[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.

[johnnyanmac]

I must ask once again why we are having these 5+ round interview cycles and we aren't able to filter for qualities that the work requires of its talent. What are all those rounds for if we're getting engineers who aren't as valued for the team's needs at the end of the pipeline?

[mooreds]

> there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to.

Hmmm. Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories? Because I agree, if someone is delegating all their work to an LLM or similar tool, cut out the middleman. Same as if someone just copy/pasted from Stackoverflow 5 years ago.

I think it is also important to think about incentives. What incentive does the newer developer have to understand the LLM output? There's the long term incentive, but is there a short term one?

[anal_reactor]

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

I've learnt that saying this exact phrase does wonders when it comes to advancing your career. I used to argue against stupid ideas but not only did I achieve nothing, but I was also labelled uncooperative and technically incompetent. Then I became a "yes-man" and all problems went away.

[locknitpicker]

> 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.

This is not limited to junior devs. I had the displeasure of working with a guy who was hired as a senior dev who heavily delegated any work they did. He failed to even do the faintest review of what the coding agent and of course did zero testing. At one time these stunts resulted in a major incident where one of these glorious PRs pushed code that completely inverted a key business rule and resulted in paying customers being denied access to a paid product.

Sometimes people are slackers with little to no ownership or pride in their craftsmanship, and just stumbled upon a career path they are not very good at. They start at juniors but they can idle long enough to waddle their way to senior positions. This is not a LLM problem, or caused by it.

[sevenseacat]

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

And then in the next PR, you have to request the exact same changes

[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.

[mikepurvis]

IMO teachability/curiosity is ultimately orthogonal to the more base question of money-motivation.

In a previous role I was a principal IC trying to mentor someone who had somehow been promoted up to senior but was still regularly turning in code for review that I wouldn't have expected from an intern— it was an exhausting, mind-numbing process trying to develop some sense of engineering taste in this person, and all of this was before LLMs. This person was definitely not just there for the money; they really looked up to the top-level engineers at our org and aspired to be be there, but everything just came across as extremely shallow, like engineering cosplay: every design review or bit of feedback was soundbites from a how-to-code TED talk or something. Lots of regurgitated phrases about writing code to be "maintainable" or "elegant" but no in-the-bones feeling about what any of that actually meant.

Anyway, I think a person like this is probably maximally susceptible to the fawning ego-strokes that an AI companion delivers alongside its suggestions; I think I ultimately fear that combination more than I fear a straight up mercenary for whom it's a clear transaction of money -> code.

[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.

[rozap]

This is what I see. Less of door slamming completely shut, more like, the door was enormous and maybe a little too open. We forget, the 6 month coding bootcamp to 6 figure salary pipeline was a real thing for a while at the ZIRP apex.

There are still junior engineers out there who have experiments on their githubs, who build weird little things because they can. Those people were the best engineers anyway. The last decade of "money falls from the sky and anyone can learn to code" brought in a bunch of people who were interested in it for the money, and those people were hard to work with anyway. I'd lump the sidehustle "ship 30 projects in 30 days" crowd in here too. I think AI will effectively eliminate junior engineers in the second camp, but absolutely will not those in the first camp. It will certainly make it harder for those junior engineers at the margins between those two extremes.

There's nothing more discouraging than trying to guide a junior engineer who is just typing what you say into cursor. Like clearly you don't want to absorb this, and I can also type stuff into an AI, so why are you here?

The best engineers I've worked with build things because they are truly interested in them, not because they're trying to get rich. This is true of literally all creative pursuits.

[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.

[jghn]

> If I'd ever answered "I don't know," I would've been mortified.

I'm approaching 30 years of professional work and still feel this way. I've found some people are like this, and others aren't. Those who aren't tend to not progress as far.

[semiquaver]

  > embarrassed to check in a pile of slop

Part of being a true junior, especially nowadays, is not being able to recognize the differences between a pile of slop from useful and elegant code.

[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.

[spjt]

I'm staff and that is probably the main thing I use AI for. It's maybe a bit ironic that AI is a lot better at sounding like an empathetic human being than I am, but I'm still better at writing code.

[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.

[QuercusMax]

Wow, you must have worked in some REALLY toxic places. I had one toxic senior teammate when I first started out - he mocked me when I was having trouble with some of the dev environment he had created - but he got fired shortly thereafter for being bad at his job.

Everybody else through my 21-year career has almost universally either been helpful or neutral (mostly just busy). If you think code reviews are just for bikeshedding about style minutia, then you're really missing out. I personally have found it extremely rewarding to invest in junior SWEs and see them progress in their careers.

[acheron]

Seriously. I guess I wouldn’t describe it as a “cut throat” thing, but absolutely nobody in 20 years of working has ever given a shit. The idea of being “mentored” is ridiculous. It doesn’t happen.