[JeremyNT]

I see what these can do and I'm already thinking, why would I ever hire a junior developer? I can fire up opencode and tell it to work multiple issues at once myself.

The bottleneck becomes how fast you can write the spec or figure out what the product should actually be, not how quickly you can implement it.

So the future of our profession looks grim indeed. There will be far fewer of us employed.

I also miss writing code. It was fun. Wrangling the robots is interesting in its own way, but it's not the same. Something has been lost.

[Nextgrid]

You hire the junior developer because you can get them to learn your codebase and business domain at a discount, and then reap their productivity as they turn senior. You don’t get that with an LLM since it only operates on whatever is in its context.

(If you prefer to hire seniors that’s fine too - my rates are triple that of a junior and you’re paying full price for the time it takes me learning your codebase, and from experience it takes me at least 3 months to reach full productivity.)

[joquarky]

> then reap their productivity as they turn senior

What companies are retaining employees long enough for this?

[wtetzner]

> why would I ever hire a junior developer

Because a junior developer doesn't stay a junior developer forever. The value of junior developers has never been the code they write. In fact, in my experience they're initially a net negative, as more senior developers take time to help them learn. But it's an investment, because they will grow into more senior developers.

[throw234234234]

The question really is what you think the long term direction of SWE as a profession is. If we need juniors later and senior's become expensive that's a nice problem to have mostly and can be fixed via training and knowledge transfer. Conversely people being hired and trained, especially when young into a sinking industry isn't doing anyone any favors.

While I think both sides have an argument on the eventual SWE career viability there is a problem. The downsides of hiring now (costs, uncertainity of work velocity, dry backlogs, etc) are certain; the risk of paying more later is not guaranteed and maybe not as big of an issue. Also training juniors doesn't always benefit the person paying.

* If you think long term that we will need seniors again (industry stays same size or starts growing again) given the usual high ROI on software most can afford to defer that decision till later. Goes back to pre-AI calculus and SWE's were expensive then and people still payed for them.

* If you think that the industry shrinks then its better to hold off so you get more out of your current staff, and you don't "hire to fire". Hopefully the industry on average shrinks in proportion to natural retirement of staff - I've seen this happen for example in local manufacturing where the plant lives but slowly winds down over time and as people retire they aren't replaced.

[chipsrafferty]

Because then you can save the time you have to spend working on it yourself.