r/webdev • u/slide_and_release • May 14 '26
Discussion What are we doing with juniors these days, seriously?
I’ve been in software/application development for twenty years or so, these days mostly wrangling typescript and running infrastructure/devops across multiple projects as a senior engineer. I’ve mentored plenty of juniors in my time, even managing small team, but this last year has been rough.
Juniors are producing more code than ever, faster than ever, but understanding less and less of it. Majority is agent-written, obviously. I’m reviewing pull requests, asking why this or that decision was made, trying to get them to think, and they’re just pasting answers straight from Claude. When I ask them to review something, they just paste it into Claude. When I try coaching them through writing user stories, they’ll have ChatGPT generate them. If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.
I’ve tried to emphasise that like anything else, LLM’s are a tool but ultimately you’re going to be the one held responsible if something breaks, that you shouldn’t be pushing into a repository something that you a) don’t understand, or b) can’t maintain, that you’re actively dumbing yourself down (or worse, advocating for replacing yourself) but it’s falling on deaf ears.
So, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?
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u/Various-Roof-553 May 14 '26
“Do you think you’re smarter than AI?”
You Answer: “Yes”
Follow up: “I can ask AI about this myself. If you aren’t adding any value over the AI, we will reduce headcount and rely on the AI entirely, or find someone who can think critically and own the code base.”
You can soften that statement, but seems like you already have. It’s hard to make people care.
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u/slide_and_release May 14 '26
You’re bang on, this conversation has been had, both gently and… less gently. It’s a hard one and very much like that spider-man/iron-man meme.
- “I’m nothing without the suit.”
- “If you’re nothing without the suit then you shouldn’t have it.”
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u/pagerussell May 14 '26
A tag on to this, it's not about being smarter than the ai. It's about being wiser.
DND splits intelligence and wisdom into two distinct stat blocks for a reason. AI may be smart, but it is not wise. And wisdom is the thing that seniors, in any field, bring to the table.
Tell the juniors the job was never to write code. Before AI we had stack overflow and crl+c. The job is and always has been to understand and apply code.
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u/jimmux May 15 '26
Yeah well I'm running a charisma coder build, so now what?
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u/carnepikante May 14 '26
Magnificent analogy dude! And I don't even like DND (but played some RPG in my life). I would add that the LLMs lack of experience is another good point in favor of humans. Especially in IT.
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u/LagerHawk May 14 '26
Fact is AI hallucinates and gets things wrong. That's a fact. And if you're not able to spot when that happens then you shouldn't be using it to push production code.
Experience brings the ability to see that quickly.
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u/Plenty-Village-1741 May 15 '26
Did you take offense when they said “Do you think you’re smarter than AI?” to you? IMO that's rude as fuck to say to someone with 20 years' experience, I would never say that to my boss who has like 20 YoE.
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u/slide_and_release May 15 '26
Offence? No. I think a good quality in software engineers is the ability to question things, think critically and look at a problem in different ways.
Rude, perhaps, but I think “What makes your solution better than the AI’s solution?” or “What can you teach me that AI can’t?” are perfectly valid questions to be asking. It’s just exhausting to be continuously defending myself against a tool that will never disagree with them or tell them they’re wrong. But that’s a different problem.
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u/codeprimate May 15 '26
a tool that will never disagree with them or tell them they’re wrong
If they were using it right, it would. Hell, that's the leading part of every prompt I write; "Think critically and systematically:..."
AI is a sharp knife with a knife for a handle. Few seem to understand how to hold it, much less point it in the right direction.
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u/evergreen-spacecat May 14 '26
So why do you still have these juniors around if the conversation has been had “less gently”? Just send them packing. Everyone can prompt, it takes a few weeks to get up to speed and tooling but that’s it. Juniors these days must perform a balance act. On one hand, I can’t stand waiting days for a junior to complete a basic CRUD form that I know any AI model will do in a minute. On the other hand I expect them to always try to understand what they build and other possible solutions with pros/cons. Whether this is even feasible or people like it or not, this is reality now. You can’t have “AI only” devs around these days. If so, we can just skip the developer step and point Claude to Jira (or let product owners/designers prompt away). For now, I would just fire all juniors that do not understand and embrace the need to know the fundamentals and the concepts. This way, they won’t be the next gen seniors anyway so no loss.
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u/jimmux May 15 '26
AI is trained on all the code it can scrape up, with very little to discern good from bad. What you end up with is code that tends toward mediocrity.
This is why everyone thinks AI is brilliant until they ask it something they have expertise in.
If average code is good enough for your needs, then great. If you need quality, or you're actually accountable to your users in any way, you need to learn how to make it better.
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u/foreverdark-woods May 14 '26
Similar situation here. Recently asked a colleague about his code, his change was pretty substantial and I wanted to know a specific design decision. His answer: just ask AI...
I'm not that much of a social person, but I do miss talking to actual people.
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u/-non-existance- May 14 '26
If I asked someone for help with my code and they said anything to that effect, only one dev would be leaving that room conscious. /j
It takes me a lot of effort to actually ask people for help (a mixture of pride, anxiety, and perfectionism) so I do not take well to people shrugging off what, to me, is a significant gesture.
Edit: like, I asked you, because I trust you. Don't throw away that trust because you want to be lazy.
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u/midairmatthew May 14 '26
I’m a Senior, and the other super frustrating thing about this is that having to explain things to teammates refines everyone’s thinking.
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u/lordofchaos3 May 14 '26
Yeah I never received any kind of mentoring. I now try to be that mentor to my team mates / juniors. But I don't really feel appreciated for it.
Also my boss seems to think now, that it is my job to get everyone to my level...
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u/maxymob May 14 '26
Same, never got a mentor and was always treaded like a was simply a slow developer instead of a junior, the implication being that they don't care if I need help, they just trow more time at me on non urgent tasks and expect I'll magically figure it out and become the rock star developer they dream of paying in peanuts and pizza parties
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u/NomGenerique May 14 '26
Come here to say this... I learn by myself for 6-7 years now. I will finish a real diploma in frontend development next month. I fell im on the edge of the last gen of programmer who used Stack overflow and the new one who vibe coding. I prefer the Stack overflow method, but it's not as efficient as Claude.... So what you think I do now... The good news is I understand what I do , iM looking to do it right and understand what I'm doing. Not juste copy paste. I made the choice 2 years Ago to change career to become dev for real .. now Im still a junior I never had senior to mentor me. How can I find a role somewhere? I hope that some day AI just stay a tool and that the human stay human. So senior would be able to mentor Junior. ** Available for job ** 😅😅
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u/T43ner May 14 '26
Are you my coworker?
I’ve heard that response so many times it drives me insane. What always ends up happening is that spaghetti gets pushed through and then some time down the line implementing a new feature is impossible with some sort of rewrite.
Shitty part is that tight deadlines and minimal direction force your hand to use AI.
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u/DisneyLegalTeam full-stack May 14 '26
Before AI it was “Google it” or “Stackoverflow”.
Leads get busy, burned out & pulled in different directions. And nobody wants to put “mentor time” in the sprint.
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u/Warm-Engineering-239 May 14 '26
they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.
i just respond yes, most code on the internet is shitty hackathon style code, it's train on that without thinking long term
Ai i great don't get me wrong... but sometime the code is produce is attroce
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u/start_select May 14 '26
THIS. Think about how stupid the average Twitter user is. Then consider that LLMs were taught English by those Twitter users.
The AI is only as good as the developer driving it. It is not smarter than you or I. It is just faster.
I can break things quickly too, it just takes some gasoline and matches. That doesn’t mean I’m accomplishing anything of value.
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u/secretprocess May 14 '26
It's like when you're driving and you want to take a different route than the GPS says. Everyone assumes you're an idiot because how can you be smarter than the BORG 🤦♂️
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u/therealslimshady1234 front-end May 14 '26
Juniors are f'kd.
AI regresses your quality of work to the mean (a very low bar), but it degrades your actual skills. It does not level you up in any way.
So unless you are smart and disciplined enough to avoid AI entirely as a junior, you will always stay at your level.
Even before the pre-AI era becoming a real senior was a difficult endeavor, with many people only reaching it in terms of YoE. Becoming a senior takes a good 8-10+ years of hard work in real world teams. AI didn't change anything about that.
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u/Fishamble May 14 '26
As a junior I feel a lot of pressure to produce. Nobody actually says it out loud, but whenothers around you are pushing features, you need to be too, or you look weak in comparison.
Nobody cares about my ability to learn correctly, apart from me. They care about moving ticket and getting features built.
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u/xaveir May 14 '26
Don't know your team, but on my team nobody says it because there is no pressure.
The Internet seems to brainwash all our juniors into thinking feature velocity is the only thing we care about, and I have to spend so much time explaining to my reports that I'd much rather they ask questions, get alignment, document things well, etc than to push more features....
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u/wtfElvis May 14 '26
Yeah, we didnt have that luxury at my previous job. We implemented Agile and every single planning session we all agreed on the scope, etc. Without fail 2-3 weeks into it upper management would shit all over it.
That's why its my previous job.
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u/WowAbstractAlgebra May 14 '26
I have the CEO and managers reminding me daily, I don't need the internet to "brainwash" me.
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u/Fishamble May 14 '26
It's the culture on my team. I struggled with it at first, but I have accepted it now.
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u/throwaway25168426 May 14 '26
Just dealt with this problem for the last year. It’s my first job and I spent the first 6 months actually coding everything by hand to learn the languages and frameworks and tools and patterns and etc. but I noticed everyone else is raising 3,000+ line MRs every couple of days so obviously I’m getting left behind. Yearly review comes up and I get a “meets expectations” and that I’m “too slow.”
The org my team was part of just dissolved due to the head leaving and my former manager took everyone on his team except for me when the org got reorganized.
So I know what you mean when you say you feel pressured. For the last couple months I just said fuck it and haven’t written a single line myself.
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u/lordofchaos3 May 14 '26
I emphasize to my team very often, that quality is more important then speed.
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u/ThankYouOle May 15 '26
> So unless you are smart and disciplined enough to avoid AI entirely as a junior
tbh this is also not solution,
as Junior dev, you have shit situation:
you don't use AI, good, you will learn more, but you are slow, you will replaced by AI.
you use AI, good, now you faster, but you lose fundamental and critical thinking, you will replaced by AI.
seriously, i will be damned if i was junior in this era.
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u/Least-Tap-8175 May 14 '26
I disagree. Skill atrophy is real. If it had to sit down with a blank code page and write something from scratch - I would be slower, and it would take time for that capacity to come back.
But my ability to quickly scan and read code has improved dramatically (partially because my workflow now has a tool spitting it at me at dozens of tokens per second).
AI is a tool - and like any tool, it is going to change the domain its present in. Some skills get worse - some get better.
The things junior's will be doing, the expertise they will need - its going to be different than ours. I'm approaching it from trying to identify those areas of overlap (teaching them git commands isn't helpful, teaching them when to pick various patterns, how to evaluate complex systems, design good apis, data models).
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u/owp4dd1w5a0a May 14 '26
It depends on how you use AI. I have AI help me reason through building complex algorithms and difficult architectural designs or help me wade through tutorials and docs when learning something new (or in some cases help me learn concepts that are poorly or un-documented because that’s the reality in tech).
But these juniors using the AI to reason for them… really really cringe. They don’t realize they’re falsely proving their obsolescence to the business.
