This month I want to highlight an article, Your company needs Junior devs, by Doug Turnbull. This article wonderfully describes several ways junior developers level up a team, including requiring experienced developers to hone their teaching skills, and challenging ingrained assumptions – often through naïveté.

Gen AI’s recent explosion is often paired with visions of a future where a small number of senior developers use AI coding utilities to automate the rote parts of their job, obviating the need to hire junior developers, and trimming the business’s largest cost – payroll. I have heard and read variations of this vision several times, although it is never explicitly pitched as a cost-savings measure. The vision recognizes senior developers are crucial, yet creates a problem where there is no pipeline to create new senior developers from junior developers.

In addition to the senior developer pipeline problem, the article does a great job describing how development cultures are largely defined by how they approach teaching and mentoring. If there are no junior developers to teach, senior developers dull their ability to deeply think through complicated problems.

This article is yet another reminder that while Gen AI continues to be a promising unlock for technology and operations, it also enables us to consider narrow scenarios that optimize for financial outcomes at the expense of long term business viability and durability. A healthy tech business has a healthy pipeline of junior developers, even if those developers require high up front investment.

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/09/07/your-team-needs-juniors

“Teaching helps not just the juniors, but the seniors too. The ‘Protege effect’ is a well studied phenomenon where the teacher’s knowledge deepens when required to teach. Juniors force-multiply seniors, not by writing code, but just by forcing seniors to teach and rethink their knowledge.”