Max Headroom 
UNCLASSIFIED
Matt Garman’s statement that firing junior developers because AI can do their work is the “dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” has almost achieved meme status. I’ve seen it quoted everywhere.
We agree. It’s a point we’ve made many times over the past few years. If we eliminate junior developers, where will the seniors come from? A few years down the road, when the current senior developers are retiring, who will take their place? The roles of juniors and seniors are no doubt changing—and, as roles change, we need to be thinking about the kinds of training junior developers will need to work effectively in their new roles, to prepare to step into roles as senior developers later in their career—possibly sooner than they (or their management) anticipated. Programming languages and algorithms are still table stakes. In addition, junior developers now need to become skilled debuggers, they need to learn design skills, and they need to start thinking on a higher level than the function they’re currently working on.
We also believe that using AI effectively is a learned skill. Andrew Stellman has written about bridging the AI learning gap and his Sens-AI framework is designed for teaching how to use AI as part of learning to program in a new language.
As Tim O’Reilly has written,
Here’s what history consistently shows us: Whenever the barrier to communicating with computers lowers, we don’t end up with fewer programmers—we discover entirely new territories for computation to transform.
We will need more programmers, not fewer. And we will get them—at all levels of proficiency, from complete newbie to junior professional to senior. The question facing us is: how will we enable all of these programmers to make great software, software of a kind that may not even exist today? Not everyone needs to walk the path from beginner to seasoned professional. But that path has to exist. It will be developed through experience, what you can call “learning by doing.” That’s how technology breakthroughs turn into products, practices, and actual adoption. And we’re building that path.
AI & ML, Software Development, Commentary
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