Comment by sharperguy
6 months ago
On the other hand, that extra money can be used to expand the business in other ways, plus most kids coming out of college these days are going to be experts in getting jobs done with AI (although they will need a lot of training in writing actual secure and maintainable code).
Even the highest ranking engineers should be experts. I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best.
Using AI isn’t rocket science. Like you’re talking about using AI as if typing a prompt in English is some kind of hard to learn skill. Do you know English? Check. Can you give instructions? Check. Can you clarify instructions? Check.
It's interesting because usually correctly collecting requirements and specifying a program is more difficult than actually coding it. Especially when you get into things like building secure, maintainable, extendable applications, that integrate well with legacy systems and so on.
> I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best.
Because junior engineers have no problem with wholeheartedly embracing AI - they don't have enough experience to know what doesn't work yet.
In my personal experience, engineers who have experience are much more hesitant to embrace AI and learn everything about it, because they've seen that there are no magic bullets out there. Or they're just set in their ways.
To management that's AI obsessed, they want those juniors over anyone that would say "Maybe AI isn't everything it's cracked up to be." And it really, really helps that junior engineers are the cheapest to hire.
> plus most kids coming out of college these days are going to be experts in getting jobs done with AI
“You won’t lose your job to AI, you’ll lose it to someone who uses AI better than you do”
Not any different to losing your job to someone who knows the next JS framework though. And we know the standard ways of protecting yourself from that.