The difference being junior engineers eventually grow up into senior engineers.
Comment on AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 6 days agoExactly what you would expect from a junior engineer.
Let them run unsupervised and you have a mess to clean up. Guide them with context and you’ve got a second set of capable hands.
Something something craftsmen don’t blame their tools
5too@lemmy.world 6 days ago
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Does every junior eventually achieve becoming a senior?
5too@lemmy.world 6 days ago
No, but that’s the only way you get senior engineers!
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I agree, but the goal of CEOs is “line go up,” not make our wing team stronger (usually)
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Exactly what you would expect from a junior engineer.
Except junior engineers become seniors. If you don’t understand this … are you HR?
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 6 days ago
They might become seniors for 99% more investment. Are you an MBA?
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 5 days ago
Interesting downvotes, especially how there are more than there are upvotes.
Do people think “junior” and “senior” here just relate to age and/or time in the workplace? Someone could work in software dev for 20 years and still be a junior dev.
Feyd@programming.dev 6 days ago
AI tools are way less useful than a junior engineer, and they aren’t an investment that turns into a senior engineer either.
errer@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Yeah but a Claude/Cursor/whatever subscription costs $20/month and a junior engineer costs real money. Are the tools 400 times less useful than a junior engineer? I’m not so sure…
Feyd@programming.dev 6 days ago
The point is that comparing AI tools to junior engineers is ridiculous in the first place. It is simply marketing.
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Even at $100/month you’re comparing to a > $10k/month junior. 1% of the cost for certainly > 1% functionality of a junior.
You can see why companies are tripping over themselves to push this new modality.
errer@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I was just ballparking the salary. Say it’s only 100x. Does the argument change? It’s a lot more money to pay for a real person.
finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
This line of thought is short sighted. Your senior engineers will eventually retire or leave the company. If everyone replaces junior engineers with ai, then there will be nobody with the experience to fill those empty seats. Then you end up with no junior engineers and no senior engineers, so who is wrangling the ai?
errer@lemmy.world 6 days ago
This isn’t black and white. There will always be some junior hires. No one is saying replace ALL of them. But hiring 1 junior engineer instead of 3? Maybe…and that’s already happening to some degree.
MangoCats@feddit.it 6 days ago
AI tools are actually improving at a rate faster than most junior engineers I have worked with, and about 30% of junior engineers I have worked with never really “graduated” to a level that I would trust them to do anything independently, even after 5 years in the job. Those engineers “find their niche” doing something other than engineering with their engineering job titles, and that’s great, but don’t ever trust them to build you a bridge or whatever it is they seem to have been hired to do.
Now, as for AI, it’s currently as good or “better” than about 40% of brand-new fresh from the BS program software engineers I have worked with. A year ago that number probably would have been 20%. So far it’s improving relatively quickly. The question is: will it plateau, or will it improve exponentially?
Many things in tech seem to have an exponential improvement phase, followed by a plateau. CPU clock speed is a good example of that. Storage density/cost is one that doesn’t seem to have hit a plateau yet. Software quality/power is much harder to gauge, but it definitely is still growing more powerful / capable even as it struggles with bloat and vulnerabilities.
The question I have is: will AI continue to write “human compatible” software, or is it going to start writing code that only AI understands, but people rely on anyway? After all, the code that humans write is incomprehensible to 90%+ of the humans that use it.
Feyd@programming.dev 6 days ago
LOL sure
MangoCats@feddit.it 6 days ago
I’m not talking about the ones that get hired in your 'leet shop, I’m talking about the whole damn crop that’s just graduated.
AA5B@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I’m seeing exactly the opposite. It used to be the junior engineers understood they had a lot to learn. However with AI they confidently try entirely wrong changes. They don’t understand how to tell when the ai goes down the wrong path, don’t know how to fix it, and it takes me longer to fix.
So far ai overall creates more mess faster.
Don’t get me wrong, it can be a useful tool you have to think of it like autocomplete or internet search. Just like those tools it provides results but the human needs judgement and needs to figure out how to apply the appropriate results.
My company wants metrics on how much time we’re saving with ai, but
MangoCats@feddit.it 5 days ago
I’ve always had problems with junior engineers going down bad paths, since before there was Google search - let alone AI.
Maybe it is moving faster, maybe they do bother the senior engineers less often than they used to, but for throw-away proof of concept and similar stuff, the juniors+AI are getting better than the juniors without senior support used to be… Is that a good direction? No. When the seniors are over-tasked with “Priority 1” deadlines (nothing new) does this mean the juniors can get a littler further on their own and some of them learn from their own mistakes? I think so.
Where I started, it was actually the case that the PhD senior engineers needed help from me fresh out of school - maybe that was a rare circumstance, but the shop was trying to use cutting edge stuff that I knew more about than the seniors. Basically, everything in 1991 was cutting edge and it made the difference between getting something that worked or having nothing if you didn’t use it. My mentor was expert in another field, so we were complimentary that way.
My company (now) wants metrics on a lot of things, but they also understand how meaningless those metrics can be.
Shame. There was a time that people dug out of their own messes, I think you learn more, faster that way. Still, I agree - since 2005 I have spend a lot of time taking piles of Matlab, Fortran, Python that have been developed over years to reach critical mass - add anything else to them and they’ll go BOOM - and translating those into commercially salable / maintainable / extensible Qt/C++ apps, and I don’t think I ever had one “mentee” through that process who was learning how to follow in my footsteps, the organizations were always just interested in having one thing they could sell, not really a team that could build more like it in the future.
Yep.
Speaking of meaningless metrics, how many people ask you for Lines Of Code counts, even today?
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Is “way less useful” something you can cite with a source, or is that just feelings?
Feyd@programming.dev 6 days ago
It is based on my experience, which I trust immeasurably more than rigged “studies” done by the big LLM companies with clear conflict of interest.
queermunist@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
Okay, but like-
You could just be lying.
You could even be a chatbot, programmed to hype AI in comments sections.
So I’m going to trust studies, not some jackass on the internet who says “trust me bro!”
lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Understood, thanks for being honest
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 5 days ago
They’re tools that can help a junior engineer and a senior engineer with their job.