Throwing the Babies Out With the Bathwater

A defense of Junior Developers

Apparently, a bunch of larger companies have decided that, as AI makes their more senior developers more productive, they can thin the ranks of more junior staff.

I believe this is a short-sighted move for all the usual reasons, and also for a reason I haven’t heard expressed before.

The Usual Reasons It’s a Bad Idea

• With no junior developers, where are tomorrow’s senior developers coming from?

• If the end result of this move is that all code is AI generated, then where do those AI train on new paradigms, frameworks, languages, and so on?

• I’m anticipating a massive and public failure some time soon: a large company going out of business because of code that no-one understood did something catastrophic. When that happens, the rest of the world will retrench somewhat, and all those junior devs you let go today are suddenly going to be in demand.

Another Reason It’s a Bad Idea

Junior developers (really, any junior members of staff) have a real and unique benefit.

No, it’s not that they’re cheap.

It’s that they are both naive and enthusiastic. They are the toddlers of the industry, untouched by the world-weary cynicism of the rest of us. Unlike us, they don’t know that “you do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.” They don’t know that an idea is ridiculous, or that something can’t be done. Like toddlers, they’re happy to try stuff and learn, and they almost expect to fail often—it’s no big deal.

This has always been an untapped resource. We rarely listen to these tyros when it comes to making decisions; they are basically cannon fodder, thrown in to do the grunt work.

But what if, when the AIs make your senior devs 5x more productive, you pause before laying off the rest. You take 20% of that savings, and use it to keep your junior devs at work.

But change the focus. No longer view them as code generators. Instead, treat them as what they are: the next generation of senior devs. Give them space. Let them make mistakes. Try to listen to their crazy ideas. I’m betting that some of those ideas, once tamed, could fundamentally improve the way you do things.

I also bet that these junior devs, who have grown up with AI, will find new, and better, ways of exploiting these coding assistants, ways that might not even occur to people who are adapting to AI after a career spent manually coding.

It requires a little faith, and a little courage. But it might just be the factor that lets you succeed while the more short-term companies decline.