[hex4def6]

> We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I referenced above cited the same thing - AI is getting good at automating junior work while only augmenting senior work. So the evidence doesn’t show that AI is going to replace everyone; it’s just removing the apprenticeship ladder.

Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we came to the same conclusion. You used to be able to make yourself useful by doing the easy / annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to waste time dealing with. In exchange you got on-the-job experience, until you were able to handle more complex tasks and grow your skill set. AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.

I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally. It's almost like the aftermath of a war killing off 18-30 year olds leaving a demographic hole, or the effect of covid on education for certain age ranges.

[strickjb9]

Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand.

In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing breaks down when you're basically collaborating with a model through a proxy.

I think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are still valuable. But it's hard to get past "why bother mentoring when I could just use AI directly?"

I don't have answers here. Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.

[shagie]

> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM.

This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested."

Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to.

It is especially frustrating that the second group doesn't become much more than a proxy for an LLM.

New juniors can progress in software engineering - but they have to take the road of disciplined use of AI and make sure that they're learning the material rather than delegating all their work to it... and that delegating work is very tempting... especially if that's what they did in college.

[ah979]

I get that. I think that getting to know juniors outside of work, at a recurring meetup or event, in a setting where you can suss out their motivation level and teachability level, is _a_ way of going about it. That way, if your team is hiring juniors, you have people you have already vetted at the ready.

[roadside_picnic]

> Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.

It's worth considering how aggressively open the door has been for the last decade. Each new generation of engineers increasingly disappointed me with how much more motivated they were by a big pay check than they were for anything remotely related to engineering. There's nothing wrong with choosing a career for money, but there's also nothing wrong about missing a time when most people chose it because they were interested in it.

However I have noticed a shift: while half the juniors I work with are just churning out AI slop, the other half are really interested in the craft of software engineering and understanding computer science better.

We'll need new senior engineers in a few years, and I suspect they will come from a smaller pool of truly engaged juniors today.

[thayne]

> I think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are still valuable.

But it's hard to know if a candidate is one of those when hiring, which also means that if you are one of those juniors it is hard for you to prove it to a prospective employer.

[Zarathruster]

> Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand.

I keep hearing this and find it utterly perplexing.

As a junior, desperate to prove that I could hang in this world, I'd comb over my PRs obsessively. I viewed each one as a showcase of my abilities. If a senior had ever pointed at a line of code and asked "what does this do?" If I'd ever answered "I don't know," I would've been mortified.

I don't want to shake my fist at a cloud, but I have to ask genuinely (not rhetorically): do these kids not have any shame at all? Are they not the slightest bit embarrassed to check in a pile of slop? I just want to understand.

[johnnyanmac]

>Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM.

seems like something a work policy can fix quickly. If not something filtered in the interview pipeline. I wouldn't just let juniors go around and try to copy-pasting non-compilable Stackoverflow code, why would I do it here?

[agumonkey]

New students are presented with agentic coding now, so it's possible that CS will become a more abstract spec refine + verify. Although I can't make it work in my head, that's what I took from speaking with a young college student.

[lezojeda]

Some juniors are even using AI for communication in Slack channels or even DMs. It's so uncanny.

[zcw100]

I don't know what world you're living in but software development has always been a cut throat business. I've never seen true mentoring. Maybe a code review where some a-hole of a "senior" developer would come in having just read "clean code" and use some stupid stylistic preferences as a cudgel and go to town on the juniors. I'm cynical enough to believe that this, "AI is going to take your programming job!" is just a ploy to thin out the applicant pool.

[amarant]

My hottest take on this is that it might be healthy for the business. During the recent boom everyone and their grandmother's dog got a job as software engineers, and some aren't really fit for it.

AI provides a bar. You need to be at least better than AI at coding to become a professional. It'll take genuine interest in the technology to surpass AI and clear that bar. The next generation of software professionals will be smaller, but unencumbered by incompetents. Their smaller number will be compensated by AI that can take care of the mundane tasks, and with any luck it's capabilities will only increase.

Surely I'm not the only one who's had colleagues with 10+years experience who can't manage to check out a new branch in git? We've been hiring people we shouldn't have hired.

[_aavaa_]

The only problem is that people need to earn a living while they’re trying to get better than that bar.

