Has AI adoption affected the quality of junior developers joining your teams?

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Connect_Detail98@reddit

People no longer give a shit about understanding technology

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Healthy_Albatross_73@reddit

I mean they never did, I bet 90% of developers don't have the slightest clue how a compiler works.

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Connect_Detail98@reddit

That's intentionally abstracted away, by people who really understand that layer of complexity. Do you think the business workflows are abstracted from your business?

We're literally the layer who should understand that stuff in order to guarantee it's good.

For example, would you use a vibe coded kernel, operating system and compiler? Knowing that people who don't really understand it are sending changes to it every single day?

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Healthy_Albatross_73@reddit

Would you let an AI manage your bank account?

Considering how much credit card debt I have, yes lol

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NatoBoram@reddit

The fact that point-and-click "programmers" are so prevalent already proved this

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rocketbunny77@reddit

We ain't hiring (this is from before the AI Fever dream though) but the juniors we do have, have become notably worse than 6 months ago.

There were glimmers of hope when seeing them solve things properly after teaching the same lesson over and over until it sticks.

Now it's as if nothing sticks, and the lessons we thought they had learned have now been unlearned. The same problems come up in every code review over and over, requirements aren't understood, code doesn't even meet the acceptance criteria but "I asked Claude and it said it does".

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One-Bowler4807@reddit

Hi, curious, wrong logic or something like bad formatting or doesn’t meet some conventions in your codebase? We don’t have juniors so curious to hear what others are seeing with Jrs using AI.

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rocketbunny77@reddit

All

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dragneelfps@reddit

I hate it when people say "that's what Claude told me" in a way to avoid responsibility of the crap they produce. Its like critical thinking skills left the job description.

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rocketbunny77@reddit

The sad thing is that the critical thinking was making an appearance now and then before Claude. Now, gone.

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Individual-Praline20@reddit

Now the quality is shittier than the usual shit. Never saw this amount of shit ever in my career. And don’t ever tell them that, they will get offended. They can’t be wrong, it’s AI ffs!!! Some know it’s shit, but won’t do anything to stop producing shit. The others don’t care or even know it’s shit, even if it smells and tastes like shit. That’s basically it. I wash my hands after each meeting now, even if I work remotely 😂

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One-Bowler4807@reddit

Seeing people get defensive over rejected output from LLMs is wild.

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AdvancedMeringue7846@reddit

No but it's emboldened a senior / lead to the point where they keep breaking shit in areas they have no experience

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ExperiencedDevs-ModTeam@reddit

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AfricanTurtles@reddit

I would say it's affecting the quality of their future selves. Unfortunately with AI teams are throwing juniors at problems that would normally be way above their heads or skill level. The junior makes it "work" with absolutely zero coding knowledge underneath and looks like a genius. Until something goes wrong.

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ZoulTown@reddit

Honestly I feel this happened to me before AI. The difference is now you don't have ask a senior college for advice, but take responsibility for your AI driven solution.

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snotreallyme@reddit

Fresh Comp Sci degrees are no different than Underwater Gender-Focused Basket Weaving Studies degrees. Except that the later might get the holder a YouTube channel. Too many people "learned to code" but very very few learned to build software and now Codex and Claude Code is making it all moot

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coderstephen@reddit

Juniors are joining your teams?

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80hz@reddit

I have friends that are new grads they know what they're doing if bloat, they know they're building tech debt, they don't care because the company is pushing it and they're going to leave as soon as they get another offer.

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PineappleLemur@reddit

Yes.

There are no more juniors, or hiring really.

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maxakusu@reddit

We just had the first failed co-op term and it was a big part of why, so yeah =/

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Izkata@reddit

We had a junior on our team for several years. Over the past year, based solely on the merge requests he was opening, he seemed to be getting dumber.

The last one before he was laid off added a function it never called, silenced the unused function linting error by exporting the function, would have only done one third of the case even if it was called, messed up a basic React hook rule so it would have errored if he ran it, and I think one or two other things I can't remember offhand. And no, the merge request was not opened as Draft.

