alt Hacker News“Junior” is the wrong distinction to make. I’ve recently worked with senior engineers who are terrible at wielding agents, and recent grad engineers who multiple themselves 100x. The main way I look for software engineers now are:
- Deep curiosity and ability to absorb new information quickly - Evidence of ability to wield and coordinate agents to the max - Ability to clearly communicate ideas
You have these skills, you can conquer the software world.
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If LLM's are supposed to get smarter, wouldn't they be able to wield agents for you? Seems like a skill with a short shelf life. In my day to day work i just use claude and it seems to spin up agents as it sees fit so I'm not sure why people need to coordinate agents to the max? If there is one thing i've seen in software engineering over many years is that sometimes software engineers prefer using flashy stuff even though it doesn't have that much benefits but they evangelize this stuff like it does. "Oh you don't use micro services and X,Y,Z for your crud app?", "Oh you use VS code and not vi?" "Why don't you maintain a data platform for your small scale data that can fit in postgres" so on and so forth.
I’ve hired quite a bit over the last 10 years. Curiosity is the absolute number one thing I look for, whether for a fresh grad or a principal/staff+
The difference between a junior and a senior is still very real. With agents, knowing what to ask them to do (or not do) is bordering on more important than it ever was. A curious junior might still go down rabbit holes for things that a person who had done this before. That’s what makes them a junior. Not everything we _can_ do we _should_ do
I feel like knowing when to say no or call an agents bluff is another useful skill
> I’ve recently worked with senior engineers who are terrible at wielding agents, and recent grad engineers who multiple themselves 100x
Wow, so you worked with recent grads who are producing 100x the slop? No wonder Anthropic doesn't hire junior engineers.
Well anthropic says you are wrong and wants juniors to disappear into another trade. This absolutely wouldn't be a coordinated effort to deskill Americans and force companies to helplessly accept whatever LLM code is generated without human review. Most certainly not. They wouldn't target regulated industries that require certain work praxis like biotechnology and lobby heavily with the military and government to change laws around this. Definitely not!