Is there bar is set at a competent mid level engineer, people entering the industry need a path from algorithms 101 to above that bar which involves getting paid.

[andrewmutz]

It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation.

It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have them leave as soon as they can get a better offer?

[throwaway2037]

    > culture of job-hopping

When using this phrase in this context, is your sentiment positive or negative? In my experience, each time I have a job offer for more money, I go and talk to my current line manager. I explain the new job offer, and ask if they would like to counteroffer. 100% (<-- imagine 48 point bold font!) of the time, my line manager has been simultaneously emotionally hurt ("oh, he's disloyal for leaving") and unsupportive of matching compensation. In almost all cases, an external recruiter found me online, reached out, and had a great new opportunity that paid well. Who am I to look away? I'm nothing special as a technologist, but please don't fault me for accepting great opportunities with higher pay.

    > Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee

What exactly is meant by "invest" here? In my career, my employers haven't done shit for me about training. Yet, 100% of them expect me to be up-to-date all the time on whatever technology they fancy this week. Is tech training really a thing in 2025 with so many great online resources? In my career, I am 100% self-trained, usually through blogs, technical papers, mailing lists, and discussions with peers.

[ike2792]

When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.

[kulahan]

One would assume the solution is to simply offer a good package and retain employees with that. I returned to an old company after a few years of floating around because I realized they had the perfect mix of culture and benefits for me, even if the pay isn't massive.

You're falling for the exact same fallacy experienced by failed salesmen. "Why would I bother investing time in this customer when they're just going to take my offer to another dealership for a better deal?"

Answer: you offer a good deal and work with people honestly, because if you don't, you'll never get a customer.

[kentm]

> It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation.

I've started viewing developers that have never maintained an existing piece of software for over 3 years with skepticism. Obviously, with allowances for people who have very good reasons to be in that situation (just entered the market, bad luck with employers, etc).

There's a subculture of adulation for developers that "get things done fast" which, more often than not, has meant that they wrote stuff that wasn't well thought out, threw it over the wall, and moved on to their next gig. They always had a knack of moving on before management could connect the dots that all the operational problems were related to the person who originally wrote it and not the very-competent people fixing the thing. Your average manager doesn't seem to have the capability to really understand tech debt and how it impacts ability to deliver over time; and in many cases they'll talk about the "rock star" developer that got away with a glimmer in their eye.

Saw a post of someone on Hacker News the other day talking about how they were creating things faster than n-person teams, and then letting the "normies" (their words not mine) maintain it while moving on to the next thing. Thats exactly the kind of person I'd like to weed out.

[endemic]

Funny, I was at my previous company almost exactly two years. They never even gave me a cost of living increase, much less a "raise." So I was effectively earning less each year. Change needs to happen from both sides if extended tenure is the goal.

[asdfman123]

You have cause and effect reversed. Companies stopped training workers and giving them significant raises for experience, so we started job hopping.

Some genius MBA determined that people feel more rewarded by recognition and autonomy than pay, which is actually true. But it means that all the recognition and autonomy in the world won't make you stay if you can make 50% more somewhere else.

[dgunay]

Why didn't companies just grant raises more aggressively? Was the ease of poaching engineers not a clear market signal?

[loeg]

Arguably, the cross-pollination of developers moving around is good for employers.

[semiquaver]

People have been saying this for at least 30 years.

[asdfman123]

They have this exact problem with scientific glassblowing, and it's been decades in the making. Manufacturing improvements now mean that you can buy almost everything from a factory, and only need experienced glassblowers for fancy, one-off stuff.

But that means there's no need for entry-level glassblowers, and everyone in the field with any significant experience is super old. The pipeline has been dead for a while now.

[Ferret7446]

This will naturally select for the people who are self driven learners. In a sense this is nothing new, just a continued progression of the raising of the bar of who is still able to contribute economic value to the market

[samrus]

How will they learn without opportunity?

[xhrpost]

> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.

Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks. Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.

[smiley1437]

> mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally.

Tech companies are betting that in 5 years, AI should be good enough to replace mid-levels.

Rinse and repeat with seniors 5 years after that.

Hard to say if that bet will pay off, or what the endgame would be; just the CEO commanding an company of AIs?

