Bleak. This flat and fast structure assumes that ICs are all senior devs, able to be largely autonomous. Who supports the junior engineer who is struggling?

There’s a lot of talk about how AI shifted the job market away from junior roles, but companies had already removed the management capacity for them.

▲

entrepy123 2 days ago | parent [-]

Is there a newer 'be autonomous' culture? Or did I just grow up a bit?

10-20 years ago people would love to talk about technical topics. Ask help, give help, offer pointers, debate merits.

Now I guess we ask AI, figure it out ourselves, and/or grin and bear it?

What happened? Is it from remote work? Or everything's easy now? Or nobody wants to stick their neck out? Time constraints? Knowledge gaps?

I don't struggle, exactly, but I run up into all kinds of situations where there's no obvious best choice (everything's awesome and everything is too limited all at once), so either some tough choices need to be made or maybe there IS a better way but it's just VERY non-documented or too much of a PITA to do right away (or simply, silo'd and well-protected).

There ARE avenues to get things done. There ARE multiple valid channels to ask or follow up in. The answer is basically: do it, don't ask. And yet...

GIVEN an culture/expectation/want to be "autonomous" (heck that's what agents need to be, mostly), I think something is missing.

It's like people learned somewhere "be independent", "be autonomous", "don't require help" as somehow "virtuous" outside of the "normal" bounds.

Am I the only one noticing this? Or did something shift?

	▲	vikramkr 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's a new culture. Combination of AI making junior engineers redundant, new grad skill levels cratering if they used AI to skate their way through college, and filtering through job applications being functionally impossible with huge floods of perfect ai generated resumes etc leading people to fall back to hiring through their network instead of applicants from open listings (and senior engineers are going to have better developed networks). And at least personally (+ for people around me) - AIs increased productivity comes with increased cognitive load and workload. Plus you don't want to take a risk on training a new grad anymore because usually they'll leave after a couple years, which was a good thing since you'd backfill with a new grad some other company had trained/ideas circulated in the industry/early career engineers built their networks and got exposure to different tech stacks and company styles etc. that's really tough now too since nobody else is hiring and training juniors so you would be wasting time and effort training some for some other company to hire away - nash equilibriulm vibes. So yes something shifted- the new grad/junior market is in the gutter rn. And if AI plateaus in this range of capability idk what happens as the current generation of engineers age out/retire. The juniors that aren't being trained today are going to lead to a vacuum of senior engineers tomorrow.
	▲	tdeck 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I always thought "be autonomous" meant "don't sit around waiting for someone to notice you're blocked", not "never consult with your colleagues".