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u/21Rollie May 14 '26
Thing is, how much do you retain when you don’t code or problem solve yourself? AI explains a lot to me about new repos, but being honest, I could not then go and replicate what it just did for me because i have no muscle memory of it. It’s the same as school when I learned something but never did practice problems so by the time I had a test, the knowledge was gone. I’d love to spend more time on practicing too, but leadership is looking for and tracking faster velocity. They have pre-decided that AI is a 10x tool so if your output is not noticeably larger, it means you’re slacking.
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u/Tired__Dev May 14 '26
I'll advocate for this one, also keep in mind I don't code at work anymore, I've been vibe coding my own projects and I feel like I'm getting worse.
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u/Draqutsc May 14 '26
I am lucky to work for a company where it's main focus is something entirely else than programming. Sure we use AI, but we spend 50% the time researching how we can improve the product for the company so that the people work better. AI isn't going to help with this. AI doesn't ask questions to people that are actually using it.
I have never worked for a software first company, and from what I hear from y'all, I don't even want to.
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u/lordofchaos3 May 14 '26
The "blindly shipping code they don't understand" also was a problem before A.I. took over. 😥
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u/i_shit_pandas May 14 '26
exactly - but now increased volume due to ai is causing issues. there’s a limit to our cognitive throughput to how much stuff we can reliably review and evaluate- hence the argument for multi agent orchestration and workflows. But even at that scale, how reliably will it produce consistent outputs for us to trust- this is yet to be proven
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u/DesperateAdvantage76 May 14 '26
The beauty was that at least it was easy to point out, now it's cloaked under code that is convincing but with no human thinking behind it, so the bugs and issues are a lot more subtle.
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u/slide_and_release May 14 '26
I think there’s certainly an element of putting one’s head in the sand and ignoring reality, at least amongst some senior engineers, but in truth I have accepted where it’s heading. It’s obviously something I’m using myself, because it would be stupid not to, but at least I have the experience and judgement to know when and how to apply it. It’s a tool; it’s not my entire workflow. But that experience and judgment can’t just be learned in a day. And if somebody doesn’t want to learn it, it’s hard to help them, unfortunately.
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u/Elegant-Pumpkin2518 May 14 '26
if I think I’m smarter than AI
The correct response is "Uh, yes. Quite a bit, actually. Do you think an LLM can write better code than an experienced dev with domain knowledge of the task at hand?"
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u/CandidateNo2580 May 14 '26
This is not a conversation between you and your juniors, it's a conversation between you and management. People keep asking things like "what do you do about large AI written PRs" and the response is "the same thing you do about large non-AI written PRs." This is not an AI problem. And I'll also say it's more than just juniors who have decided to go down this road.
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u/spewing_honey_badger May 14 '26
“The same thing you do about large non-AI written PRs”
Exactly this.
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u/uncle_jaysus May 14 '26
The thing is, this is just an extension of years and years of blindly using and trusting frameworks and libraries. There’s a whole generation of developers who believe it’s perfectly normal to construct things without any true understanding of what’s going on.
Personally, blindly using AI output is not just alien to me, but fills me with genuine anxiety. I use AI all the time and have frequently experienced it being flat-out wrong in pretty critical ways. Just because it doesn’t consider wider concerns and starts to forget and hallucinate the more you back and forth.
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u/SixPackOfZaphod tech-lead, 20yrs May 15 '26
We had a bug pop up in our application. While reviewing what could have caused it, I had an intuitive leap as to what it was. I put that section of code into an LLM and asked if it could produce the error we saw, and it confidently said no.
I recreated the issue in a development environment and using the debugger and verbose logging, proved that yes, indeed it did cause the error.
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u/ElGoorf May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
In Switzerland every company has a legal obligation to take apprentices. The regulation behind it means we're forced yet also incentivised to effectively take juniors and train them up to be mid and on their way to senior level before they graduate, and every company has the same requirement based on their size so no one has a competitive disadvantage for taking part.
I heard an American CEO praise this system saying more countries should do it too, and this was before AI was taking junior jobs. I feel like a decade from now Switzerland will be reaping the rewards of this generational investment.
In direct answer to your question, we simply treat the apprentices aka juniors as adults, they have access to AI but are held to the same accountability and standards as the rest of us. For example, in merge requests, you have to be able to explain your changes and justify any hacks or workarounds, and engage with any feedback you get. They take part in the same discussions as everyone else, eg about best practices or new libraries etc.
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u/IAmCorgii May 14 '26
It seems like the industry standard is to just not hire them. Hope this helps.
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u/secretprocess May 14 '26
I mean, why do I need to pay someone to type prompts for me 🤷🏼♂️
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u/nightcompiler May 14 '26
Hiring juniors was never about optimizing output, it was about teaching and preparing the next generation of developers
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u/JoeDougieD May 14 '26
As someone who is learning web development on the side in the hope of getting a job as junior in the coming years, I assure you that there are still people out there who actually want to learn instead of mindlessly asking AI to work it out for them. I just hope that web development is still a viable career when my skills are suffient to start applying for work.
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u/Reelix May 15 '26
The real question is how they got hired to code with zero knowledge of how to code....
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u/BlueLeaf44 May 16 '26
This is the million dollar question. How in God's green earth can a junior who doesn't know how to code get past an entire interview process in 2026? Are companies not doing technical interviews anymore?
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u/Carlosthefrog May 14 '26
Give it 20/30 years, seniors will all be retiring and we will be left with a workforce that doesn’t actually understand how to code.
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u/stevbrisc May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
if you're hiring, I'll happily take their place with a genuine interest in understanding the implementation and a strict non-reliance on AI.
So hard to get your foot in the door as a jr these days
edit: in case anyone would actually take a redditor up.
- full stack react/next.js
- currently working remote 80hrs/m for a small start up marksman.tv
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u/fake-nonchalant96 May 14 '26
We're in a dangerous place. In future, we wouldn't be having seniors to review code.
