Less Junior Staff

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Less Junior Staff

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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August 26, 2024 at 12:00 am

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acfieldsend SSC-Addicted Points: 490 More actions · Answer 1

Surely if there are fewer junior developers because most of the junior work is being done by AI, there will also be fewer juniors available to become experienced developers. Over time, this will lead to a shortage of experienced developers.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736172 More actions · Answer 2

That's exactly the point of the article. Over time, this will be a bigger issue. Less experienced people able to judge quality

Grant Fritchey SSC Guru Points: 398882 More actions · Answer 3

Also, if a lot of code is generated, then the process of literally learning how to write that code is also going to be curtailed. Getting from junior to senior, never easy in the first place, looks to be getting much worse.

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt

Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 76000 More actions · Answer 4

I worked on a system that used a machine learning algorithm to make product recommendations.

The person who designed the methodology deliberately introduced a random element to mitigate the problem of new products not being recommended because they had little or nothing for the algorithm to base a recommendation. Without it there would be a tendency to recommend an ever narrowing group of products.

I don't know if the instigators of AI solutions have an answer to AI vanishing up its own output.

In all honesty I believe that the AI tools I have seen so far would be better targetted at replacing management jobs rather than junior tech roles. Obviously not for decisions requiring empathy and humanity but for decisions requiring assessment of cold facts.

I have a friend who has made their living for 14 years as a travel writer. She has seen her job evaporate overnight due to the use of Generative AI. She notes that it matters not one jot that Generative AI says that Venice is famed for its gardens and she says its famed for the canals, St Mark's Square and the Rialto bridge.

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Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004323 More actions · Answer 5

acfieldsend wrote:

Surely if there are fewer junior developers because most of the junior work is being done by AI, there will also be fewer juniors available to become experienced developers. Over time, this will lead to a shortage of experienced developers.

Ironically, there's a shortage right now. A lot of the answers provided by AI are exactly the same answers provided by large numbers of supposed "experts", even many with 2 or more decades of experience and are high profile on the internet with hundreds and, sometimes, thousands of followers.

My take on AI having to do with things like SQL and databases is that it can't be much more than a somewhat sophisticated search engine that forms a "consensus" based on what it finds and I've found (especially lately) that even "expert" levels are knowledge are a whole lot lower than many would have surmised.

Here's a graphic of one of my favorite questions. The answer provided below is dangerously incorrect. Asking the same question on a normal search engine and other AI (BING CoPilot, ChatGPT 4o, Claude 3.5 (shown below), and Perplexity.ai) comes up with this and similar incorrect and dangerous code.

AI Claude Convert DATETIME2 value to DATETIME datatype

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Eric M Russell SSC Guru Points: 125561 More actions · Answer 6

Even with the rise of cloud hosting and AI, my belief is that junior level developers and database/server administrators will always be in demand - but just not in the same organization and position. In the not-so-distant future, IT talent will be needed on-demand, and a larger percentage of the workforce will be entry level gig workers ($$), contractors ($$$), and consultants ($,$$$), and they will all be using AI as a personal assistant.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho