This article talks a lot about AI, but what I find odd is that in my relatively short (but long enough) ~9 yr career so far, this problem predates AI. I don't deny that it exacerbates it, but you don't kill a disease by addressing the symptoms. From the first time I was ever involved in the hiring process, senior leadership always encouraged me to hire more experienced staff, always most heavily scrutinized juniors, and had negotiations fall through with mid-level candidates the most. This was despite juniors passing technical screens with strong showings. This was not at a Fortune 500. This was a micro-cap subsidiary of a private, billion dollar company.

And although it hasn't discouraged me, I have to admit that I've been burned by juniors when caught in the middle between them and senior leadership on output expectations or strategy because frankly it's much more challenging to mentor how to navigate company politics than it is to mentor professional coding acumen. I want to be humble here. I don't think that's the junior's fault.

It feels like these problems go a lot deeper than AI. Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team. We've all experienced this. It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.

You're not wrong! I'm the original author of the post, and yes, I've seen this trend for years now, too, but I was using those two research studies that I cited as the basis of the article, so I started looking at it from that lens. I think the problems go deeper than AI, too, which is why I touched on corporate incentives. Ultimately, my goal was just for teams to think about how it could benefit them to invest in juniors and for college students to know that they need to prepare for a challenging ride if they're majoring in an AI-adopting field.

We may have some things in common. I'm not a mom, but I am a woman. And I don't want to assume the same is true for you, but breaking into this industry was difficult for me, so even without children, I'm really invested in the ability for juniors to succeed too. I wish I had responded more directly to your article rather than my general ennui. I really admire your willingness to write this. I hope it gets broad engagement, because I think these problems seem obvious to us but based on private conversations I've had with some industry peers in very senior director roles the drying of junior opportunities for growth is not readily obvious to them. I'm going to have to think more about the corporate incentives you mentioned, because reading that in the article, it feels deeper to me, and I think that's what I was trying to get at by sharing my past company details.

I think you succeeded overall at your goal! Thanks for replying. You encouraged me to go back and read your article more closely.

I appreciate the positive feedback. :) And yes, I was a career changer, so it was difficult for me to break into tech, too, so it feels a bit personal for that reason, as well.

Yes, AI isn't helping but the corporate world has been doing this for decades! Junior devs are second class citizens internally. I don't blame them for moving on after a few years.

I guess I should clarify too: I don't believe in junior titles. They handicap people into the position you describe where they must move on to progress. When I describe "junior" above, I generally mean a candidate with <=1.5 years of experience. When I say mid I mean any amount of experience greater but not senior according to technical review. And yep, I know this is not the best heuristic because there are definitely people with no working experience who have mid-senior coding skills (although they're rare). I think that's sort of part of the problem too. Senior management is disincentived from understanding the roles and growth trajectories, so our heuristics for hiring are totally warped and stomped on.

I agree. I wonder if it's a mix of fully remote work being popular some time ago and the amount of tech one has to know now increasing (DBs, backend, frontend, cloud, observability, security, etc.). When hiring remotely, people naturally try to find candidates who are very communicative, have a high level of ownership, and can work with or without clear requirements and without oversight. That latter set of traits is often associated with senior developers rather than juniors.

>Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team

Well that explains why AI excacerbates this. It's all they ever wished for and they don't need to make do with that facsimile of "human interaction" anymore. It's not perfect but that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.

Or you know, they just really want to be as cheap as possible in production (hence, outsourcing).

>It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.

I'll give a slight BOTD here after my disdain above and admit tha a small team probably isn't the best enviroment to train a junior. Not unless you either

a) truly believe that the skillet you need isn't out there, and you are willing to train it yourself to alleviate your workload, or

b) you are thinking long term efficiency and are willing to lose early productivity to power the future prosperity. Which, to be frank, is not how modern businesses operate.

And yes. Any teacher in any field (but especially education) will tell you that the star players make their day, week, and year. But the worst cases make you question your career. Our natural negativity bias makes the latter stick out more. Those in industry won't get star players as they are either filtered out by these stupid hoops or gobbled up for 100k above your budget by the big players. It's rough.

