I'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI.

What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because of AI, then that is daft although I can understand a period where companies are deciding whether they still need 50 Developers instead of 20 + AI.

For me, the worst change for Juniors is remote working. I don't want the experience of newly qualified engineer being sitting in their bedroom all day chatting to people on Teams and not knowing when they can interrupt and when they can't. We used to have an office so we could at least do 2 days per week together but we don't any more. The banter, the office, the observation, the overhearing things is a critical part of both learning engineering and learning how to be part of a workplace.

I think it is less about junior engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.

This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.

[0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...

Well, maybe you've been blessed with a better pool of juniors than the ones I've worked with. The ones I've worked with require exactly what an AI would require -- completely defined tickets with no ambiguity, lots of deliberate review, no guarantees that what they produce is bug-free.

At least with AI if it's not working out you just shut it off and it's done. If it's a person's livelihood that process takes a huge burden on all involved.

I agree with you about juniors and remote work - but like everything else: just figure it out.

Your customers aren't sitting next to you several times a week, yet they have no problem paying you and expecting you to get your job done. Sure, you might need to meet in person a couple of times a year but if you're smart enough to use a computer you can figure out how to work with someone in a different location. The issue is probably not the distance.

> we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months

The sad reality for smaller companies is that we cannot compete salary-wise, which means training juniors that will leave the minute they become productive

But mostly the issue is with the market, there are only so many things you need a junior to do in a body shop that is getting squeezed

Other companies are also cash constrained and need to pivot fast to "AI"-something, which juniors wont really help with on the short-term

Totally agree about remote work for juniors. Even as a senior I feel like it's diminished some of my skills, in spite of all the benefits it brings.

> What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do?

I used to use the new hires to hold expertise so that I can spend a weekend at the beach without getting paged. That was the true selfish incentive in spending negative productivity where it takes me more time to teach than to do.

AI absorbs knowledge that the company can keep when I leave.

This used to be a capacity and bandwidth issue, as well as a timing issue with spare time.

I couldn't spend 9 PM to 11 PM on an odd Thu doing this with a human.

Agreed wfh to me is just generally bad for any creative work but for a new person it must be taking aways years of development.

The goal is prevent homegrown talent, and give a reason to import H2B of offshore.

I think you really want to look at this in terms of the fact that it was already getting difficult to convince companies to hire junior engineers. They already don't want to pay for the inevitable several months of training before they're working at full speed. They want someone to be productive for the money now. And senior engineers are probably more productive per $ than juniors, even if the seniors are getting paid more. It doesn't help that a lot of people in our industry like to switch jobs every two years (which is, of course, further not helped by the reluctance of companies to give raises rather than hire new), which means there's a good chance they'll do nothing but pay their training only for some other company to harness the benefits. And companies, especially publicly traded companies, want decisions to benefit the company in the next quarter, and while that may not be immediately on everyone's mind during the hiring discussion it does trickle down.

But the junior will do at least some real work that hopefully benefits the company while they are there. There is at least something on the "benefit" side of the cost/benefit balance to entice them.

The problem that AI creates is that it tends to eliminate even that benefit. The task I would assign to the junior as their first task, which I expect to take them some weeks on as they not only do the nominal task but acquire all the surrounding skills and knowledge to finish it, is now a prompt and the senior engineer intermittently checking in on the AI's completion of it. It's hard to justify hiring the junior and paying them for six months if the senior can do the task(s) they'll finish before they jet off to their next job in a fraction of a day or two.

I have written this from a point of view that is foreign to me to explain the problem from their point of view. I do not accept this formulation wholesale, though there are substantial kernels of truth in it that anyone who wants to convince a real person that they are wrong about this assessment will have to deal with. I'm a very long term oriented person and still believe that raising up talent within your organization is extremely important. After all, in the end, what even is your organization except the talent you have within it and the system you've built for it to operate? Unless you think you can operate without any people at all, people are a vital part of your organization and you'd better be growing the best people you can or you can expect to get beat in the long term by an organization that did invest.

But when I look out at the world, what I see operating in most people and companies is much closer to the point of view I described first. That "beat in the long term", however long it may be, is certainly longer than one quarter or even one fiscal year.

I guess a lot of this depends on whether you consider juniors to be part of your talent pool. Unless you are retaining them, it is just subsidizing industry at large to train them.

I stayed less than a year at my first two jobs. They bet wrong.

You’re in a whirlwind of propaganda at the moment. The talking points and takes are mostly planted. Even the title has an inner circle nod to it.