Engineering video
0:57 · 7 October 2026
The speaker explains: aI creates opposing effects at the junior level by decreasing short-term job availability and raising CS grad unemployment, while simultaneously empowering juniors to use LLMs to query codebases, answer questions, and deliver features end-to-end without heavy senior mentorship.
Hear it at 0:00 →So, AI did two opposite things to the junior level, which is, number one, in the short term, there are a lot less jobs for juniors. We have unemployment for CS computer grads at 6% for the first time in years. That also has to do with the economics, but on the flip side, it also empowered the juniors a lot more. So, back in the days, if you would be a junior, you really needed a lot of hand holding.
And pretty much any questions had to be answered by a senior engineer that had to mentor you. Usually, those people never had the time because they're just turning out features and doing bugs, and you'll be left at your own devices with whatever documentation companies had, usually not a lot. Nowadays, they give you a code base, you can just query it with the LLM, and the LLM not only answers questions, but it can also guide you to bring a feature to an end, and even do it for you.
So, all of a sudden, juniors can actually deliver features, kind of end-to-end almost features.
