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- Hacker News
- A senior engineer would always be able to out engineer a junior engineer, the point of hiring junior engineers was always that you could pay them less than a senior and hopefully keep them on board with your company and develop into leadership or a more proficient engineer. In addition, newer employees end up bringing fresh perspectives and keep the company from eating itself while also being more malleable and likely to go along with what you think are best practices. I am still wrestling with the way that software engineering will work in the long term with AI, but I feel like the value proposition of hiring juniors hasn't really changed.by MiiMe19
- It's a tough time to make those decisions. I really don't know what juniors will do. Continuity is a real cost, but a long term one. So, early on definitely doesn't make sense, especially when you are laying a foundation. But afterwards, you have to have some form of continuity to maintain the product and the cheapest and best way would be to bring on young talent.by jdubya859
- Just because you are a founder, does not mean you "are" the company. To build culture as a company, you need people to "grow up" within said company. To be sustainable for a long term, it's more important to have a team that is familiar with your company, the way you do things and the issues you encounter along the way. Someone "growing up" in your company will be way more valuable long term. Sure, you might say a senior dev will be able to grow much the same way but 1. He will cost more upfront 2. He might have (justifiably) have higher standards of his own and leave you for a better offer 3. He will be less flexible in trying out new things
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.
by finnlab - Hi fellow founder here, just sharing some thoughts. Agree that with AI more eng work can now be handled by a senior dev but a good junior dev using AI is also more capable than ever. I think with a good process in place, you can ramp up a junior dev sooner rather than later. And as good as AI is, there's still a human bottleneck, so I'd assess the quantity of work you have vs. the technical complexityby nagalluri
- This question fully captures my two main problems with the current AI-fanaticism. I've said it a million times: writing code was never the hard part and in my world has always been the most enjoyable part of software.
First, to me, the two major differences between a junior and a senior developer are(or used to be, I'll get to that in a bit):
1. Intuition: software is all about compromise and knowing when you can, should and should not cut corners and at what cost really is, to a very high degree, intuition(and some auxilary technical knowledge). 2. Domain knowledge.
Both come from, you guessed it, experience.
The second part is junior developers in general - from what I see, they are commonly completely detached from reading and writing code. Currently Gen-Z are entering the workforce. For many of them(vast majority), cut off their connection to the internet and they struggle with a simple while loop. And they look horrified when I tell them that 15 years ago, we were writing code - SVMs on a sheet of paper as exams. Same goes for all the people who said "oh well, no need to write the code if the AI can do it for me". Seeing people with two decades of experience turn into idiocracy characters is painful. Like in a year I see the seniors revert back into what juniors are today - completely incapable of formulating and facing a problem without an LLM on their side. And worse still - they will never admit it but I see how much they stop being passionate and just roll with everything.
The other thing to consider is burnout: take a senior that understands your service or product completely: in a real world scenario you know that no system is ever going to be perfect. You can only push someone so far with mountains of small, medium and large tasks and tell them "what's the big deal, you have unlimited slop max pro"? The big deal is small and trivial tasks which, with or without AI, require context switching which is exhausting. It's not a question of "if" but "when" will your senior get burned out and toss everything at slop max pro++ and just collect a paycheck for as long as the company is around or something better pops up. And in that same context - if you come to me with 5 jira tickets and tell me they have to be done by the end of the day, do I really have the time and mental strength to pay close attention to all of them or just be like "hey slop, see this ticket? do it? when tests pass, deploy". At this point, my question is, am I a senior developer if I was practically never in the loop of what was done?
by axegon_ - If you want to move extremely fast in development/programming, you are right that you are better off with a good senior with Max Plan. But running a company/startup is not just about writing code. So the question is not about junior vs senior but about what type of humans you want to hire to help grow the startup. Start there.by codegeek
- It's not about junior vs senior. it's about hiring a competent developer. There are competent junior developers and there's plenty of useless seniors. Besides these, what you are building matters. If you are not dealing with hard tech, then a junior with a model could level up fast. If you are building complex hard tech then experience matters a lot for judgement, however some juniors could still keep up. The bar is at an all time high, but for everyone, seniors as well.by segmondy
- > A senior with Max plan beats three junior hires (very rough estimate).
If you have seniors doing the job of juniors, you will soon have no seniors either. If you have a senior doing the job of 3 juniors (which is different than doing 3x kind of tasks), then your senior will burn out and leave as well.
Also, as senior I enjoy working with juniors because I like to teach and share (with seniors that’s also possible but happens way less often). Working in a team of full senior+ engineers is not fun (in regular companies I mean): too much ego, politics, bias… no open to change
by sdevonoes