The legal industry has already figured out that LLMs can draft routine documents (and make massive mistakes) as well as a graduate lawyer, but that’s not the point.

That industry has properly recognised that this is where people learn the skills to do more complex, higher value work.

Hiring a junior dev is a luxury for big companies that can afford to tie up senior devs tandem coding with a junior for months, then giving easy projects to the junior dev with extensive code review and hand-holding for another year.

I don’t think anyone has the budget for that anymore - not even the big companies. It’s two years of negative $ output for the $ you put in and after those two years the junior dev leaves anyway for a more senior position.

This aligns with my thinking that juniors can leverage AI to become seniors much faster than people without AI but there are important concepts about learning debugging, learning how the underlying technologies work, etc. that is crucial to becoming a senior dev. Just using AI to pump out code without knowing the details of how it works will not end up going well for the long haul.

The real issue is wage expectations. In 2 ways

1) For the last decade many juniors have had unreasonable salary expectations that have often still been met. Now there is an alternative that's a lot cheaper and doesn't come with an attitude.

2) It's generally agreed that for the first year or 2 in your career you aren't that useful; after that you start to add lots of value quickly. But salary expectations don't double when you go from a junior to an intermediate - maybe they go up 25%. It's clearly much better value to hire only seniors if you can find them.

I'm not saying these are right or wrong but a whole article about juniors that doesn't mention wages, and just tries to implore companies to "do the right thing", misses the point.

Not only does your fancy AI junior randomly spew bullshit back at you; that happens with humans as well; but it keeps doing it, never learning anything.

Managing one or several of these idiots has to be the worst job ever invented.

We have one junior dev in a team about a dozen. They have had other roles with us, both at the current job and previous ones. We know they are smart, reliable, and motivated. It's a no brainer to spend time on training because, combined with the skills from other roles, they are likely to have a lot of leverage.

But it's hard to imagine committing to the training without the history.

> Indeed, companies that try to staff only with experienced devs face a pipeline problem. Without juniors today, there are no seniors tomorrow.

This one seems like a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Defecting (hiring only seniors) is rational in isolation, but if everyone defects, everyone loses. What incentive for a smaller company to hire and invest in training the junior if in two years they'll leave for a larger company anyway.