The Junior Dev Role Will Look Different With AI

What's going on, guys? So, I was reading an article a couple days ago. I think it was the CEO of of AWS saying that replacing junior developers with AI is the dumbest thing he's ever heard. And I tend to agree with him. And I just want to go over some points that you may or may not agree with when it comes to just AI and junior developers. [Music] So, before we jump into the video, I just want to let you know about today's sponsor. So, I think we've gotten way too used to just giving up our personal information and trusting every platform that we use. For instance, we start to talk to chat bots like they're our friends without realizing that everything we type is actually being stored and turned into training data. And if you think about it, this is really crucial when you add in personal information, whether it's health info, financial reports, company information, whatever it may be. And all this can eventually be used against you if it gets into the wrong hands. 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And personally, I do think that a lot of these companies will realize that they've made mistakes when it comes to this. So, I'll actually I'm going to talk about some reasons why I think that I'm going to start with what I think is the most detrimental, and that is that they're killing their own future. You know, not only their own future, but if enough companies do this, then killing software development in general. Because if you think about it, we if we get rid of all the junior devs, then we're not passing the torch anymore. juniors uh you know they can be pretty horrible when they start. They might write spaghetti code and they don't understand half of what they're doing. They break stuff left and right and it's the seniors that help them and and kind of show them the right way to do things hopefully at least if they're they're good developers and mentors. Um that's kind of the natural pipeline of software development. uh juniors become mid-level, mid-levels become senior, senior becomes the one mentoring the next generation. And you break the chain, then the whole system collapses. And every senior developer was a junior at one time. And if you stop hiring juniors today, what happens in 5 years when Bob retires or when Sarah gets poached by Google? all that knowledge about your systems, your codebase, your weird business logic, it just walks out the door and you're left with uh a bunch of project managers that don't know how to code and and Claude or or whatever AI you're using. And the scary part is, like I said, this isn't just going to be this isn't just one or two companies doing it. If if the entire industry stops hiring juniors, where's the next generation of senior developers coming from? You know, they're not just going to materialize out of thin air. And I'd bet my life that these companies um that do this the most will really regret it in a few years. And I know some people disagree, but you need human developers. Writing syntax is it's only a small part of building successful software. And I think to me at least another thing that doesn't make sense is the numbers. Juniors cost companies the the least. So why get rid of your employees that you're paying 60 to 70k when uh in a few years they'll be worth much more as seniors? Uh it's also juniors. I mean I know this more than anyone cuz I I teach junior developers. They're the ones that are excited and motivated to learn. They still have that spark in them that seems to go away after a few years of dealing with with legacy code and unrealistic deadlines and and just uh pointless meetings, stuff like that. Uh, when's the last time you saw a senior developer really get genuinely excited about a new framework or about anything to do with code? Half of them are just complaining that they have to write React every day. But juniors, they're the ones watching YouTube tutorials, taking courses on the weekends. They're also the ones asking questions, and they know that they don't know it all, unlike a lot of seniors. And a motivated junior developer is a very valuable person to a company as long as they're not a complete So you're literally firing your most enthusiastic employees. And from a pure ROI perspective, you invest a year or two training a junior. And if you do it right, you have a loyal senior developer that knows your system inside and out. And that's worth way more than the initial 60k investment. But if you fire them all, you're going to be paying 150k for senior developers who need six months to to understand your code base. And again, we're going to run out of senior developers at some point. And and I'm a big fan of AI tools. You know, I use them all the time. I think that they really increase productivity, but I think there's going to be a real wakeup call u for businesses uh when they realize that there's, you know, there's value to human beings that that no AI can give. Now I want to talk a little bit about just the junior dev role in general in the age of AI. So in the past a team might have a junior just create all the buttons or or do something do the really mundane stuff right boilerplate. I do think those days are over with AI. Uh I think the juniors are going to have much more responsibilities now because they can use AI. Uh, and to an extent, I think that it'll make the junior role more exciting because instead of spending months learning how to center a div or writing the same crud operations over and over, juniors can jump straight into the the fun stuff, the interesting stuff, you know, and AI can handle the boilerplate, the repetitive components, the basic styling, uh, which means juniors can focus on more important things like system architecture, and they can solve actual problems. I do think juniors should spend some time writing boilerplate and doing that boring mundane stuff though. Uh because they should know how that works. But that's not all they're going to be doing now. So instead of being the person who gets stuck with all the grunt work all the time, they become the person who knows how to or hopefully they become the person that knows how to leverage AI tools to be really productive. They're like an AI enhanced, you know, developer from day one. And I know that that's a very optimistic, almost naive uh point of view, but things really do tend to work themselves out. So, I think juniors will be all right in the long run. Things are are never as as bad as we say they're going to be. Uh especially a lot of the content creators on YouTube and so on. Uh they do the the whole doom and gloom thing, but it's always blown out of proportion and things just always seem to stabilize. And I don't know why so many people think that, you know, this time it's going to be different. But anyway, it's just something to think about. I'd like to hear your opinions on this. So, leave a comment letting us know. and I'll see you in the light next