[samrus]

High risk bets like that cause bubbles. If that bet doesnt pay off then there will be a talent crisis that the american tech industry may not recover from

[checker659]

I think the current grads are going to be shafted either way. In 5 years, there might be more opening for "fresh" young grads and the companies will prefer them over the young people who're just graduating.

[asdff]

“automate it away” ironically still requires a human in the chain to determine what to automate, how, and to maintain that automation. Whether it be derived from an ai or a systemd script or an Antikythera mechanism. Now if you leave that to seniors you just ate a big chunk of their day playing shephard to a dozen plus “automated” pipelines while they still have stuff to do outside the weeds. Now you need more seniors and pretty soon they want triple what you could pay a junior and I don’t think they are 3x more prolific if the junior is managed efficiently quite frankly.

[jjk166]

The process of setting up and maintaining automation should be less labor intensive than just doing it manually (or else why would you automate it?) and almost always requires a more advanced skillset than doing the manual task.

[furyofantares]

I hope juniors will figure out how to use AI to do larger tasks that are still annoying for seniors to do, while seniors take on larger tasks still. I think it's just seniors are learning this stuff faster at the moment and adapting it faster to current work, but as all that changes I would guess juniors reclaim some value back.

That said, you hit on something I've been feeling, the thing these models are best at by far is stuff that wasn't worth doing before.

[QuercusMax]

I've been making use of copilot in VSCode to make changes in a codebase that's new to me, in a language that I can read if not necessarily write unaided - it's a dialect of SQL, so I can certainly understand what's happening, but generating new queries is very time-consuming (half of which is just stupid formatting stuff). Copilot seems to understand the style of the code in my project and so I don't have to do much work to make it conform, compared to my hand-written versions.

I've also written a lot of python 2 in my career, and writing python 3 still isn't quite native-level for me - and the AI tools let me make up for my lack of knowledge of modern Python.

[squirrellous]

Some juniors do figure it out, but my experience has been that the bar for such juniors is a lot higher than pre-AI junior positions, so there is less opportunity for junior engineers overall.

[x0x0]

My 2 cents: they're too expensive.

We had code school grads asking for $110-$130. Meanwhile, I can hire an actual senior engineer for $200 and he/she will be easily 4x as productive and useful, while also not taking a ton of mentorship time.

Since even that $110 costs $140, it's tough to understand how companies aren't taking a bath on $700/day.

[johnnyanmac]

If you're hiring in SF or NY, then the problem explains itself. Even a single young new grad needs that much to so live.

you can't have rent at 3.5k a month and not expect 6 figures when requiring in-office work. old wisdom of "30% of salary goes to rent" suggest that that kind of housing should only be rented if you're making 140k. Anyone complaining about junior costs in these areas needs to join in bringing housing prices down.

[hershey890]

Good new-grads in expensive areas are going to cost $100-$130k. This is a bargain considering a few years back they could get $200-$350k.

Bear in mind these types can explain things like why word-alignment matters and train themselves into being net productive within a few weeks.

[icedchai]

Yep, the value isn't there. I'm on a very lopsided team, about 5 juniors to 1 senior. Almost all of the senior time is being consumed in "mentorship", mostly slogging through AI slop laden code reviews. There have been improvements, but it's taking a long time.

[fundad]

I entered the job market in late 2000. There was no reason to hire a junior engineer when every hiring manager and senior engineer knew 10 friends who recently lost their jobs. I found work on less desirable projects and yes it affected my career trajectory and it sucked. Starting out has always sucked for most people.

[gausswho]

Anyone reccomend an analysis, article or book or video, of this effect on the blue collar industry decades ago?

[darkstarsys]

It's happening again now with robotics, self-driving vehicles and RL. Factory workers, truck drivers, construction work, order fulfillment, machinists, farm work, medical technicians and more are all very much at risk (same thing as OP: mostly junior roles getting automated). Some info at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137

[JumpCrisscross]

> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad

Plenty of skilled work requires a master’s or PhD. CS, for those who want a safe, secure job, looks like it’s going that way.

[zingar]

Do you mind giving some examples of the work that annoys seniors?