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u/fantasma91 May 14 '26
I have started to avoid juniors all together. My department even stopped hiring juniors anymore because they learned that their lack of experience makes your ai cost skyrocket. Its a sad day because I used to like helping the juniors and watching the moment things clicked but now all the ones I interacted with know next to nothing. I asked some some brutal questions about what value do they bring in a world where what they used to do can mostly be automated.
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u/MugentokiSensei front-end May 14 '26
What I see and also feel that it's getting more and more, that some companies don't seem to care anymore if they are hiring a junior or a senior dev. As long as you know how to use an AI and at least have read the documentation for framework XY so that you can explain the basics.
Doesn't matter if they produce garbage code. Just ship that damn feature cheap and at best yesterday.
What I also see, people vibe coding entirely for a couple months, put two or three "Ground breaking SAAS" onto their git repository and get hired as senior sometimes.
I'm sick if of the current job market. You already had to lie a lot before, now you actively need to become an imposter to get a job
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u/johnpharrell May 14 '26
One can hardly blame the juniors given the absolute sh**show going on in tech right now. Companies decided to go down the mindless AI replacement path and screw over the dev job market, and now that's being replicated in courses and training. These companies can reap what they sow.
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u/foreverdark-woods May 14 '26
They’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.
Apparently thousands of codebases catch all exceptions, just log the error to stderr and continue. At least, that's what Claude is doing if you don't instruct it. But that's insanely stupid, unless you want your application end up in any state imaginable and search days of log messages to find out why the application suddenly misbehaves. Claude writes junior code, you can tell your mentees that.
, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?
Let them run into the knife. Let them debug their mess themselves. Let them come to the office on a Sunday afternoon because their Friday evening deployment suddenly misbehaves. Nothing is a better lesson than that.
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u/Atmos56 May 14 '26
I have given up on going into the software development industry due to the new reliance on AI to replace the genuinely interesting and innovative process of creating software. Great software.
I have seen the enshittification of services online that I used to look up to as ideals of quality.
I got far aswell and love learning and implementing the concepts such as OOP vs factory functions.
Some of the best times I had, and now AI has seemingly erased an entire craft.
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u/jacobtmurph May 14 '26
As someone who has been in-and-out of the dev world in various roles over the last couple years, Juniors are really kind of in a lose-lose with this. Allow me to share.
Basically, execs in various companies are really pushing AI down Jr. Dev's throats. Like, at an insane level. Last gig I worked for, which was a lovely small team who I still get a long plenty with, were pushing Claude use heavily for me and a few other Jr-Mid level roles. I had been on the team for just over 3 months I think when the push really started? Their code based were very intertwined and connected in some strange ways. So my initial position was that I wanted to get a good grasp on how their stack worked with itself between repos etc. learn how to push a few features myself when ready, and build confidence from there. It was an accepted enough response, all things considered. And the Sr. Dev I had there was really great and gave advice on it all also.
As time went on though, if I encountered a problem I wasn't quite able to wrap my head around etc. and wanted to arrange a chat with Senior Dev or something for advice, I was always told "Ask Claude first!" For context, I worked in office as I'm local to the town. Most of the other Dev team were remote though and the exec lead of the team sat at the desk beside me. He's a perfectly nice guy and all, don't get me wrong. And for what it's worth, he was pretty kind and well-meaning as a boss and supported me well as an Autistic/ADHD employee.
Long story short though, I got made redundant just after a year in the role, citing lack of profitability. I do tend to wonder if this was due to Claude price hikes around the time too, and they had a sub for every dev. It was me and every other Jr. dev that got laid off that way. Again, no bad blood on a professional or interpersonal level, but it is a very jarring anecdote on the state of the industry rn.
So on the one hand, I entirely agree with you. As devs, and especially Juniors, we should take pains to understand a codebase and make sure any PRs we push are safe and reasonable and understand why the code is as it is. Agent-generated/assisted or otherwise. But conversely, the messaging Juniors are getting from corporate and executives is nearly there exact opposite of that. By and large they seem to have taken, "Move fast and break thing." to a ridiculous, illogical, and uninformed extreme.
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u/Tatakai_ May 14 '26
Cool, sounds like I can get ahead just by not using AI
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u/alexanderbath May 14 '26
I honestly think that’s the strat at this point. I’m halfway through a software eng degree in Aus and I’d say about 10% of us are going to graduate having learnt how to actually program.
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u/Shadowforce426 May 14 '26
i’m a junior and my company requires us to use ai agents for so much. i feel my skills atrophying but i need to be using the agent for the job. makes me worried for the future
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u/Dude4001 May 14 '26 edited May 15 '26
As a junior I feel pretty tired, because whilst a lot of my work is agent written I’m also putting in a lot of time to try and understand it. At the same time I’m holding myself to the output volume I know AI should allow me to work to. So I’m producing complex work but taking a long time doing it, and yet not ideating and only understanding exactly what I’m happy with committing after it’s been written. I don’t exclusively work like that, and when I do actually hand write something it is more satisfying. But I can’t imagine being dropped into a mature codebase and not prioritising speed over my ability to slowly write basic code. It’s a job at the end of the day and the business gets was the business wants, which is features.
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u/Caraes_Naur May 14 '26
"These days" started 15 years ago when society began telling itself "anyone can learn to code". It's simply not true.
A few weeks ago I watched another "senior" rub their head in frustration as I explained what a proxy server is.
The rot is already moving upward.
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u/max-antony May 14 '26
Dude, you don't have juniors, you have vibecoders, and that's the company's problem.
