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You're not wrong! I'm the original author of the post, and yes, I've seen this trend for years now, too, but I was using those two research studies that I cited as the basis of the article, so I started looking at it from that lens. I think the problems go deeper than AI, too, which is why I touched on corporate incentives. Ultimately, my goal was just for teams to think about how it could benefit them to invest in juniors and for college students to know that they need to prepare for a challenging ride if they're majoring in an AI-adopting field.

We may have some things in common. I'm not a mom, but I am a woman. And I don't want to assume the same is true for you, but breaking into this industry was difficult for me, so even without children, I'm really invested in the ability for juniors to succeed too. I wish I had responded more directly to your article rather than my general ennui. I really admire your willingness to write this. I hope it gets broad engagement, because I think these problems seem obvious to us but based on private conversations I've had with some industry peers in very senior director roles the drying of junior opportunities for growth is not readily obvious to them. I'm going to have to think more about the corporate incentives you mentioned, because reading that in the article, it feels deeper to me, and I think that's what I was trying to get at by sharing my past company details.

I think you succeeded overall at your goal! Thanks for replying. You encouraged me to go back and read your article more closely.

I appreciate the positive feedback. :) And yes, I was a career changer, so it was difficult for me to break into tech, too, so it feels a bit personal for that reason, as well.

Yes, AI isn't helping but the corporate world has been doing this for decades! Junior devs are second class citizens internally. I don't blame them for moving on after a few years.

I guess I should clarify too: I don't believe in junior titles. They handicap people into the position you describe where they must move on to progress. When I describe "junior" above, I generally mean a candidate with <=1.5 years of experience. When I say mid I mean any amount of experience greater but not senior according to technical review. And yep, I know this is not the best heuristic because there are definitely people with no working experience who have mid-senior coding skills (although they're rare). I think that's sort of part of the problem too. Senior management is disincentived from understanding the roles and growth trajectories, so our heuristics for hiring are totally warped and stomped on.

I agree. I wonder if it's a mix of fully remote work being popular some time ago and the amount of tech one has to know now increasing (DBs, backend, frontend, cloud, observability, security, etc.). When hiring remotely, people naturally try to find candidates who are very communicative, have a high level of ownership, and can work with or without clear requirements and without oversight. That latter set of traits is often associated with senior developers rather than juniors.

>Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team

Well that explains why AI excacerbates this. It's all they ever wished for and they don't need to make do with that facsimile of "human interaction" anymore. It's not perfect but that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.

Or you know, they just really want to be as cheap as possible in production (hence, outsourcing).

>It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.

I'll give a slight BOTD here after my disdain above and admit tha a small team probably isn't the best enviroment to train a junior. Not unless you either

a) truly believe that the skillet you need isn't out there, and you are willing to train it yourself to alleviate your workload, or

b) you are thinking long term efficiency and are willing to lose early productivity to power the future prosperity. Which, to be frank, is not how modern businesses operate.

And yes. Any teacher in any field (but especially education) will tell you that the star players make their day, week, and year. But the worst cases make you question your career. Our natural negativity bias makes the latter stick out more. Those in industry won't get star players as they are either filtered out by these stupid hoops or gobbled up for 100k above your budget by the big players. It's rough.