I don't know for sure, but it's definitely the first tool of that value to have a persistent strobing (scroll position) bug so bad that passersby ask me if I'm okay when they see it.

Man, I had never even put words to that problem but you are right that it is beyond annoying. It seems to me like it worsens the longer the Claude instance has run - I don't seem to see it early in the session.

Yeah, issues have been open on GitHub for months. I've tried shortening my scrollback history and using other emulators but it doesn't seem to make a difference. It's pretty frustrating for a paid tool.

ha I thought it was just a me thing and had have accepted my fate.

A social lesson: don't yuck other people's yum.

If your “yum” lowers the quality of a community I’m in, welp,

LLMs can be used to quickly mulch data into a digestible format that at least used to take effort. Friction is a natural deterrent for bad behavior. Beyond that, however, is the fact that your user interactions with most applications used to be quite coarse. A "customer story" was just that: a story we crafted from the data we have available to us about our customers. We have to build it from heuristics like bounce rate, scroll distance, and other thorough, idiosyncratic and diligent abandonment metrics.

Now why bother? Your customer will ask their silver ball (LLMs) anything and everything, and you can directly do bulk analysis on (in theory) the entire interaction, including all of your customer's emotions available via text.

Lastly, your customers are now eager about this tool, so they're excited to integrate/connect everything to it. In a rush to satisfy customers, many companies have lazily built LLM integrations that could even undermine their business model. This pushes yet more data into the LLM. This isn't just telemetry like file names, this is full read access to all of your files. How is that not connected to privacy?

Come down to Ojai valley. They'll be crawling all over you in no time. I grew up in the east. Most of the ticks we had at least couldn't even carry Lyme or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. California is wild.

For GP's sake, even before you make it to FYPM levels of angry, you will be in over your head. It's too much work. I remember being very early in my career and feeling like GP does. This is very easily more than a full-time job. The demands people will make of you and the attitudes they will use to do it will make you crazy.

What strikes me about this exchange is no one is talking about the money. In the past, you could do either and no one had to care except you. Now a lot of jobs that people could find fulfilling aren't because the economy is so distorted, so how are we supposed to honestly look at this? I guess let's walk these people off the plank and get this over with...

I remain convinced that RSC and the SSR craze was a result of someone (or multiple) people needing a raise and their friends wanting to start a company selling abstract compute. Statically hydrated, minimal React was pretty great when served over good CDN infrastructure. Then I watched the bundle sizes and lock-in balloon. That second article is a dragon slayer. It really lays out the problem with React. In marrying itself to Next.js and embracing the server, it's betrayed the platform. Meanwhile, the platform itself has matured. React practically built my career, and I just don't have a reason to choose it anymore.

SSR isn’t a craze. Web applications have been served that way for literal decades now.

Read it in context. There's nothing wrong with SSR.

I agree, if there is a death of React it will be killed by Next/Vercel.

I probably shouldn’t care. I’m just not looking forward to the chaos of another full “turn” in JavaScript, akin to query->backbone or backbone->react.

Maybe I shouldn’t fear it. I’ve just yet to see an idea that feels valuable enough to move an entire ecosystem. Svelte, HTMX, etc… where is the “disruptive” idea that could compel everyone to leave React?

Being responsible for the peak of something and having the power to undo it but choosing to do nothing produce the same result.

By this logic, you'd also have to blame Gen X and Millenials, as they've all been voting for at least a decade (and together have outnumbered baby boomers for several) but single family zoning continues to persist

I, a Millenial with a very active voter record, increasingly do. What seems to be the problem? Perhaps I should point out that representatives still must bring issues to bear, and the age of the average representatives has only very recently dipped into even high Gen X territory. Regardless, if your goal is to spread a little bit of the recent blame around, by all means, don't let me stop you. We should do something about it.

That's a big question. I think TUIs are great for glue processes, and it doesn't hurt when they look pretty. They're also excellent first projects with composable interfaces. Shell code is such a pain. It's quick and dirty, but there are a lot of footguns. The main challenge is reducing the friction of making a TUI to the point where it's easy to execute an idea, and a lot of frameworks do this really well. Add the proliferation of LLMs on top, and maybe that could explain it?