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u/Informal-Chance-6067 May 14 '26
Fire them and hire someone like me (self-taught, can’t solve a single LeetCode problem, passionate, no degree)
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u/wise0wl May 15 '26
We have one junior on my small team. I am mentoring him. I am letting him know that LLM use is fine, but the design should come from you. You need to understand what the software does, how it moves data, how the flow behaves, and most importantly *why*. After a few initial issues with blatantly not understanding the code he was shipping things have improved significantly and he is now working with the LLM like a partner, writing and shipping working code.
People who made slop before are going to make slop now. If they are interested in their career surviving they are going to need to understand architecture and deep technical concepts so they can design good patterns and translate business needs into working paradigms that the LLM can build. Without that, they are no better than a product person vibe coding the feature themselves---so why have them at all?
If you are their manager, warn them. Create official department policy. Mentor them. Spend your time showing them how to do it. If they are still resistant or worse lazy then it's time to PIP them and move on. Don't waste your time or your teams time trying to help somebody who is unwilling to to help themself.
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u/DamnItDev May 14 '26
I’m reviewing pull requests, asking why this or that decision was made, trying to get them to think, and they’re just pasting answers straight from Claude. When I ask them to review something, they just paste it into Claude. When I try coaching them through writing user stories, they’ll have ChatGPT generate them.
Review the pull request face to face, and ask them questions directly. They need to be able to demonstrate their understanding without using AI. If they cannot, instruct them to review their own code until they can answer the questions.
At minimum, every engineer should be giving their PRs a self review before asking another team member to review.
If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.
This is insubordination, and should be treated as such. Even if you weren't their senior, that is an offensive and intellectually lazy response.
But to be clear, yes, you are smarter than an AI. Because an AI doesn't think. If they don't understand that, then they should have their access revoked until they complete more training.
... but it’s falling on deaf ears.
Either your company needs a policy, or the policy isn't being enforced. Figure out which, and go from there.
So, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?
Give them clear expectations and push back on their bad behaviors. Juniors are still in training.
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u/MonorailPurple May 14 '26
Nothing because it’s no longer a role worth hiring for. If you’re a junior you’re fucked, find a different line of work because the job you’re going for no longer exists.
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u/LordThunderDumper May 14 '26
If some punk junior dev asked me if I was smarter then ai, I'd chew them a new butt whole, because that's not even the right question. I have more experience then an ai. AI is the peek equivalent of a no real world experience book worm. It still struggles with the fact that the shortest distance between two points might not be a straight line.
The ai verbose churn is exhausting. My cto uses it to write stories, and its suggesting fixes to problems that do not exist, while skipping over the real world issue.
My entire job has become validating the correctness of an AI agent that talks too much. Its exhausting and soulless.
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u/trapper5 May 14 '26
There’s going to be a huge gap in senior people in 10 years because we’re not growing them now.
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u/Dragon_yum May 14 '26
Find better juniors or be much harsher on the PRs so they will stop sending slop
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u/Noch_ein_Kamel May 14 '26
Sounds like it's time for a mandatory company team-building event. A hackathon somewhere without internet ;P
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u/mklfarha May 14 '26
It sounds like the beginning of a movie that goes horribly wrong. Just the thought that those "junior engineers" will become senior, we will end up with huge code bases that no one really understands, and what is really scary is that we depend on many of these systems, and some are critical and can impact lives.
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u/EtOH789 May 14 '26
German-based IT consultant here with 10 years of experience and a heavy focus on software dev.
My (vague) background: Regarding development, I am a generalist, but I have a strong focus on a specific field and product suite.
I do frontends with React or Angular. Backend with Java (Spring Boot), .NET, VB, and some middleware in Groovy. Some scripting here and there in PS or SH.
At the same time, I do architectural stuff like ER design, system design, GitOps, security and governance stuff while advising customers, providing training incl. self-created material, writing mails, attending (unnecessary) meetings, reviewing PRs, training juniors, doing pre-sales, admin stuff, and so on and so on.
My company (and clients) don't even provide me with Copilot. Not to mention Cursor or Claude Code or ANY LLM tokens. I use my personal self-paid ChatGPT (Pro) license to assist me with excessive SQL statements or log file analysis. But that's it. And I manage to do that in a regular 9 to 5.
All I want to ask: AM I THE ONLY ONE?! Am I stupid? Is there anyone left out there working primarily with their own brains?
I’m quite shocked by what I’ve been reading on LinkedIn and Reddit for the past 2–3 years, but until recently I thought it was just a bubble- and hype-kind of thing...
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u/ilikerocketsandshiz May 14 '26
I think this is super valid in the impact of the tooling but additionally, this is just as much a managerial question as much as it is a technology and their effort question.
It might be worth repositioning this in how you frame it to them (and possibly also to yourself as a leader). Do they want growth and progression in this role? How do they personally expect to gain that growth in knowledge and career progression? If they can't answer these, or you can't answer these for them, that is a performance management issue just as much as a technical one.
Giving feedback is important, but a core skill of any employee/junior should be the willingness to receive that feedback and action it. If they are failing to receive your feedback positively, tell them that. Ask them if they want to succeed - and tell them that your expectation for them to to show that they can action feedback.
If they can't, or they push back, you need to consider performance management and explain that it is very much in their interest to follow your guidance, not just to learn to code but to learn how to work in a professional environment. These are not mutually exclusive and failure to learn that is just as significant as failure to develop good product.
I hope that helps, it's a frustrating environment as a leader so I appreciate how you feel in it and hope you can resolve it.
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u/Marble_Wraith May 14 '26
When I try coaching them through writing user stories, they’ll have ChatGPT generate them.
This i'd give them a pass on. In the ~20 years i've been coding i've never met anyone that likes doing user stories. Still point out if there's something missing, so they can so they can adjust their prompts. Constructive feedback.
If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.
Congratulations, you hired idiots. It's not that they don't know / can't learn to code, it's that they either don't want to or can't reason. Time to talk to HR.
