alt Hacker NewsEvery single time I see an article like this come out on hacker news I have the same reaction “sure, this year”.
There is still room for juniors… in fall of 2026. Will there be in fall of 2030? If your thesis rests on LLMs and AI systems not dramatically improving over where they are today, is it worth anything?
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I'll take the other side of that. Was there room for juniors in 2020? In 1950? What was the value of a junior in a world where programming was done in assembly? How much reliable work - how much value - could you get from them? Probably less than their salary.
Now, you could argue that those were days when people moved jobs a lot less, so a junior was an investment for the company, even if they weren't worth their salary yet. And that's true to at least some degree. Still, that means that what changed isn't the value of juniors, but companies' willingness to invest in the future.
The real value of a junior engineer is that they will become a senior. That's really always been the case IME. Juniors in the first year or two of their career are routinely a net negative, maybe break even. But the thing is, unless you're making the bet that LLMs are going to _entirely_ replace human SWE, we as an industry have to maintain a pipeline to take in juniors and level them up. If we don't, we're going to be in real trouble in about 10 years.