Juniors are not as capable of delegating to AI as seniors are. Delegation to AI requires code review, catching the AI when it doesn’t follow good engineering practices, and catching the AI in semantic mistakes due to the AIs lack of broader context. Those things are all hard for juniors.

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ragebol 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't that the point, to be able to learn that.

The craft changes with all these AI helpers, so the juniors have to also catch up/change with it. Or there won't b any seniors in due time.

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ixsploit 14 hours ago | parent [-]

It's really not an easy problem to solve.

You would hire someone with the expactation that they learn, but you also need to pay them. New hires always slow the team down. And currently you wouldn't even get much out of them, as you can delegate those tasks to AI.

Additionally you can not even be sure that the junior will learn or just throw stuff at AI. The amount of vibecoded Code I have to review at the moment from Seniors is stunning.

So yeah, the market needs Seniors, but there is basically no incentive for a company to hire a Junior at the moment. It's just easier and cheaper to pay a bit better than the market and hire Seniors then to train a Junior for years.

	▲	ragebol 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That has always been the case. The market price for seniors will go up significantly if the supply drops. It's just shortsighted to not train any/enough juniors as an industry. Shortsightedness, what else is new