Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you

From the article:

It is really, really tough to get your first role as an engineer. I didn’t realize how hard it was until I watched my little sister (new grad, terrific grades, some hands on experience, fiendishly hard worker) struggle for nearly two years to land a real job in her field. That was a few years ago; anecdotally, it seems to have gotten even harder since then.

This past year, I have read a steady drip of articles about entry-level jobs in various industries being replaced by AI. Some of which absolutely have merit. Any job that consists of drudgery such as converting a document from one format to another, reading and summarizing a bunch of text, or replacing one set of icons with another, seems pretty obviously vulnerable. This doesn’t feel all that revolutionary to me, it’s just extending the existing boom in automation to cover textual material as well as mathy stuff.

Recently, however, a number of execs and so-called “thought leaders” in tech seem to have genuinely convinced themselves that generative AI is on the verge of replacing all the work done by junior engineers. I have read so many articles about how junior engineering work is being automated out of existence, or that the need for junior engineers is shriveling up. It has officially driven me bonkers.

All of this bespeaks a deep misunderstanding about what engineers actually do. By not hiring and training up junior engineers, we are cannibalizing our own future. We need to stop doing that.

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The right way to think about tools like Copilot is more like a really fancy autocomplete or copy-paste function, or maybe like the unholy love child of Stack Overflow search results plus Google’s “I feel lucky”. You roll the dice, every time.

These tools are at their best when there’s already a parallel in the file, and you want to just copy-paste the thing with slight modifications. Or when you’re writing tests and you have a giant block of fairly repetitive YAML, and it repeats the pattern while inserting the right column and field names, like an automatic template.

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Have you ever been on a team packed exclusively with staff or principal engineers? It is not fun. That is not a high-functioning team. There is only so much high-level architecture and planning work to go around, there are only so many big decisions that need to be made. These engineers spend most of their time doing work that feels boring and repetitive, so they tend to over-engineer solutions and/or cut corners—sometimes at the same time. They compete for the “fun” stuff and find reasons to pick technical fights with each other. They chronically under-document and under-invest in the work that makes systems simple and tractable.

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The best teams are ones where no one is bored, because every single person is working on something that challenges them and pushes their boundaries. The only way you can get this is by having a range of skill levels on the team.