Junior Roles Aren't Going Away

https://iamcharliegraham.substack.com/p/junior-roles-arent-going-away

by tylerg • 1 year ago

32 41 1 year ago

iamcharliegraham.substack.com

bigyabai• 1 year ago

First, let's be clear, AI agents do remove roles. At previous companies I founded, I needed a team of developers to build a robust website, integrate it into deployment pipelines, configure hosting, make the UI look good, and handle all the moving parts. I needed marketers to create content, design images in Figma, Canva, and Photoshop, manually research, and write notes to customers and prospects. Now, AI agents can handle a huge portion of that.

I don't believe a word of this. If you replaced your marketers and designers with ChatGPT and a SVG generator, then you shouldn't act surprised when your marketing doesn't work. Your entire thesis statement of "AI agents do remove roles" is unfounded if you refuse to show us metrics to qualitatively compare the success of AI versus human marketing.

How do you know that AI isn't the reason your startups fail to find traction in an AI-saturated market? Do any of your businesses exhibit self-evident runaway success because of AI? It doesn't even sound like you're measuring.

grahac4• 1 year ago

I agree that AI does not replace the best people in those roles. It can do an average to good job. Maybe it can reach top 40% of the industry? If you need the best UI or best marketing, humans are still netter. Those top human jobs won't go away for a while.

With that in mind, if you just need average to good, AI can do a good job at a tiny fraction of the cost. So the average to good roles will start getting replaced.

As examples, the sites tellmel.ai, and rivalsee.com for example were created without needing a UI or frontend designer. In the past I would have needed to hire a UI employee or consultant to do either of those at a very large expense (especially for the really good ones).

stalfosknight7• 1 year ago

This is bullshit. Junior roles have already been extinct for quite a long time now.

No place that's hiring will give you the time of day until you already have the word "Senior" in your title. But no one can explain where Seniors are supposed to come from though.

grahac4• 1 year ago

Yeah right now that's certainly true.

But my belief is those companies will soon realize that some of the people who they thought were junior are pretty adept at AI management - more adept than the senior people. And that skill will suddenly be more in demand than how well you can code an optimized sorting algorithm.

Some will get there faster than others of course. But AI is changing things so quickly that it may happen faster than we think, given the state right now.

stalfosknight7• 1 year ago

I don't mean right now, I mean going as far back as 2018 at least when I had to go through a brutal slog over many months to get my first gig as a new software dev. I eventually ended up in a midlevel role and had to grow into it (I still feel like I found a Willy Wonka golden ticket).

But it is infuriating to see people suggest that there is such a thing as junior level positions and that companies actually want to hire junior level people. That has been absolutely false for a very long time.

alistairSH2• 1 year ago

We have a floor full of interns right now. Our India and Mexico offices do as well. Some of them will probably be offered full-time roles.

I hired a junior engineering a few years ago. And have done every few years for about a decade.

I work at a mid-size, PE-owned company that's been around for 50+ years, that operates in the enterprise SaaS space. Junior roles aren't going anywhere. But, the expectations of those junior hires will change (as they have evolved since I was junior myself, way back in the 90s).

Will AI change how we hire and retain talent? Of course.

stalfosknight7• 1 year ago

Unpaid 20-something interns fresh out of college are not quite the same thing as what I am referring to when I say junior software developer.

zihotki• 1 year ago

We, at a large Dutch bank, also do have 20+ interns but 0 positions for them in IT department. Leadership is projecting that if you do well in internship then you'll be hired. But no interns were hired in last 2 years...

spacemadness3• 1 year ago

Key phrase is you hired them a few years ago. That’s not helpful in the discussion now.

Edit: Missed this was in response to “extinct for a long time” which makes more sense. It is true that it is an entirely different world than three years ago.

Avicebron• 1 year ago

r/LinkedInLunatics is leaking again.

That said I'm glad this founder is able to micromanage his AI, they sound like a very problematic person to actually work with as an engineer, and if screaming into the void of AI means he is no longer sending vague poorly worded demands, I guess that alone might be worth it

grahac4• 1 year ago

LOL. AI is currently like a mid-level average to good engr who can write good code but ocassionally goes off the rails. Any engr on a team with those characteristics would be heavily vetted in reviews. Almost like a smart CS intern.

