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Comment by doug_durham | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like the author shouldn't be in tech. For many, perhaps most of us programming is joy. It's why we started in our teens and have continued for 40 years. This is just a cynical post that adds no new value. We didn't kill the junior training mechanism. Juniors are still hired in the 100's thousands every year. There are valuable things to be said about the impact of AI. This isn't one of them.

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Programming gives me great joy. I wrote my first batch scripts when I was 6 years old. I got my first job in the industry when I was 20. I'm 41 now. The problem isn't the act of programming.

As to juniors, first time I heard someone brag about AI removing the need to hire juniors was in 2022. every junior I know is struggling to find work. It's not hard to find reddit threads with people sharing their experience to that effect. The fact that some do get hired is not evidence to the contrary.

I remember being fresh out of school in peek free money era and couldn’t find anything. It was brutal. The only way i got out of it was by accepting help from an uncle who got me an internship at his company. After that one tiny bit of experience, i found a job at a php shop.

I dont think much has changed. It has always been who you know. I was fortunate enough to have an uncle.

Every single new hire i see is either the child of two fango mango parents or a visa. I rarely ever talk to someone with a different background.

In startup world, everyone had theater degrees or dropped out. It was amazing. I miss it.

> every junior I know is struggling to find work.

They also struggled in 2000, and in 2008. There was no AI at the time.

You mean after the dot-com bubble and after the financial crisis? I mean, not to disagree, but what point are you making here?

Were they bragging?

"I wrote my first batch scripts when I was 6 years old." - Wow, that's pretty amazing. What did you write when you were 10? Really curious.

Not much for a while, then when I was a teenager I got into Flash / ActionScript, this was around the 2advanced era, if that means anything to you. I did a little bit of that & HTML, CSS and PHP throughout high school, then landed a job in e-mail marketing a few years after I dropped out of school, slicing templates for customers. Been climbing my way up since.

I'm guessing an AUTOEXEC.BAT file to configure DOS settings for different games.

haha close! i saw my mom get frustrated not remembering where her programs were located, so I wrote a little numerical menu for her with her programs listed in order of use. each number was secretly another .bat script that would then go to the right directory and run, for example, WordPerfect for her.

> What did you write when you were 10?

Me, personally, a text adventure game filled with bugs that I did not know how to fix. (I realise only decades later that the index into array I was using to store the location references was probably incorrectly calculated when I moved sometimes.)

I learned a lot of programming from books like these (official links, not pirated):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTdGY0VEQzSGZnelU...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTb2VxczM3WGNBLUE...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTRUl3SFRONGN0MFk...

There were more (one had a game called "Rats" and from the description I thought it would be a 3D game, but alas I never got it entered properly and even if I did, I realise now that it probably wasn't 3d rendered).

There are way too many people in tech who did it solely for the money. People worry about AI slop but these poseurs have been cranking out garbage for decades. A lot of my career has been cleaning up the mess they've made.

The difference with AI is that now generating AI slop is much faster than carefully crafted code. So companies began to prefer AI slop.

Their rollin out the agentic swarm soon… god help me.

> There are way too many people in tech who did it solely for the money.

Well perhaps now, when AI halves your salary, and then halves it again, and the only people left are those who do it for some reason other than a salary, you'll be happier?

If AI did that to my salary it would be a nice wage for a job where I sit in a chair all day so yeah.

"Juniors are still hired in the 100's thousands every year."

CITATION NEEDED

From my perspective it seems like they're just not hired basically at all anymore

Look at the Fed published employment numbers. Over 80% of new CS grads find employment in their field. That would be 0 if we were hiring none. We are still hiring juniors where I work.

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