We have all seen the scope of what AI can do in almost all aspects of business. It can process tasks significantly faster than a person in areas like code generation, data analysis, and repetitive workflows. One area in particular has seen a massive shift in the job market as a result: the software development industry.
Many companies are realizing that putting these AI tools in the hands of experienced developers is making those developers capable of handling menial tasks with little to no effort. These tasks are normally where junior developers would be brought in. They would begin their career learning the software development landscape and the business processes that go along with it. It would likely take them days to complete a simple task, one that a seasoned dev would take hours on, but that is part of their growth. You hire them to handle these easy tasks so that your senior developers can spend time on more complex and skill-intensive workloads. All new hires in any industry take time to learn the ropes; that’s just the name of the game. They (hopefully) will be faster on the next iteration as they continue to learn.
Before AI, junior developers were viewed as an investment. They were brought in, given the less desirable tasks available, grunt work, if you will, but colleagues and life lessons would help them grow. Looking towards the future, you are investing in them to someday be your senior developers. This is where I think a lot of companies are overlooking a potential problem.
I do not have an issue with AI. I myself use it daily. It is a fantastic tool for things like git commits, code formatting, or writing simple algorithms. My issue is that with this “lack of need” of junior developers we are seeing now, where are you going to be getting your senior developers from in the future?
Essentially, every company right now that is in the junior dev hiring freeze is committing to the idea that AI will be robust enough in the future to handle all tasks that senior developers handle now. As promising as AI currently is, there are a lot of things I’m not sure it will be able to deliver on.
Are you willing to blindly trust code written by a black box? I surely am not, not yet anyway. Even if we get to that point, who will be architecting your software, or are you once again trusting that AI will always have the right answer? AI must be trained, and it is done so by experienced subject matter experts. Will we no longer have a need for it to be trained either in the future? The list of things that it will need to be able to do goes on and on.
Maybe it will be everything we need. But what happens if it isn’t?
