keep your head up
Hey there, Today, I wanted to talk about a very toxic message I see online. Which is that “Junior Developers are deprecated”. Or “dead,” as one article likes to put it (link in the PS). Many people…
Jul 26, 2024 · 2 MIN READ
Hey there,
Today, I wanted to talk about a very toxic message I see online.
Which is that “Junior Developers are deprecated”.
Or “dead,” as one article likes to put it (link in the PS).
Many people try to get your attention and clicks by playing on your greatest fears.
Telling you that coding is dead.
That junior devs picked the worst year ever to be junior devs.
Or that the tech market is doomed and it will never, ever recover.
These people are very convincing.
Even as a Senior developer, I get triggered when reading their stuff.
In the article I mentioned, the author compares a Junior developer to an LLM, claiming they do the same job.
What a bunch of BS.
Junior devs are smart. LLMs are not.
Junior devs can think. Not just retrieve information they’ve been trained on before.
They can be creative when solving problems. They can understand what you want from them without you having to specify every single parameter.
I think whoever wrote that article has little faith in humans.
And very little experience working with people.
I would say they also have low self-esteem or value themselves and their fellow humans pretty poorly.
If you have ever played with a 3-year-old child, you will have no doubts about how incredibly intelligent and adaptable humans can be.
Junior developers can do 100x what an LLM can. They might not be able to write code as fast or have all the training data GPT has.
But they have real intelligence.
They have creativity.
And experience in the real world.
Machines won’t get there in the next century if you ask me.
So, keep your head up. Don’t let fear get the best of you.
If you like to solve problems and you enjoy coding even just a bit, you will make a hell of a programmer, and we need more devs like you.
Keep up the good work!
Happy Friday, Dragos
P.S. Here’s the link to the article https://sourcegraph.com/blog/the-death-of-the-junior-developer. Give it a read and try to understand the assumptions behind it. You will realize is just speculation driven by fear rather than sound arguments. Cheers.
