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AI Has Ruined the Job Market (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I'm applying to jobs, and the amount of AI assessments, rounds, AI interviewers, questionnaires, is nuts.

One of these emails for example,

It's rough.

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[–] 11 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

Claude Code replaces managing a junior dev team of 5.

But who was hiring 5 junior devs?!

Did nothing they produced matter to anyone who knew better?

I can't think of a better way to drive my organization into obsolescence, than to have 5 junior devs rampaging across the place leaving stupid mistakes in their wake.

I love having one or two junior devs around the office. On a large team (15 devs), there's just enough deeply unimportant unimpactful harmless bullshit to keep two junior devs from doing too much damage.

Once, on a huge team (30+ senior devs split into squads), I had four junior devs at the same time.

That is the maximum I have ever allowed, and that was during a period of exceptional demand.

Anyway, I guess I just wish the folks replacing 5 junior devs with an AI equivalent to 5 junior devs the day they deserve. Lol.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    An extra problem is that AI heavily favours bullshitters. It destroys the capability and cues to recognize them.

    The tech job market is now a lemon market for both sides - neither applicants nor companies can reasonably know what's really offered to them, and what is made up.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.

    You can't really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don't learn (at best they'll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).

    Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there's more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.

    Yes. Same here. I never would have managed to build teams as large as I have if I didn't create some of my senior devs out of junior devs.

    You can't really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don't learn (at best they'll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).

    Yes. Exactly! It boggles my mind when folks talk about all the money they're saving on junior devs. A forever-junior sounds terrible, to me - no matter how cheap.

    Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there's more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.

    Yes. When I was doing consulting gigs for clients too incompetent to maintain their own developer teams, I would hire junior devs and charge clients for their work. Organizations too incompetent to hire and retain their own developers are also pretty reliably too incompetent to tell the difference.

    Even so - while I never felt I owed those (generally sociopathic, often malicious and usually willfully stupid) clients too much loyalty - professional ethics still meant that I didn't saddle them with any fully un-supervised junior developers. So they were still better off with my consulting team than with an AI.

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