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0 pointschii20d ago0 comments

Doesn't make sense to stop hiring juniors.

If AI increases productivity, and juniors are cheaper to hire, but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai as a senior, then it makes more sense to hire more juniors to get them working with an AI as soon as possible. This produces output faster, for which more revenue could be derived.

So the only limiting factor is the possibility of not deriving more revenue - which is not related to the AI issue, but broader, macroeconomic issue(s).

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jakobnissen20d ago

Juniors are not as capable of delegating to AI as seniors are. Delegation to AI requires code review, catching the AI when it doesn’t follow good engineering practices, and catching the AI in semantic mistakes due to the AIs lack of broader context. Those things are all hard for juniors.

ragebol20d ago

Isn't that the point, to be able to learn that.

The craft changes with all these AI helpers, so the juniors have to also catch up/change with it. Or there won't b any seniors in due time.

ixsploit20d ago

It's really not an easy problem to solve.

You would hire someone with the expactation that they learn, but you also need to pay them. New hires always slow the team down. And currently you wouldn't even get much out of them, as you can delegate those tasks to AI.

Additionally you can not even be sure that the junior will learn or just throw stuff at AI. The amount of vibecoded Code I have to review at the moment from Seniors is stunning.

So yeah, the market needs Seniors, but there is basically no incentive for a company to hire a Junior at the moment. It's just easier and cheaper to pay a bit better than the market and hire Seniors then to train a Junior for years.

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zmmmmm20d ago

> but is just as able to hand off tasks to ai

I think this is the crux of it. Someone who doesn't know the right thing to do just isn't in a position to hand off anything. Accelerating their work will just make them do the wrong thing faster.

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