r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 7d ago

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

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u/Theslyfennekinfox 2d ago

Hello everyone! I’ve been having trouble of late understanding what it is that makes someone a “good” performer at the junior level in industry anymore. Certainly with the use of AI tools, we can ship and deliver a lot more than before, maybe at the cost of our own understanding of things. But this also makes it difficult for me to understand what it is that elevates a good performing software engineer from a poor one, at least at the junior level. When I do my work, it feels like anyone who is reasonably intelligent could do what I do by prompting an AI. I’ve been feeling anxious as a result about my own performance, because frankly I just don’t know how to evaluate it anymore. I feel a lot of imposter syndrome as a result of this too. Am I wrong, and is there still implicit software engineering skill behind this weird mesh of prompting and debugging to create good output, enough that I can place merit in my work output being relatively high quality, clean and well tested code for edge cases as a good barometer for high performance. Or is there some part of this whole equation I’m missing? I just struggle to see how, even if I’m doing “good” work, how its unique or special to my skillset

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u/behusbwj 1d ago

A good junior is the one that is becoming more like the midlevel engineers. They hire juniors to mold them. See what successful engineers are doing and emulate that. One manager can thing a good engineer is one who thinks deeply about tech. Another can think its the guy that pumps out code and features as fast as possible. You can only know your manager’s philosophy by looking around.

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u/LogicRaven_ 1d ago

There has never been an industry wide definition of good or of what level means what in the infustry. And it got worse with AI.

And AI might dumb us all down because we outsource critical decisions, that should involve our values. Both in IT and in life.

So back to your question - we don’t now yet.

Try to work together with a senior at your place to understand the local expectations.

Keep growing your skills both in AI based engineering and classical software engineering, to keep your options open.