
| Or because bad legal documents become obvious immediately,
| while bad code has a 2-3 year incubation period.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| I am not understanding the joke.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| They're saying that the language in such a document could
| be read and discovered almost immediately, whereas the
| logic bomb sitting inside a bunch of poorly written code
| may take years before it finally explodes.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| ...while ignoring that flaws in legal documents are not
| always immediately obvious, and bugs in code are not
| always difficult to discover.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Not always. Contracts for example sometimes contain
| landmines that lay undiscovered for a decade or more.
|
| A key difference is that law is an actual profession. It
| has qualification, continuing professional development and
| licensing requirements, and personal consequences for
| getting it wrong. None of these things are true for
| software development.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I would argue they are pretty similar. It's not hard for a
| bad clause in a contract to get overlooked at first and
| then become a problem years later. Example:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/think-commas-don-t-
| matt...
| CPLX wrote:
| I'm pretty fluent in both worlds and they are actually
| highly equivalent on this one specific point.
|
| In both cases it looks perfect and it works right up until
| it doesn't, usually for the same reason, entering an
| unanticipated state.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| They are run by partners laser focused on making money, just
| over a longer time horizon than private equity would be.
| Equity partners have most of their own wealth tied to the
| firm.
|
| Grads are cheap. Partners can dangle the future senior
| associate/partner carrot over the head of a hopeful junior
| for many years while that junior brings in money that goes
| into the partners' pockets. The junior brings in more money
| as they grow professionally.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Hiring a junior dev is a luxury for big companies that can afford
| to tie up senior devs tandem coding with a junior for months,
| then giving easy projects to the junior dev with extensive code
| review and hand-holding for another year.
|
| I don't think anyone has the budget for that anymore - not even
| the big companies. It's two years of negative $ output for the $
| you put in and after those two years the junior dev leaves anyway
| for a more senior position.
| robofanatic wrote:
| This isn't a new phenomenon and not limited to software
| development. Companies know that people get trained and leave
| all the time. Most companies have plans for that.
| t-writescode wrote:
| There's a lot to be said about this comment, but I'll stick to
| two things.
|
| 1) it's a waste of resources for seniors to be doing the work
| that the juniors and 2s can do. Hunting down infrequent or low
| priority bugs, fixing small layout issues, etc. they're perfect
| for someone paid less and growing and learning the codebase.
|
| There is *always* plenty of junior-ready work and the day a
| week of work to schedule, prep and help those juniors to do it
| pays dividends.
|
| 2) a Junior leaving because you won't pay them, have a toxic
| culture or won't give them a promotion when it's time speaks
| more about a broken company culture and one of a style that's
| rampant in the tech industry and business at large than it does
| about loyalty and willingness for the employee to stay at the
| company.
|
| Good leadership and skilled organizers can easily solve the
| problems you've listed; and, even better, create a culture of
| longevity for all the employees at a company, not just the
| juniors.
|
| Speaking as someone that has worked for companies that give a
| shit about their workers and who helped raise me up from a low
| SDE.
| lolinder wrote:
| > it's a waste of resources for seniors to be doing the work
| that the juniors and 2s can do. Hunting down infrequent or
| low priority bugs, fixing small layout issues, etc.
|
| These are tasks that in the current environment often get
| pushed back for "later" indefinitely. These tasks aren't un-
| resourced because the company isn't hiring juniors, the
| company isn't hiring juniors because they no longer have the
| funds for small fixes.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| As a customer of these types of businesses: yes, we can
| tell. We do care, and we are ready to drop the shitty
| products of these bad companies at the first opportunity.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| The problem with this idea is that being bug free and jank
| free is the moat that a mature app needs. Software lives on
| user trust. If everyone can see that the simple things
| aren't being done right, why will they have faith that the
| complex things are?
