So far, I'm really struggling to see the value add of a junior engineer given how good the models have become. A senior with Max plan beats three junior hires (very rough estimate).
Having spoken with a few peers (founders), they have expressed similar feelings. I want to hire juniors and see them grow, but I feel my bar of expectations is at an all time high, and perhaps unrealistic.
Those are generalizations but in my experience, once the 5-Year mark passes, a junior is pretty much always a better colleague than a senior.
This is not to say that you should not hire seniors but you need a good mix of trainers and trainees. Training employees can also make a senior much more effective at his own job.
And a good junior will ask questions in a design/architecture session that an AI likely wouldn't. This is a good thing to get the group thinking. It also seems that people tend to have better business context than the AIs.
What juniors are sticking around at 5 years? The market reality is they can likely 1.5x-2x their pay by switching jobs, unless they started at FAANG or some other ultra high paying co
The future of OpenAI and Anthropic is contingent on a lot of factors which can (and maybe will) just vanish overnight. If China "invades" Taiwan, or if the data center buildouts completely stall, AI is going to be in a very precarious spot.
If you’re the type of person or company that would hire an outsourced team overseas without hesitation, then LLMs would probably be fine for you.
A single staff-level engineer with 4 concurrent agents on a Max plan replaces 4 seniors and 12 junior hires.
It's okay to say that we want don't need to hire any human programmers anymore since they are the bottleneck. But the strong disadvantage is that these agents need humans to tell them what to do.
If you think otherwise, look no further than the Huggingface hack and what happens when they run completely autonomously. Not only that is a waste of tokens, it can cause you to be legally liable for damages if something terrible happens.
And yeah... have seen all the jargons come and go. DOS, Novell, Windows NT, xml, soap, next, BSD had a moment, chef and yada yada...the vague hand wavy semantics to 2010s web saas will not be spared
The most common shared cross continent language for whats going on is math... stats of state of memory registers
The jargons conjured up on the fly to do office work 30+ years ago all fade away; how many startups went all in on COBOL during the RoR era?
So yeah; hard pressed to recommend tethering juniors to useless jargon as we have most of my career.
I think it all comes down to what the they did during their studies and how they've spent their time. So I'd judge them based on the things they've built and their experience using AI tools. These days you literally have top US companies like Sierra asking their candidates to vibe coding a project as the coding interview.
I personally spent a lot of time and money building with Claude Code and Cursor. Probably more than you would at most companies, especially an intern: full days (weekends included) and about $5,000 in 2 years on tokens. During my sophomore year, I went so hard building agents with AI, I skipped all my classes and barely passed my subject, which got me Tier-1 VC inbounds. So the junior engineers in their early 20s can be more proficient than senior devs.