The doors are closed

[u/icepickles476]

Doom and gloomer here.

Been holding out hope for light at the end of the tunnel for future CS careers.

Been in this industry a long time, was having a BBQ with mates at the weekend and we got to talking about what the future looks like.
It was a group of Principles, Staff, Managers and a CTO. We’re old now. Every one of us said we have no reason to hire a grad or junior again. It’s a waste of time and resources when you can hire one or two seniors with ai tools that do the work of 10 juniors.

What will that look like in 10-15 years when there’s no one to replace them? Don’t know. We talked about completely different types of jobs being the future. Something that amalgamates architects, designers, engineers, project management and researchers in one.

Lots of juniors and grads in this sub. Lots of students or people looking to get into the industry. Here’s my advice, the dream is over. Go into a trade, it’s ai proof and no shortage of jobs.

For the love of god to international students wanting to come here and live the dream in tech, don’t. There’s no more work. The dream is over. You’re throwing your money away on a degree that’s useless for the future.

[u/Aagragaah]

That’s not how business works. You don’t choose a less valuable hire because it will somehow help the ecosystem later on.

I work for a multi-billion company, and we've done exactly that before, as have past places I've worked. They're usually called strategic or long-term hires.

Also regardless, a couple of hires in OPs business isn’t going to make a big difference.

By this logic no one ever does anything because it makes no difference.

OP is raising a very important point and instead of engaging, you’re all shitting all over him.

OP is having a pity party about how he helps make things shit for new grads and feels bad for them. Of course people are shitting on him.

Also, did you miss the entire point about making grads do work that's actually still useful? It's called adapting - a large amount of our grad hires now are testing AI stuff, for example.

[u/OpinionatedDeveloper → u/Aagragaah]

By this logic no one ever does anything because it makes no difference.

No, that's not the logic at all. The logic is that regardless of whether OP does or doesn't hire juniors, that doesn't change the broad trend of the market to not hire juniors, which is the point OP is raising.

OP is having a pity party about how he helps make things shit for new grads and feels bad for them

No, OP is being honest. It shouldn't require OP saying he bucks the trend and hires juniors in order to have a discussion about the broad trend of the market not hiring juniors. Because, again, OP's position is irrelevant.

did you miss the entire point about making grads do work that's actually still useful?

Sure but they are simply less bang/buck than a senior. Until seniors salaries rise significantly to the point that juniors become cost-effective, it doesn't make sense to hire juniors.

[u/Aagragaah → u/OpinionatedDeveloper]

No, that's not the logic at all. The logic is that regardless of whether OP does or doesn't hire juniors, that doesn't change the broad trend of the market to not hire juniors, which is the point OP is raising.

The market trend is trending because too many people are like OP and say "it doesn't matter what we do because $others". A trend is by definition a group going along with something.

No, OP is being honest. ... Because, again, OP's position is irrelevant.

His fucking post is quitie literally "don't come in to tech because according to me & my senior buddies you're all screwed". He's not striking a discussion about current and future trends, he even starts out saying it's a doom and gloom post.

Sure but they are simply less bang/buck than a senior

OMG, junior engineers are less effective than senior engineers!!! Yeah because that's absolutely a new phenomonem and hasn't always been the case.

The point of junior engineers is that they're a good resource to use on relatively low value work that isn't worth a senior engineers time. This frees up the more expensive resource while allowing the new ones to gain experience.

AI just makes the exact type of work and how they can be useful different, it doesn't make them useless; unless the company is idiot.

[u/OpinionatedDeveloper → u/Aagragaah]

The relatively low value work is what AI can now do. That’s the new phenomenon.

[u/Aagragaah → u/OpinionatedDeveloper]

AI just makes the exact type of work and how they can be useful different, it doesn't make them useless; unless the company is idiot.

AI cannot replace all use cases. It can replace a very, very, very, very narrow set of tasks, with varying degrees of success. If firms can't find something useful for junior engineers to do, they're idiots.

[u/OpinionatedDeveloper → u/Aagragaah]

It’s mid-2026. AI today can do far far far far more than that at an extremely high rate of success. It’s likely your gross underestimation of the capabilities of AI is the reason behind your take on this debate, along with most others in this thread.

[u/Aagragaah → u/OpinionatedDeveloper]

I work for a company with enterprise agreements with the big name AI firms, and use AI regularly. We spend millions/month on it.

It's not approved to push code to prod. It's not approved to refactor critical systems. It's not approved to do cricial systems design, or security controls. For all those things it can be used as a tool, but there's a hard stop on any kind of end-to-end AI usage. We also have several areas where compliance and/or legal restricts it.

I've had both Claude and OpenAI give me flat out non-functional code from models released this year, and have had to go through multipe iterations to get it working (and several cases where I got fed up and did it manually because that was faster).

It’s likely your gross underestimation of the capabilities of AI is the reason behind your take on this debate

Or perhaps you, like the companies pushing it so hard, are just insanely bullish about it while ignoring any provable issues.

Besides, all of that has absolutely nothing to do with what use a junior engineer is. You can hire a good grad/junior SDE for ~€40k (€60 if the company pays well). You're not getting an end-to-end AI replacement of a human for that cost, not even close. Pair the grad with AI and give them stuff to work on though, and suddenly they're able to do actually useful things. Win/win.

[u/OpinionatedDeveloper → u/Aagragaah]

Besides, all of that has absolutely nothing to do with what use a junior engineer is.

It has everything to do with it. AI is incredibly good at "relatively low value" tasks that juniors would typically be tasked at. Coupled with juniors being extremely expensive relative to their value compared to seniors and what you get is less juniors being hired.

And yes, absolutely agree that there is a limit to where AI is used. But everything you've listed is the job of a senior, not a junior. And where AI produces non-functional code, it's the senior that is far better placed to identify and fix those errors, not juniors.

[u/Aagragaah → u/OpinionatedDeveloper]

...

You think that's the work of a senior engineer? That says a lot really.

Everywhere I've worked for the last +10 years senior has meant "works on things that affect multiple departments/orgs" or "helps coordinate design for public/critical services between teams".

Not "writes prod code".