| mjr00 wrote:
| IMO you're way overestimating how much hand-holding juniors
| need. Juniors coming out of college have a decent grasp of
| basic tooling like git, IDEs, debuggers, and yes AI coding
| assistants. We just hired two recent graduates and they were
| both getting meaningful work done independently within 2 weeks.
| They still need code review and guidance, but it's not like
| they need a senior watching over their shoulder telling them
| how to write a function in python.
|
| You're going to have to teach them about the unique frameworks
| and processes at your company, but you have to teach seniors
| about those things too. Unless you're doing something _really_
| unique, juniors don 't need to tie up senior devs "for months".
| Remember they can help each other, too.
| matt_s wrote:
| This aligns with my thinking that juniors can leverage AI to
| become seniors much faster than people without AI but there are
| important concepts about learning debugging, learning how the
| underlying technologies work, etc. that is crucial to becoming a
| senior dev. Just using AI to pump out code without knowing the
| details of how it works will not end up going well for the long
| haul.
| latentsea wrote:
| Seniors can also leverage AI to become juniors too.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Dogfooding is encouraged for our top dogs, underdogs, and
| even random strays we find. In our vision of the future, on
| the internet everyone is a dog.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| The real issue is wage expectations. In 2 ways
|
| 1) For the last decade many juniors have had unreasonable salary
| expectations that have often still been met. Now there is an
| alternative that's a lot cheaper and doesn't come with an
| attitude.
|
| 2) It's generally agreed that for the first year or 2 in your
| career you aren't that useful; after that you start to add lots
| of value quickly. But salary expectations don't double when you
| go from a junior to an intermediate - maybe they go up 25%. It's
| clearly much better value to hire only seniors if you can find
| them.
|
| I'm not saying these are right or wrong but a whole article about
| juniors that doesn't mention wages, and just tries to implore
| companies to "do the right thing", misses the point.
| codr7 wrote:
| Not only does your fancy AI junior randomly spew bullshit back at
| you; that happens with humans as well; but it keeps doing it,
| never learning anything.
|
| Managing one or several of these idiots has to be the worst job
| ever invented.
| jbmsf wrote:
| We have one junior dev in a team about a dozen. They have had
| other roles with us, both at the current job and previous ones.
| We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no
| brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the
| skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of
| leverage.
|
| But it's hard to imagine committing to the training without the
| history.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no
| brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the
| skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of
| leverage.
|
| This is the problem, early career devs are extremely bimodal in
| skill distribution.
|
| You can luck out and land the 1 in 10 who just gets it and has
| the knack and has been coding since they were 12. But 9/10
| times you end up with someone who has trouble even making a
| commit or with writing basic syntax, who just "picked" software
| as a career at some point in college for the salary. This has
| been my experience anywhere that doesnt have FAANG level cash
| to be hiring the top graduates at 150k+.
| kristianc wrote:
| > Indeed, companies that try to staff only with experienced devs
| face a pipeline problem. Without juniors today, there are no
| seniors tomorrow.
|
| This one seems like a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Defecting
| (hiring only seniors) is rational in isolation, but if everyone
| defects, everyone loses. What incentive for a smaller company to
| hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll
| leave for a larger company anyway.
| tiew9Vii wrote:
| Provide an environment and incentives so that people enjoy
| working for your company and don't want to leave.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.
|
| But if companies aren't hiring juniors like they used to,
| shouldn't retention be a lot easier?
| kunzhi wrote:
| _> What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in
| training the junior if in two years they 'll leave for a larger
| company anyway._
|
| I find these statements so damning and self-incriminating. It's
| an open admission that the junior should expect to be treated
| poorly.
| codr7 wrote:
| Using AI certainly isn't expected in any teams I'm leading; not
| that I'm going to forbid anyone to use a tool, but I will warn
| everyone about depending on it and the requirement for
| verification/understanding.
| gokhan wrote:
| I find it quite naive that senior devs think this will stop with
| juniors. TFA says "No juniors today means no seniors tomorrow ...
