Post #2761480
2026-05-22 11:09 UTC
Replies (16)
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@timfreund@mastodon.xyz 2026-05-22 11:58
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us and those intern career arcs are some of the accomplishments I'm most proud of. We take a tiny chance, they do great work and launch fulfilling careers.
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@numodular@c.im 2026-05-22 13:49
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us Apropos for the ultra-processed food industry, in artificial #USpol "Early career", meet #EmergingEconomies in #DevelopingCountries, where organic includes well-rooted origins. Makes for a better trajectory than the precipitous fall, the US is championing.
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@emc2@indieweb.social 2026-05-22 14:14
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us Words that stick in my head: always look at what someone could become with the right support and guidance.
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@gbsills@social.vivaldi.net 2026-05-22 16:26
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us This was good. When I first interacted with GitHub Copilot, I felt it was like an automated junior developer without an ability to get better. This includes Copilot cutting an pasting code found on StackOverflow and GitHub, just like a junior developer. So, of course, business guys would decide "hey, we can just hire a senior guy to code review the AI code. What could go wrong?" And no, other AI coding tools are not any better.
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@NotYourSysadmin@infosec.exchange 2026-05-22 18:38
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us I think it's very important for us to take lessons from the manufacturing industry here. In the US at least, it's incredibly difficult to make anything domestically. Complicating things further, a Smarter Every Day video from several months ago found that, not only have we lost the ability to make things, we've lost the ability to make the things that make things. In his case, he found that finding folks who knew how to make the molds and metal stamping components was difficult to impossible to find domestically. And we're gladly walking into the same trap with knowledge work. It isn't enough that we're outsourcing software development itself. We're outsourcing the ability to make new software engineers. (And, being an Ops person, I'd argue that we're doing that with all knowledge-based roles in general.)
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@cdonat@hostsharing.coop 2026-05-22 20:01
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us At the same time those same companies tell seniors looking for a new job, that they're too old. Not flexible enough. Kept up to date for decades in one of the fastest changing industries. Not flexible enough. Sure! Developed the current technologies, but not flexible enough to use them in their work now. Sure! Like they think, they don't need software developers at all any more. They're wrong, but sadly confident.
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@zimzat@mastodon.social 2026-05-22 21:33
This likens back to Netflix (circa 2014) showing they rarely hire Interns/Juniors, to which someone gave a memorable response in the form of "If you don't hire juniors, you don't deserve seniors" in 2018. https://dev.to/isaacdlyman/if-you-dont-hire-juniors-you-dont-deserve-seniors-48kb The industry has been making moves to avoid hiring Juniors, or training _anyone_, for a long time under the assumption someone else will do it or everyone will "sink or swim" on their own (externalizing the cost to individuals). @raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
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@0x4d6165@transfem.social 2026-05-22 22:54
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us "Every senior engineer alive today got their start doing the exact grunt work they're now saying juniors don't need to do. That's not progress. That's pulling the ladder up behind you."
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@marco@mastodon.skup.in 2026-05-22 23:29
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us Thanks to that mindset I can't find a job. Companies keep telling me "you don't have any work experience, come back in 5 years". It's so frustrating. Recently I got my first job offer in 9 months and it was a full time Full-Stack-Developer position for MINUMUM WAGE and 0 benefits.
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@FenTiger@mastodon.social 2026-05-22 23:42
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us Caveat: the "people who know more than they do" have to be willing to share their knowledge. If they act like some kind of high priesthood, you'll just turn a junior engineer into a pissed off senior engineer who works for someone else instead.
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@shapr@recurse.social 2026-05-23 01:06
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us what if we train them and they leave? Answer: what if you don't and they stay?
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social 2026-05-23 03:05
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange Oh, My, God. This is *exactly* what I've been telling people at my work. And it's nothing to do with software. You simply *can't* sustain talent if you don't invest in it. Which means, as you say, hiring juniors and *spending money* to allow seniors to actually train them. Instead, we underbid contracts. In order to deliver on that, we have zero room for any training or mentoring: our seniors are fully tasked with deliverables. We're eating our seed corn.
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@a_cubed@mastodon.social 2026-05-23 03:30
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us @jamesmarshall@sfba.social I gave my business schol Information Ethics class on AI last week and stressed exactlythis point. Whether LLMs can do the work your junior people can do or not (to an acceptable quality/price), betting your business on the LLM being able to replace senior people in ten years is a bad business decision.
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@aspragg@ohai.social 2026-05-23 15:23
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us I was with the article right up until > Juniors in 2026 aren't going to spend their days writing CRUD endpoints. But they can review AI-generated output, learning to spot the subtle wrongness that only develops through exposure. Will they though? I thought there was plenty of evidence out there that humans evaluating machine output that's kind of ok much of the time tend to get pretty blind to even the blatant mistakes when they pop up.
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@derf@masto.ai 2026-05-23 15:29
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us This is such a great article. It perfectly explains a feeling that lots of seniors will have had. The thing that I think we miss when we ask “how do you get seniors without hiring juniors?” is that the plan is likely to be *not* have seniors either. To the greedy CEO, if ai “can replace” juniors, maybe it will mean one day (soon) they don’t have to pay those senior salaries either.
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@compfu@mograph.social 2026-05-23 20:18
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us Thanks for sharing this great article! Another very good point that I haven't seen quoted here is this: "...someone is always learning the system from scratch, which means someone always has recent context on how the onboarding works (or doesn't), where the documentation gaps are..." I'm currently onboarding a new colleague and it's incredible how often I notice that docs are outdated or some context only existed in my mind so far.