[deadbabe]

I had a frank conversation with a hiring manager about it.

What he said was even if we hire juniors, juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI.

So basically, today’s juniors are not worth investing in. Until society really sorts itself out with responsibile AI usage in a way that still develops independent professional skills, there is no point in hiring juniors. They will just be a more expensive version of whatever AI agent they use, which can be used directly by seniors anyway.

Companies today do not have to really worry about who replaces the seniors, that will be a problem for newer companies in 20 years or so. In time a solution will arrive naturally.

[musicale]

> juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI

this does not seem to be an argument for requiring junior employees to focus on using AI tools

[vanuatu]

thats interesting, the HMs where I work love hiring juniors (who pass the bar) because they are so AI-native

the more experienced engineers can help with setting guardrails and mentorship, but the juniors come unconstrained by priors on how to use ai in creative ways to solve all sorts of business problems.

[deadbabe]

That just sounds like a good way to end up with solutions like AI agents for parsing a text instead of a deterministic regex.

Juniors have no advantage over seniors in AI skills.

[mxkopy]

I love how the basic expectation of having a job and the life altering circumstance of not having one factors into this not even a little bit

[deadbabe]

Not sure what you mean, juniors are a poor ROI these days.

[JesseTG]

They mean that juniors have bills to pay, too.