GoKawiilThe Kids Are Really Alright
AI didn't erase the junior's value. It increased it.
“AI ate the junior’s marginal value”. This is the feedback I got from the last post on this topic. According to this argument, the work of a junior engineer goes something like this:
There is a need for a solution. Someone more experienced (a senior engineer) plans it and designs it.
The senior engineer breaks down the work in multiple small tasks, clarifying the steps to be taken. Each task is given to a junior engineer.
The junior engineer executes it, which nowadays means prompting it to an AI tool, and creating a pull request (PR).
The PR receives feedback from more senior engineers. The junior engineer gets the feedback and takes it to the AI tool again, proposing changes.
Repeat until done.
If the process above is what happens in practice, why do we need a junior engineer? They are just passing through requests (and sometimes adding noise) from one place to the other, and they cost a full time salary. That’s fair.
Before we jump to conclusions, let’s look at a different story. Or maybe the same story, approached in a different manner.
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