[ansgri]

For me the most annoying would be a technically correct solution that completely ignores the “higher-level style” of the surrounding code, at the same time defending the chosen solution by referencing some “best practices” that are not really applicable there for some higher-level reasons, or by insignificant performance concerns. Incidentally, LLMs often produce similar problems, only one doesn’t need to politely argue with them.

[twosdai]

Writing unit tests, manual validation work, manual testing. Automating Deployments of infrastructure, DNS work, tracking down annoying one off bugs, fixing and validating dependency issues.

Basically this type of maintenance work for any sufficiently complex codebase. (Over 20k LOC)

When I was an QA intern / Software Dev Intern. I did all of that junk.

[devin-2030]

We might need a lot of young adults for war in the near future, according to some.

[roadside_picnic]

Larger scale war happens when the lives of young people are more valuable as fodder for the war machine than in a field or behind a desk.

[frmersdog]

I don't know if that's it. Speaking from outside the tech space: most of my office jobs since 2012 have been "doing the easy/annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to 'waste time' dealing with."

So, there are two parts to this:

The first is that a lot of those tasks are non-trivial for someone who isn't a digital native (and occasionally trivial for people who are). That is to say that I often found myself doing tasks that my bosses couldn't do in a reasonable time span; they were tasks which they had ALWAYS delegated, which is another way of saying that they were tasks in which proficiency was not necessary at their level.

This leads into the second part, which is that performing these tasks did not help me advance in relevant experience at all. They were not related to higher-level duties, nor did they endear me to the people who could have introduced me to such duties. My seniors had no interest in our growth as workers; anyone who wanted to see that growth had to take it into their own hands, at which point "junior-level" jobs are only worth the paycheck.

I don't know if it's a senior problem generally, or something specific to this cohort of Boomer/Gen-X seniors. Gun-to-my-head, I would wager the latter. They give enough examples in other arenas of public life to lend credence to the notion that that they simply don't care what happens to their juniors, or to their companies after they leave, particularly if there is added hassle in caring. This is an accusation often lobbed at my own generation, to which I say, it's one of the few things our forebears actually did teach us.

Yet again, AI is just a cover for mismanagement.

[RogerL]

I grew up in the 70s. The hand wringing then was calculators. No one was going to be able to do math anymore! And then wrist watches with calculators came out. Everyone is going to cheat on exams, oh no!

Everything turned out fine. Turns out you don't really need to be able to perform long division by hand. Sure, you should still understand the algorithm at some level, esp. if you work in STEM, but otherwise, not so much.

There were losses. I recall my AP physics professors was one of the old school types (retired from industry to teach). He could find the answer to essentially any problem to about 1-2 digits of precision in his head nearly instantly. Sometimes he'd have to reach for his slide rule for harder things or to get a few more digits. Ain't no one that can do that now (for reasonable values of "no one"). And, it is a loss, in that he could catch errors nearly instantly. Good skill to have. A better skill is to be able to set up a problem for finite element analysis, write kernels for operations, find an analytic solution using Mathematica (we don't need to do integrals by hand anymore for the mot part), unleash R to validate your statistics, and so on. The latter are more valuable than the former, and so we willingly pay the cost. Our ability to crank out integrals isn't what it was, but our ability to crank out better jet engines, efficient cars, computer vision models has exploded. Worth the trade off.

Recently watched an Alan Guth interview, and he made a throwaway comment, paraphrased: "I proved X in this book, well, Mathematica proved...". The point being that the proof was multiple pages per step, and while he could keep track of all the sub/superscripts and perform the Einstein sums on all the tensors correctly, why??? I'd rather he use his brain to think up new solutions to problems, not manipulate GR equations by hand.

I'm ignoring AGI/singularity type events, just opining about the current tooling.

Yah, the transition will be bumpy. But we will learn the skills we need for the new tools, and the old skills just won't matter as much. When they do, yah, it'll be a bit more painful, but so what, we gained so much efficiency we can afford the losses.

[geoffmanning]

This assumes there will still be a demand for software developers in 5 years. I believe we'll be out of jobs much sooner than that.

[weatherlite]

> I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?);

Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.

[giancarlostoro]

The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;)

While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in minutes usually, sometimes maybe an hour if its obscure enough. You just have to feed the model enough context, full stack trace, every time.