Forever Junior: The Skills AI Can't Develop for You
A junior engineer at Criteo fears that AI agents, by doing the learning for us, will create a generation of forever juniors. To avoid that fate, he deliberately builds three human skills: curiosity (making the agent explain its decisions), reviewing (emulating senior feedback patterns), and handwriting (occasionally coding without AI). The goal is to become the senior who writes the comments, not just a junior with a good skill file.
That’s the extinction I’m actually afraid of: not Software Engineers disappearing, but Seniors disappearing — as we all become forever Juniors, only ever qualified to review one agent’s work with the help of another.
- alexpotato
Many years ago I was working at a firm that investigated stock pump and dump schemes on Yahoo Finance message boards.
We had to scrape the boards and then analyze messages to see if we could identify the identity of the people running the schemes.
This was 2002 and I wasn't aware that the LWP::Simple existed in Perl (aka the requests library in Python).
I ended up using basic TCP socket libraries to connect to port 80 and do http requests. It was, to put it mildly, a major pain in the ass.
That being said, I learned a TON about how http, tcp, html, etc all work together. 20+ years later, I still use some of that knowledge when analyzing network protocols at work.
I mention this b/c nothing is stopping people from doing similar projects now. e.g. Linux from scratch [0] is one great example of learning fundamentals even though we now have 1 click "launch me a Linux VPS" options.
Joel Spolsky make this point too. Even if you are using Java, it's still helpful to understand how CPUs interact with cache because the highest performance comes from optimizing the whole stack.
- t0duf0du
Not to take away anything from this guy but man, my mind just stops registering information after lines like this: `As a Junior fresh out of school, “still learning what I’m doing” isn’t a caveat — it’s the job description`
- bironran
I fully agree. I see this today, even "so early" in AI adoption (it's been ONLY a couple of years!). I'm a firm believer in "know the stack all the way to the bottom". Possibly I'm an extremist, I believe every developer should at least know a little bit of assembly and maybe even run the NAND game (build a computer from NAND gates - https://nandgame.com/). But basic skills lead to deeper understanding of the elements in the stack. Exactly how TCP works. BGP. Why "it's always DNS". Interrupts. Virtualization. What the hell is PSI. Why kernel space is not user space. JVM allocation pressure. String interning. Concurrency and thread sync and "why isn't my code working multi-threaded" or even "I'll just sync through the db".
I don't know how to solve these. I tried Java internal tech talks (internal to my company) but most devs just weren't interested. I try ad-hoc with sessions with devs but very rarely I feel a bite.
The pipeline is collapsing. In 5 years, who will be the next senior devs? I have so few candidates to look at, and no new ones at all.
- tech-historian
This blog post renders horribly on my Chrome browser. Then I realized it's because Ghostery is blocking a lot of it. Looks okay in Incognito mode.
If your site doesn't load basic UI elements because they're designated as ads, you're not doing it right.
- pitched
The skill required to get an AI to cooperate is not the same one as the craft of coding. Typing what it says out yourself will never get you there.
It’s like calling yourself a mechanic because you brought your car to a shop and paid for a mechanic to do an oil change.