Why we need junior developers

Until I see Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up at my door in a leather jacket looking for Sarah Connor, I’m not going to worry about AI trying to destroy humankind.

What I am worried about? This unusual movement to eliminate the role of the junior developer role.  

There is a lot of ink being spilled these days about how companies are not hiring junior developers and using AI to do the “grunt work” that junior developers do. Well, I think that’s just silly.

I consider myself a senior developer. I also plan on retiring someday, and I’m guessing I’m not the only senior developer who plans on doing that. In fact, I feel very confident saying that 100% of senior developers will, one way or another, stop coding at some point. 

Now, math is hard, I know, but it seems incandescently obvious to me that to be a senior developer, you must first be a junior developer, and if there are no junior developers, then we’ll eventually run out of senior developers. And then where will we be?

Maybe AI will write all the code, who knows? Still, it seems obvious that we need to continue to nurture and grow junior developers into tomorrow’s seniors. It feels silly that I even need to say this.

I get the temptation to reduce headcount. A fully-loaded junior developer can cost well into the six-figure range. You have to onboard them, train them, and spend time with them. They don’t always do what you tell them to—not out of spite but out of inexperience.

And an AI coder? Sure, it might go off on a crazy tangent, but it’s ready to go from day one, and always on. 

Of course, that works great until all your senior developers retire. But hey, that’s years away, right? The benefits are now, and the costs are a decade or two in the future. Easy call!

Well, maybe. Obviously, you have to pay the piper sometime.

Think of the team

But there are more good reasons for having junior devs around than just planning for the future and eventually making senior developers.

I know this is going to be hard to believe, but senior developers can be a bit set in their ways and often tend to have their mind made up about certain things. A good junior developer can rock the boat and inject a fresh perspective where things might have grown a bit stodgy and rigid. 

Juniors can make fresh what may be growing stale. Just asking the simple question “Why?” can be a great benefit to a team.

And because senior developers are experienced and, well, senior, too many seniors can risk spoiling the project. While the idea is that AI does all the “dirty work,” if there are no junior developers around, then you have a group of folks who all want to take the technical lead, and no one who is willing to follow. This can create a dynamic that might be tense or even toxic. 

Think of a fleet full of admirals without any sailors. You get plenty of strategy and direction, but the ships aren’t actually moving anywhere.

And too many seniors can make your “bus factor” way too high. A team of all seniors will tend to become siloed, with specific knowledge residing in only one head at a time. The process of passing down information to a junior developer not only puts that knowledge in two heads, but also sharpens the minds of both teacher and student.

Senior developers teaching junior developers is a way to expand the horizons of the whole team.

Ultimately, you could have an orchestra with only soloists and have all the second and third chair instruments filled in with synthesizers and other manufactured music, but the music would be stale and algorithmic. You need the human touch to probe, question, explore, and learn that really makes an orchestra sound like it should.

Sure, you can fake a whole violin section with a keyboard synthesizer, but it will never have the depth and soul of a skillfully played Stradivarius. If we want soulful software tomorrow, we need junior developers today.