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by kneebonian 1191 days ago
I see it the other way around the senior engineer is expensive and costs a lot 2 juniors are cheap. Who cares if their code is crap they produce it really fast so they find a bug, just fix it quickly. If anything the time a Sr. spends thinking about things to do things "right" is seen as a waste of time. Whereas the jr. will produce an enormous amount of buggy code but they can fix the bugs quickly by just throwing another prompt to ChatGPT to solve.

Now some might say that the code will be terrible quality and buggy and full of holes and the users will hate it, it is never economically viable to build enormous systems on a house of cards like that. To which I respond, you just described every piece of enterprise software I've ever used ever.

1 comments

Because as soon as you tilt from producing features to fixing bugs, you are losing traction and your competitors will win and now you are bankrupt.

I've seen entire businesses collapse because of this mentality.

Yes, this is also why senior engs get payed so well. Actually if you are junior dev you basically cost money, imo. However a lot of companies hire those in hopes they will make their career and stay longer - especially startups do that, as they can slide on the company culture hook way more. Also they need them as senior engs require equivalents of "secretary" to handle less import things.

I don't mean to sound mean, senior devs are also secretaries of their cto and so on.

Tell that to SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, or a dozen other enterprise software vendors.
> you are losing traction and your competitors will win

i mean, unless your competitor produces order of magnitude less bugs than you, how can this be true?