alt Hacker NewsThis article talks a lot about AI, but what I find odd is that in my relatively short (but long enough) ~9 yr career so far, this problem predates AI. I don't deny that it exacerbates it, but you don't kill a disease by addressing the symptoms. From the first time I was ever involved in the hiring process, senior leadership always encouraged me to hire more experienced staff, always most heavily scrutinized juniors, and had negotiations fall through with mid-level candidates the most. This was despite juniors passing technical screens with strong showings. This was not at a Fortune 500. This was a micro-cap subsidiary of a private, billion dollar company.
And although it hasn't discouraged me, I have to admit that I've been burned by juniors when caught in the middle between them and senior leadership on output expectations or strategy because frankly it's much more challenging to mentor how to navigate company politics than it is to mentor professional coding acumen. I want to be humble here. I don't think that's the junior's fault.
It feels like these problems go a lot deeper than AI. Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team. We've all experienced this. It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
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You're not wrong! I'm the original author of the post, and yes, I've seen this trend for years now, too, but I was using those two research studies that I cited as the basis of the article, so I started looking at it from that lens. I think the problems go deeper than AI, too, which is why I touched on corporate incentives. Ultimately, my goal was just for teams to think about how it could benefit them to invest in juniors and for college students to know that they need to prepare for a challenging ride if they're majoring in an AI-adopting field.
Yes, AI isn't helping but the corporate world has been doing this for decades! Junior devs are second class citizens internally. I don't blame them for moving on after a few years.
I agree. I wonder if it's a mix of fully remote work being popular some time ago and the amount of tech one has to know now increasing (DBs, backend, frontend, cloud, observability, security, etc.). When hiring remotely, people naturally try to find candidates who are very communicative, have a high level of ownership, and can work with or without clear requirements and without oversight. That latter set of traits is often associated with senior developers rather than juniors.