If AI was amazing senior level engr, it would be a different story.

spacemadness3• 1 year ago

“I believe I’m at the forefront of a trend…” Trademark LinkedIn. We’re all swimming in a sea of grifters.

coolThingsFirst3• 1 year ago

A large chunk of junior roles have vanished. Tech is neither a lucrative nor an interesting career anymore.

Prompting until you get a somewhat working solution is boring af. I dont want to tell an LLM what to code i want to do it myself. In every bullet point he has the AI word in it.

akomtu• 1 year ago

Pulling the lever of LLM until you see a winning combination is what programming will become. Only the minority will remember the engineering skills.

stalfosknight7• 1 year ago

That is incredibly depressing.

Anelya• 1 year ago

Your take on outdated university curricula totally hits the bulls eye here. We gotta revamp academic programs to match the fast-paced industry tech development and new trends. Junior roles are key, we just changed what the jr role needs to do - prompt, check, re-run, verify... but we need fresh grads ready to crush it with cutting-edge skills.

Pet_Ant• 1 year ago

Universities aren't job training. Universities are for getting foundational academic skills. You can use that to get a great foundation for applied knowledge, but that's not what they are for. Universities are measured by publications.

During my internship my placement suggested on the feedback form at the end of term a focus on more upcoming skills like Flash, Silverlight, and Aero. 3 years ago we'd be telling students to learn blockchain. My education, which included foundational aspects like OS, ended up being more important when containers came around, even when it was "obvious" that Windows was the only OS anyone will use now.

Universities are higher level foundations just like elementary and high school. Not job training. Best course is to get you four year, and then take a year or two for bootcamps and/or community college to get whatever is currently hot and disposable.

RyanOD• 1 year ago

I don't understand how anyone can get to the level where they "understand programming basics, architecture, and what good code looks like" without years of grinding code, collaborating, research, mistakes, refactoring, etc.

To me, the idea that a Junior Developer would understand CS at that level or get there without writing code every day for a very long time seems highly unlikely.

What am I not understanding?

Stwerner2• 1 year ago

I look at it kind of similarly to what the rise of online poker did for texas hold'em. You had people who spent decades playing in person to learn enough to get to the highest tier, but when online poker came about people were able to play 4+ tables at once basically 24/7 at a higher hourly hand rate per table than was possible in person (let alone having access to analysis tools like Poker Tracker). People were able to get very good in a much shorter amount of time.

I suspect we're going to see something similar with Junior talent across the board. A lot of the barriers to actually getting to the core of software engineering for example are going away, and you're going to be able to get orders of magnitude more trial and error attempts in than you previously could in the same amount of time.

oldandboring• 1 year ago

You'll have to forgive me because I know literally nothing about competitive poker. Are there players whose experience is primarily online, who show up at in-person tournaments and lack the "soft skills" necessary to excel in that setting? Preventing themselves from exhibiting tells, etc.

I'm not trying to relate this back to the AI/junior/senior developer question, I'm just curious about the dynamic in poker since you seem to know what you're talking about.

wobblyasp• 1 year ago

I think the only thing that's going to change is expectation around deliverables.

I don't need an L4 to crack out some dirty code now, I'll let an agent do it so the L4 can level their skills up grinding harder problems.

Izkata• 1 year ago

Junior roles, not junior developers. They're useful for exactly the gruntwork you're describing, freeing up seniors for the higher-level or more difficult stuff while learning from it.

The theory is the roles would disappear because now the seniors can just send AI agents off to do the gruntwork instead of having to hire juniors or spend time on it themselves. It doesn't take into account if everyone does this then no one is training new seniors.

recursivedoubts• 1 year ago

"Right. And where, exactly, do you think senior developers come from?"

fch42• 1 year ago

AI breeds them, in cosy vats warmed by the exhaust heat of a thousand GPUs.

somanyphotons• 1 year ago

Its not AI that took the junior roles, it's low supply of positions so the more experienced out-compete the juniors

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

The role of a junior will shift senior, thanks to AI leverage.

The expected knowledge of a junior will shift senior, thanks to AI broadening what one person can do.

The amount one junior can accomplish will increase thanks to AI.

These things have been trends for decades. AI just keeps them going.

Junior Roles Aren't Going Away

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