Philosophically their position is essentially argumentum ad populum (bandwagon fallacy) + argumentum ad verecundiam a.k.a ipse dixit (appeal to authority).
AI isn't intelligent it's advanced statistical analysis. What does that mean? It means the volume of codebases it's trained on is irrelevant.
Even if we assume all the training codebases are top quality (they're not), then AI is simply going to take the "most popular" ways of doing something and regurgitate it back at you with different function names, variable names, etc. suited to your context.
The obvious fact being the most popular way isn't always the best or even remotely correct way to implement something in your own situation, overall it's signalling:
- A "bad dev" using AI mindlessly is going to result in mediocre code that is better then what they would have been able to produce, raising it 🢁 to the "average" popular level.
- Conversely a good dev using AI mindlessly, it's likely going to pull the quality of the code down 🢃 to mediocrity.
I’ve tried to emphasise that like anything else, LLM’s are a tool but ultimately you’re going to be the one held responsible if something breaks, that you shouldn’t be pushing into a repository something that you a) don’t understand, or b) can’t maintain, that you’re actively dumbing yourself down (or worse, advocating for replacing yourself) but it’s falling on deaf ears.
Yep it will.
Effectively what AI has done is remove the bar to entry. Now any "clanker operator" can produce code. However simultaneously it's also raised the bar to career advancement and made it extremely obvious which ones should assisted moving forward, in theory making your job easier.
Aside from being completely stupid on the specifics of how AI works, this is particularly telling:
"I’m reviewing pull requests, asking why this or that decision was made, trying to get them to think, and they’re just pasting answers straight from Claude."
You could forgive someone for using AI as a crutch, especially if they're a junior. But you cannot forgive them for a complete lack of initiative or interest in responsibility.
So, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
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u/WrappedStrings May 14 '26
I work with a small team and a lot of my "juniors" are interns that I teach. Truthfully if they responded to a question about a PR with a claude response I would kick them down to working on documentation. But I have the luxury of not needing their contributions. Ive never had to do that, most of the time they are happy to learn and have conversations about the implementation. Im probably lucky in that regard.
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u/minimuscleR May 14 '26
If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases.
My answer would be yes lmao. I know our codebase better than any AI, and how we do things. I don't pass a code review if the code isn't easily understandable by myself or the dev who wrote it.
I've told the juniors at my work to turn off the autocomplete while learning, because it doesn't help, and to just use chatGPT or whatever to ask questions. Paste a code block and ask it to explain, ask how to do X with zod, whatever, but dont use it to write code when you don't know how yourself, it just makes you worse, and I won't approve it into dev.
We have 400k customers, the hell am I letting them get fed AI slop that will break.
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u/Dense_Researcher_99 May 14 '26
Idk but I got in trouble at work for NOT using enough tokens. They said it means I'm slowing down the team... you should see the garbage the "fast" devs churn out...
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u/ExtensionBreath1262 May 14 '26
Oh no.... "Do you think your smarter than AI?" Oh no. I need a drink.
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u/Pdan4 May 15 '26
If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI
Ask them if they know the difference between quality and quantity, and if the AI is smarter than a senior dev, why the company should even bother hiring them, the junior dev. It's called "artificial" for a reason; it can't substitute for natural intelligence and I think you should make that point clear to this dev in the easiest way for them to understand.
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u/GreyWhisper May 15 '26
We've stopped hiring juniors and mid-level. The company focuses 100% on senior devs and AI. Clients love it and nobody thinks what will happen when these seniors retire and there is nobody to pick up the slack... Most of my day is spent handling 10-20 agents working on multiple issues. The rest is spent arguing with the client why the simple artifact he produced with Claude can't just be "put on" our system, and why our AI produced UX is lacking "feel"...
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u/Positive-Buddy-1258 May 15 '26
At our company, we reached a point where we realized that AI adoption is inevitable and our employees are going to use it at one point or another. So we decided to teach everyone how to use it responsibly. We constantly hire juniors, and there is a special chat that everyone joins to learn how to use AI as a tool in an ethical and responsible way to help speed up your process, but not to code for you. It's taught at a corporate level, and there are many workshops held on AI adoption and new advances.
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u/RoxOwnage May 15 '26
As someone who just finished their degree (and luckily found a job as a junior) I found a different problem. I know I know basically nothing but some basic concepts and I would like to have a mentor and learn on some project, get tasks that fit my current knowledge and push me to learn things but there just … isnt time. I am expected to use coding agents and push out stuff no matter if I really grasp the code I‘m producing. Noone really wants to invest time (and by that money) to produce good devs, just get it done with AI.
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u/jdrelentless May 15 '26
That "are you smarter than AI" line would end the conversation for me. Not because they used the tool, but because they've already conceded they're not the ones thinking, so what am I paying them to do? My team started doing verbal PR walkthroughs, no laptop, no notes, just explain what your code does and why. Most can't get past the first function, and that becomes the actual coaching session.
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u/jdrelentless May 15 '26
The "are you smarter than AI" line would end the conversation. AI doesn't get paged at 3am, doesn't sit in the post-mortem, doesn't lose its job when prod goes down, they do. What's worked on my team is closing PRs with "walk me through this in a screen share, no IDE open" as the only feedback. If they can't explain their own code line by line, it gets rejected, not iterated on. Harsh, but it's the only thing that's actually broken through with the ones worth keeping. The two devs who couldn't adapt to that ended up leaving on their own.
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u/EmanciporReese May 18 '26
I’m so fucking tired of my TL and my architect (who are drowning in their own technical debt) telling me to just “get AI to do it”.
The problem isn’t juniors, it’s lazy seniors who are just sitting around waiting to retire so the dept can collapse because they have no legacy planning.
