Software is Losing Juniors Faster Than Ever Before

Photo by Jackson Sophat on Unsplash

As software developers, we are used to being part of a talent shortage. People were always willing to pay us for our rare and valuable talents. 

When software houses could not get any.

That is changing.

In the here and now

Escaping the junior software development experience trap

In many companies, junior developers are just helpers of Senior and Middle developers.

They are the rule takers and not the rule makers in the organization.

That means junior developers are often not given a chance to grow and develop their talents. If junior developers are not allowed to get better, they do the only logical thing at that point.

Let’s all job hop.

At a good company, developers were given opportunities

Ideally, junior developers would be given tasks that suit their capability and that would allow them to benefit from the experience of more experienced developers. 

In 5 years or so a developer would be well prepared to take on that senior role or a good mid-role at a great company.

Yeah. I wish we were all in good companies.

I understand that this can degenerate into junior developers being given routine and boring tasks that take a long time but do not require any specialist skills.

How AI is changing everything

Simple tasks are for AI

Instead of giving junior developers easy tasks to complete

*cough* web development.

Now? Get GPT-4 or Copilot X on the case. If you put a couple of junior developers on the task you might find it going wrong and your juniors keep wanting to come back with *queries*. 

Yeah. Juniors are annoying. You’re underestimating how annoying AI is as well though.

As OpenAI improves GPT-4 and the other technologies improve companies will sit up and take notice (even more than now). They’ll do that in terms of cost savings. 

Complex tasks are for seniors

We’re looking at a world where we might use AI for simplistic tasks. We then use experienced software developers for more difficult tasks.

So how will experienced developers gain that experience?

Conclusion

I’m scared. I guess I’ll be working on my own in a vertical with awful coding standards forever without a junior to work with.

Probably a good thing.