| juniors must focus on higher-level skills like debugging, system
| design, and effective collaboration" and yet he believes AI won't
| be doing all of that by the time those juniors somehow upskill on
| their own.
|
| I was just testing the newly released Copilot Agent Mode in VS,
| and it already looks quite capable of debugging things
| independently (actually, it's not much different from VS Code
| Agent Mode, which came out a couple of weeks earlier).
|
| System design? Not all seniors need Google-scale design skills.
| Most systems designed by seniors are either overdesigned, badly
| designed, or copied from an article or a case study anyway. There
| are plenty of seniors whose only real qualification is the number
| of years they've been working.
|
| The author is from Google. I'm not sure if effective
| collaboration is something given there, but in many companies,
| especially outside of tech, it's not something you see often. And
| it's usually inversely proportional to the company's age.
|
| What seniors learned by doing is now written down and available
| to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some of the best
| minds in the field. Any given senior likely knows only a fraction
| of a domain, and even less when you start combining domains. LLMs
| probably already there for some of the seniors, only they never
| checked.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > What seniors learned by doing is now written down and
| available to LLMs, often in multiple sources, explained by some
| of the best minds in the field.
|
| It may shock you to learn that this was true before LLMs. There
| was a website called "Google" which acted as a front-end for
| almost all recorded knowledge in human history, and putting a
| phrase like "best design patterns for web APIs" as a search
| query (the primitive name for prompts) would give you hundreds,
| if not thousands of real-life examples and explanations of how
| to accomplish your goal.
|
| Somehow senior developers kept their jobs despite the existence
| of this almighty oracle. LLMs do a better job of filtering and
| customizing the information, but seniors will still keep their
| jobs.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Only non-engineers listening to VC-hype on podcasts think that AI
| can replace fully junior engineers. Here is a problem I recently
| asked a junior dev to solve:
|
| Our service occasionally gets especially expensive requests that
| amplify to our dependencies, one of those dependencies have
| started complaining that our bursts of traffic are impacting
| other users, talk to them and propose a solution that aligns with
| our different requirements. Possible directions are X, Y, Z.
|
| AI is pretty far from able to do this. A cracked out vibe coder
| maybe could have just added a one-off naive rate limit algorithm
| pulled from stack overflow or maybe pulled in an unmaintained 3rd
| party 'rate-limit' package and called it a day. And that would be
| fine for a MVP but in large organizations figuring out what to
| build, how to build it, and getting agreement with stakeholders
| is way, way more work that doing than actual implementation
| (which still rarely can be one-shotted and needs a lot of hand-
| holding and iteration to get decent solutions).
| decGetAc wrote:
| I can't tell if you're overestimating your junior devs or
| underestimating AI. Likely both. The current hype is a lot but
| some of it is true and I'm seeing everyone at all roles
| acknowledge this.
|
| I don't think it's a stretch that an AI will be able to do what
| a junior devs does soon (2/3 years). Getting consensus on a
| solution out of 3 from various teams ?
|
| There's a few integration points missing today (company docs,
| company access to slack, longer context) but all of that is
| possible today. I believe it can do as well as a job as a
| junior devs can at this task.
|
| I'm genuinely curious if you have been keeping up with AI
| and/or working with AI for your tasks (technical, writing down
| different solutions, promoting about how to interact with
| different teams based on their team specifics)?
|
| Caveat: I'm honestly pretty far from drinking the koolaid but
| it seems inevitable even if AI stopped progressing - taking
| what we have today and building on top of it could get us this
| coryvirok wrote:
| This has led me to wonder if this is the last generation of
| "senior" devs. The thinking goes, if it takes a couple of years
| to educate and train a junior dev on average and LLMs can
| increasingly replace junior devs... There is no need for a
| company to hire junior devs, starving the ecosystem of talent
| that would have otherwise gone onto becoming senior.
|
| In a world where the average work is the first to be displaced
| (due to training data availability), the last to be replaced are
| the ones furthest from distribution mean...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-18 23:02 UTC)