[stalfosknight]

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.

[alistairSH]

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.

[zihotki]

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...

[stalfosknight]

That is a great example of the kind of bullshit I'm talking about.

How exactly are people supposed to reach a senior level if they aren't allowed to be junior developers first?

[spacemadness]

People have been asking the executive class this for a long while now: why don’t you care about training? Their response has ever been silence or threats or that’s what school is for. Do it on your own time, after the 50+ hours we demand from you. Some places get it and had a proper pipeline to train. A vast majority do not. And now they give us this. Great bunch of folks.

[coolThingsFirst]

Basically the idea is become a senior at your own expense. Work for years without pay and only then get a job if and only if the new AI models by that time hasn't made mid or senior level engineers redundant as well.

[stalfosknight]

…but how?

If no one will employ you to formally give you a verifiable senior title, how exactly is that supposed to happen?

[stalfosknight]

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.

[alistairSH]

We pay our interns, as required by local law.

[spacemadness]

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.

[grahac]

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.

[stalfosknight]

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.

[grahac]

Totally fair. Sorry you had to go through that.

Yeah the joke is companies want to hire someone who is already an expert in that role who is curious and a fast learner, without realizing that if someone is already an expert who is curious and a fast learner, they probably want a different role to grow into.

[stalfosknight]

I don't mean to shit on your article. I think the general gist of it is correct; what it means to be a software developer is going to radically change for all levels, not just we mere mortals without the magical word "Senior" in our titles. Being fluent in prompting and supervising AI agents are going to be more of the day to day than cranking out lines of code.

I'm just (I think justifiably) a little salty because not that long ago LEARN TO CODE!!! was the mantra for those who wanted to step up into a middle class life and now every executive and their mother is frothing at the mouth over shoehorning AI into anything and everything and pulling up what little of the career ladder exists while they're at it.

[sublinear]

Yeah people still need to learn to code. Anyone frothing at the mouth needs to see a doctor.