And that junior dev will probably leave in 2 years because HR won’t allow you to give them a raise to match their market comp.
But with a team of 7, I can’t believe that giving them all a Claude Code subscription wouldn’t be much cheaper and much more productive than hiring a junior. A junior though with AI is more dangerous than a junior without.
That’s not really an either or situation, you can have 7 team members with Claud Code and 1 Jr without.
I’ve seen many people stick around for a surprising amount of time while severely under compensated. I suspect that’s why HR does it.
What’s the use of the junior? You have just widen the gap between mid and junior developers making them less useful
Working on problems that are a poor fit for a mid level developer with AI assistance of which there are still plenty.
I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, which means a larger percentage of what’s left over is more cheaply done by Jr’s working without AI assistance.
A mid level developer is just a ticket taker. That’s their job. No matter what their title, if they are just pulling well defined tickets off the board, that’s what they are.
> I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems
Fascinating. I am finding the exact opposite, like complete 180
How exactly do some people leverage AI to rearrange the furniture in the conference room for an office party?
Physical labor may be a tiny fraction of what a team of developers do, but I’ve seen what amounts to several thousand dollars spent on that kind of silly task because teams leverage the tools they have.
You pay contractors and caterers - that’s a poor excuse ti have dead weight.
You just replaced one task that an AI is useless for with a different task that an AI is useless for.
The point obviously still stands, and no I am not suggesting using Jr devs for physical labor alone is worth adding them to the team. Rather that “Work” includes a very wide variety of tasks that need to get done.
> I find AI tools make everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems
this part I find fascinating. most places I worked (30 years in, 10 as a contractor so quite a lot) the distinction between Jr, Mid and Sr falls exactly into the kind of works that they do. I, as a Senior, often work on hard shit, Jrs are not (yet) entrusted with those problems and work on entirely different set of problems. I cannot compute how AI makes everyone better at exactly the same kind of problems, problems I am solving today few people on my team are working on and then same goes down the "pyramid"
I’m not saying everyone on the team is doing the same kind of work, rather the kind of work that LLM’s make people better at become less relevant when a bunch of people have access to them.
Automation always runs into diminishing returns for similar reasons. If 99.99% of a workload is embarrassingly parallel, what remains becomes important once you can throw enough cores at the problem.
You’ll see a guy in a multi million dollar crane lifting multi ton objects and then people using ropes attached to that same load for final positioning etc. What you don’t see is people using ropes to lift bricks 20 stories by hand as the crane lifts multi ton pallets of bricks as automation is taking care of that kind of task.