Comment by Retric
13 hours ago
I’ve gotten plenty of use out of junior devs. The critical bit is what makes anyone a useful worker. I’ve found anyone that’s both dedicated and meticulous is worth the investment.
Sure there’s a wide range of skills and you can’t just hand any task to anyone and expect it to work out but some fresh collage graduates are more capable than the average person with 5 years of professional experience. At the other end you need to focus on whatever they actually are capable of doing. 40+ hours a week can slowly expand even an extremely narrow skillet as long as they’re a hard worker.
And have you compared the output of three junior devs to hiring one mid level ticket taker who isn’t that much more expensive + AI coding agents?
You don’t want 3 Jr devs at the same time because of diminishing returns. Most projects have grunt work where attention to detail is important but experience doesn’t really help much. AI can quickly come up with alt text for images, but ensuring it’s actually useful for someone using a screen reader is a different story.
1 new Jr every 2 years works quite well for a team of 7+ developers.
And that junior dev will probably leave in 2 years because HR won’t allow you to give them a raise to match their market comp.
But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.
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