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Comment by mohamedkoubaa | Hacker News Reader

>as a senior, you don’t need juniors anymore. The mundane tasks, at least I find that a lot of people agree with that one, can be fully outsourced to an LLM

Master craftsmen didn't take on apprentices to give them chores.

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>Master craftsmen didn't take on apprentices to give them chores.

Is today opposite day?

So the purpose of a graduate degree is TAing a few classes?

A big part of the value to the tenured professor is not having to teach an extra couple of sections of CS 101. The other part is plastering their name on a bunch of extra papers to game their h-index :D

I don't want to be too flippant here, but senior engineers generally gain very little from training juniors, not least because promo processes suck at basically every tech firm, and so the moment you train up a junior, they are going to leap to another company rather than go through promo...

Master craftsmen paid apprentices almost next to nothing, and they were often contractually guaranteed to stick around for many years, so the teaching was a kind of wage and also a cost that could be recuperated later on. (The apprentice even often had to pay the craftsman to take them on.) None of those things are true for junior software engineers, who are paid to contribute and can leave at any moment. Also, yes apprentices often had to do chores. It is just not analogous at all.

Not to mention, the physical trades are not stopping taking on apprentices because... LLMs can't build a house? Not even the mundane bits.

It will be interesting how to get the financial incentives to train juniors in knowledge work to line up with the fact that every new generation needs to be trained.

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