alt Hacker NewsAuthor here. My last post on this reached the front page, and the main objection was that after AI, the junior's marginal value is gone: if a junior just passes specs to an AI tool and PRs back, why pay the salary?
That deserved a real answer, so I wrote this post. Short version: that describes a problem with how the role is structured, not what juniors can do. Push back welcome.
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vee-kay • today at 12:00 PM
If an intern can do the work of a technical lead, architect, software designer, or project manager, why do we need such expensive resources? Just fire all the seniors (including the CxOs) and let the interns run the company as lowest-paid temporary contractors, with the help of AI. /s
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my take from this article - there's a point you miss. is the organization product driven ? because usually that changes how engineers solve or approach problems. a few organizations are product driven.
if it's product led - and every engineer no matter the level are supposed to understand the business and the requirements that drive value i.e create their own tickets etc - then yeah the value of the junior engineer stays the same or goes up.
with other orgs - where product managers act like high priests and everything has to go through Jira. then the value of not just junior engineers but engineers in general has been always at an all time low.