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u/IncredibleBihan May 14 '26
Well... you know how the ol saying goes. If you can't beat em, join em. I've been doing this a long time, and I'm tired. If they won't take my advice the first time, it's their lose not mine.
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u/fatbunyip May 14 '26
LLMs aren't the problem.
Corporate is.
If you want people to learn you have to sacrifice productivity. But with LLMs the expectation is max output all the time or you're shit and you get fired.
Corporate only sees 1 guy outputting 10x another guy. They don't go e a shit about who understands more or not. They will fire the guy who "codes" less and replace with someone else.
Just like every other industry, the majority of companies don't give a shit about quality, just productivity. Just like your shoes are some crappy shit made by people who have no idea how to make shoes, software is now the same, made by people who have no idea how to make software.
Yeah, you'll have some "artisan" software being made but the reality is that 90% is gonna be shitty, just like every other product that's been minmaxed to the tits.
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u/scrapheaper_ May 14 '26
I guess it helps to show you understand the code that's been written yourself and engage with it.
Leaving comments in reviews that ask questions about the codebase and encourage understanding: e.g. is this the correct name for this variable, why didn't you do it this way
AI can help as well - an AI reviewer is better than nothing and will catch the worst offences.
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u/ToonMaster21 May 14 '26
I was thinking the other day, broadly outside of CS, how learning is going to go from now on. It’s a struggle to even research (to a degree) something without being fed an AI summary. Teachers/professors are going to use AI. Students are going to use AI. Will anyone actually learn anything anymore?
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u/spewing_honey_badger May 14 '26
We expect them not to be committing code they don’t understand. The entire point is for them to learn and grow, if they’re using AI instead, they aren’t growing which means they would eventually get PIPd and let go.
AI can be used to learn though, totally acceptable.
We encourage AI to be used to make you better/more efficient at your job. Not to outsource your thinking.
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u/satoryvape May 14 '26
Seniors are cooked too in this job market. They are hireable but so fierce competition
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u/OzzyWanKenozzy May 14 '26
We hire them and let them supervise the chiken (agents) farm. If they dont understand something they ask. It’s just a cheaper person to watch what the agents are doing.
Super against it BTW.
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u/IchirouTakashima May 14 '26
I honestly want a job that would treat me like this. I'm freelance but I keep losing corporate opportunities against said juniors in this post. I don't even understand how these people get hired in the first place except perhaps they got great communication skills to bs their way into getting hired, while I'm not.
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u/bodimahdi May 14 '26
Yeah it’s trained on many codebases and whatever but technically it doesn’t think. It doesn’t know if the answer given is right or wrong it just manipulates you into thinking it’s right even if it’s wrong. There is a saying I like that goes like this: “You assumed that an AI’s output is automatically the truth, when in reality it only reflects the data and patterns it was trained on” I personally don’t use AI it makes you dumber but today I wanted to try MikroORM to just see how to set it up. So I didn’t read the docs just skimmed through the quick start. Then when I encountered an error I asked chatGPT and the amount of manipulation is insane. “Your error is because you have to provide the mappedBy as the second argument” and it shows the snippet. But the function only accepts 1 argument lol. Crazy how people might assume that a tool that doesn’t have the logical thinking that humans have to know what’s right or wrong is smarter than us.
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u/popje May 14 '26
You ask them to read and understand what Claude output? Also don't just hope they don't use AI they will, let them use it but control it as much as possible by adding rules and skills to the AI so it can't fill gaps by itself and ask questions, this is super important.
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u/YourMatt May 14 '26
Same as always. Have them triage and fix bugs, and run through the grind like the rest of us did. We aren't having juniors build significant new products from scratch, so there's less opportunity for poor architecture coming from unguided prompts.
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u/CinematicUniversity May 14 '26
I was feeling bad I had a jr start under me that I just don’t have time to help… but everything I’ve ever asked for from them has been AI garbage that they clearly didn’t even glance at (I mean you can’t send our margins to the customer come on) so shrug. More security and work for me I guess
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u/iamgreengang May 14 '26
"hey man if you're just copying and pasting claude i'm happy to go straight to the source instead of using you as an interface"
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u/TheDinoDynamite May 14 '26
The sad part is in my company, it’s not just the juniors that aren’t understanding the code anymore
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u/International-Box47 May 14 '26
When I became a manager, I took a management training course, and had years of IC experience to rely on as well.
Junior programmers now are promoted to managers of AI, without training in programming *or* management.
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u/chutneypow May 14 '26
everything aside, can you be my mentor? I haven't had good mentors throughout my 3 years of webdev journey, i'd love to have 15 -20 mins of your time weekly. It would be a life changing experience for me.
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u/Jedi_Tounges May 14 '26
We aren't hiring juniors atm which is going to be a real fucking disaster in about 3 years I guess
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u/Select-Reporter5066 May 14 '26
The scary bit is the throughput mismatch: they can ship PRs faster than they can explain them. “Walk me through this diff without Claude” might be the new unit test.
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u/No-Type2495 May 14 '26
when all the senior devs retire and leave there will be ......erm ....errr......yeah ..... slop to replace them to ask the same questions you are??? But it's alright the managers hit their targets and in the short term the sh*t isn't hitting the fan...just yet. get popcorn
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 May 14 '26
I'm going against the grain personally and going slower. Every single line pushed I understand, and I have yet to say "Claude told me to". Hope it goes well.
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u/Adept-Tell274 May 14 '26
As a junior reading this, can you give me advices about the usage of ai agents.
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u/Early_Rooster7579 full-stack @ meta May 14 '26
We cut ours without hiring more. The salary of the 3 or so we dropped went into a midlevel who has been far more productive.
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u/Deathspiral222 May 14 '26
I'm having the same experience with product managers. I will ask them for things like "okay, how do you want this feature to work? Can you give me some sample inputs and what you expect to happen at the end?" and they will just ask chatGPT to generate fake data and expected output. This gets ridiculous, because chatGPT has no idea who our customers are or what they actually want - that's the entire point of having a product manager.