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R2_SWE2@reddit

My company stopped hiring juniors because they’re short-sighted idiots

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TheDinoDynamite@reddit

At first I thought you were talking about the juniors lmao

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Hog_enthusiast@reddit

Oh you must work at my company, no way two places are making that same mistake

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vincit_omnia_verita@reddit

Juniors or your company?

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PhysiologyIsPhun@reddit

Playing both sides, so he always wins

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chat-lu@reddit

Yes.

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Legitimate-Store3771@reddit

And here I thought that was the point.

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WeiGuy@reddit

I love teaching, except when that's not in my job description and guiding/fiixing all the juniors work takes longer than doing it myself. I fear for the quality of juniors even more now with AI. One guy that we hired really green on our team doesn't seem to understand how surpassed he is and how quickly he'll become obsolete if he doesn't put effort, but AI is his crutch right now.

Unless companies start taking responsibility for long term health of the market, hiring juniors is kind of pointless now because all bosses care about is results. And babying someone when you barely have time to do your own work is not feasible.

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PhysiologyIsPhun@reddit

I'm not saying I agree with this or that it doesn't make me extremely pessimistic for the future of software, but genuinely what is the point in any single company taking responsibility for the long term health of the market? People say companies should "invest" in hiring juniors, but as soon as a junior gets enough experience to find a better paying job, they will do just that. And that's the smartest decision for them; I did the same in my career and would expect no less from a self - respecting individual. So from a single company standpoint, what's the point in losing time and money investing in someone just to see them go to a competitor and actually contribute?

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WeiGuy@reddit

I agree, it's not the companies responsibility to care about anything other than itself. However, caring about their people is and the byproduct is greater good, whether they care about it or not.

But they don't care and they don't want to enhance the employees that come under their wing. Right now, they're all in a scramble to buy up for themselves the talent that is currently available and exploit it until it's dry without giving a second thought about helping that talent grow further.

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Majestic-Watch-2025@reddit

Yes they are garbage who don't know how to code and don't want to hear any advice.

I'm sure there are exceptions, and these hires weren't on my team so I didn't interview them, but that's what I see.

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_town-drunk_@reddit

We haven’t hired junior devs in 3 years. The quality was already low back when we were hiring, I’m scared what they will be like after doing school in the age of AI.

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vincit_omnia_verita@reddit

50-50 some are amazing and others are terrible

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Human-Kick-784@reddit

Thats why you hire them and pay them half as much as a mid.

Juniors are an investement. Sometimes its gonna pay off. Sometimes its not. But you cannot afford to not invest, because your high level talent WILL move on.

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_town-drunk_@reddit

Absolutely. I’d rather we still hire them to find those good ones, but leadership says otherwise.

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chat-lu@reddit

A fizz buzz without AI may be challenging for them.

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throwaway_0x90@reddit

The *REAL* question is have you updated the metrics you're using to measure SWE performance.

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chat-lu@reddit

Why not?

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throwaway_0x90@reddit

With the advancement of AI, asking the same leetcode and reverse linked list questions of 2019 tells you absolutely nothing.

So before trying to determine swe quality, let's first see if we can agree on what a good swe looks like in 2030.

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chat-lu@reddit

I still want to know if people can reason and solve problems like I did in 2019.

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throwaway_0x90@reddit

What challenges will a SWE be expected to solve in 2030? Nobody knows.... except I'm confident soft skills will be significantly more important than they were in 2019.

Other than that, nobody even knows how a SWE job interview will look like in 5 years.

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chat-lu@reddit

What challenges will a SWE be expected to solve in 2030?

I don't care about that at all when hiring juniors. They need to be able to think and learn.

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throwaway_0x90@reddit

"They need to be able to think and learn."

About what?

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chat-lu@reddit

My favorite interview question is to ask them about the flaws of their favorite tool. If they can't find any then they either don't know that tool very well or lack judgement.

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Minimum-Reward3264@reddit

I bet it is. I’m gettin destroyed by the spending quota. I need spend a certain amount or else, where else is not defined. There’s no way I can process that amount of code I would have generate a day to hit the target and understand every single line. So hope is most won’t be able to either.

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