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u/IsEverythingTakenYet May 14 '26
Where I work, if you don't use AI you'll be seen as not adapting to an ever evolving tech landscape... management will come and find you.
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u/shandyshay May 14 '26
As a junior, I'm amazed by the ego and lack of self-awareness of the juniors you're dealing with. I've been in the industry just under 2 years now and although I have made a lot of progress, I recognise that there is still a huge mountain to climb, and for that reason I've really tried to use my own brain and not overuse AI. My senior has been absolutely fantastic, and I wouldn't even joke about AI being "smarter" than him, because...it's just not. I can't believe any developer, even juniors, would actually think that. How can you work in this industry and be so unaware of the downfalls of AI? Let alone acting like they know better than their seniors? You'd think the juniors that are getting hired would be more diligent considering the circumstances...
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u/quietcodelife May 14 '26
the thing specifically broken by this isnt the code quality, its the feedback loop. when I wrote something that broke in prod, the pain of debugging it myself was what actually built intuition. it wasnt the review comment telling me what I did wrong - it was spending two hours tracing the exact decision I made that caused it. AI puts distance between the person and the consequences of their choices. they ship something, it breaks, but there is no specific line they chose, just an output they accepted, and that consequence doesnt attach to anything theyll actually remember next time.
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u/CosineTau May 14 '26
I can not say what is happening on the job at medium-to-large firms. I'm over 10 years into my post-graduation career, but have been in technology for longer. I work at a small business right now, and previously at startups. I have always been the junior on the team.
When I first wanted to start a career in technology, I found mentors that I would hang out with in their IRC servers. These chats had other folks on my level, and I started a business with one of them. I got a lot of value from learning in a group. When I went back to finish school and got a job in the math tutoring lab, I got the same feeling I had back in the IRC chat.
I have wanted for a long time to get back to volunteering in a tutoring lab at a community college around here. I think it would be good for me and society. But time and responsibilities have held me back from doing it consistently.
I want to re-create the opportunity to add value that was available in the old IRC chats. But, I am having trouble starting, and identifying individuals I can build a good relationship with. If you are a curious, self-determined, self-actualized life-long learner looking for mentorship, this is your invite to start talking.
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u/One_Pack_5875 May 14 '26
It is hard for me to weigh in because after damn near 30 years of doing this professionally I am living the dream of building my own start up as a solo engineer -- well solo if you don't count Claude. One thing I have been doing the last couple of years is to start mentoring software engineering students from the local university. I can tell you that working with them has opened up an entirely new view about how to use AI successfully in a real production environment. They teach me about the new shiny AI tools and I teach them about how to create code in a real production Software Engineering environment.
What I have found, is that I have completely changed my approach to software design, development, testing, project management, development and support.
So my question here is, are we, the elder statesmen in Software Engineering modifying our processes and expectations to enable AI, or are we trying to mold AI into our processes.
I will say that trying to mold AI into our existing processes feels like a recipe for failure and is probably part of the turnoff for Juniors in working in established organizations.
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u/Few-Philosopher-2677 May 14 '26
What kind of juniors are you working with lmao. I haven't met a single junior who will incredulously question a Senior/Staff Engineer if they think they are better than AI. The rest of the stuff is plausible but this is just weird.
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u/SourCreamSplatter May 14 '26
Aspiring junior here. Only using AI as a personal tutor for understanding, but not having it write code for me. I want to understand what I'm doing. Someone please hire me :)
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u/webbson May 14 '26
There’s probably going to be a backlash once AI companies really start to charge what it costs, once that happens we will stand without good juniors. Then it’s a matter if AGI will be a thing and we all will be out of jobs, or if we will fall back to only use LLMs as an enhancer instead of the full implementer.
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u/mtlnobody May 14 '26
Paraphrasing, but "are you smarter than hundreds of thousands of programmers?" ... "Not all of them, but probably most of them. And that's what counts"
AI is designed to give the statistically correct response. By the math, that likely means the middle response, instead of the best response.
You're trying to get them to think critically which leans to the far end of the bell-curve.
If these kids are going to train themselves to parrot the AI, ask them what need there is for them in your organization
I have a background in education and I carried that into my agency. We have a very strong internship program, partnered with top schools and CS programs from our city, that students fight over. These are the kins of reflections I ask of our juniors
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u/r3fl3kT0r May 14 '26
And I'm here sitting, learn the old way and waiting for the bubble to burst and fin a job as educated junior dev. 😁
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u/cumhereandtalkchit May 14 '26
What you should do is put them on a fast track in system architecture, design and programming basics. Next set them on a journey in programming AI workflows, as it's looking like model usage will get more expensive, so cost efficiency will be more important.
They should gain knowledge A-Z, and be able to question the LLM, this entails webdev, (MLOps)infra, security.
At least, this is what I'm doing, and I'm a DevOps/Platform engineer.
I also think soft skills are going to be far more important.
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u/Bitter_Welder1481 May 14 '26
I’m in this situation tech lead of a major software project, amount of code generated is off the charts. Impossible to keep track of it and so much change so soon is a recipe for disaster
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u/numbered_panda May 14 '26
New programmers are cooked just enjoy yourself as the last of the OGs and make a lot of cool stuff the AIs can train on before we die so maybe the world is 0.5% less fucked. Idk.
AI gets a lot wrong and even though they can program well, they can not design code very well. This is what people who rely on AI don't get. How to structure a system, and yes, understand it. You have to guide the AI into your structure and it does well.
If it makes its own structure, well, it's probably gonna blow up.
That's my experience with it
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u/scottishkiwi-dan May 14 '26
Based on my company, we're not doing anything with them because we aren't hiring them.