AI: The ROI of Hiring Seniors vs CS Grads Has Changed
AI: The ROI of Hiring Seniors vs CS Grads Has Changed
With this title, you would be forgiven if you thought this post was going to be about elders getting scammed by AI bots. However, I’ve wanted for a while now to express my thoughts on how AI collaborative coding should be changing the workforce in tech.
You’ve Been Promoted!
As soon as I started using AI in a more deliberate and intentional manner, I realized a few key insights right away. First, my AI colleague was a bit of a junior coder. Second, I’d been promoted to a Dev Manager. It is no great leap from these facts that using AI in a way to mentor 3+ agents at a time is a easy productivity boost.
However, two outcomes emerge from this relationship. One, having a deep knowledge of computing, coding frameworks, patterns, and practices is vital to ‘mentor agents’ that have vast knowledge of the languages and all optional solutions found on stack Overflow, but are a bit unpredictable in the way they solve issues. Second, with the emergence of AI coding, how are junior coders going to gain the experiences needed to fully make sense of these choices and develop coding paths that approach the deep knowledge of current senior?
It will take great willpower not to just rely on AI vibe coding rather than get immersed in actual fully understand technologies and make meaningful changes in them or with them. Yes you can get a long way vibe coding, but it will take some debugging Spidey sense to suss out complicated, multi-level integration issues… Spidey sense gained over years of solving similar issues.
Backed up by experts
Just in case you believe this is some crusty senior coder “get off my lawn” point of view I am not alone in this perspective. Many engineers at Microsoft have expressed this perspective especially dev managers. Even the experts back this up. In his book “Beyond Vibe Coding” Addy Osmani says there is a “knowledge paradox” with seniors and juniors using AI coding. Seniors use it to “accelerate what they already know”, while juniors tend to “learn what to do”. This sounds like how you gain experience normally, until you consider his following insight.
Senior engineers use AI to:
- Rapidly prototype ideas they already understand
- Generate basic implementations they can then refine
- Explore alternative approaches to known problems
- Automate routine coding tasks
Meanwhile, juniors often:
- Accept incorrect or outdated solutions
- Miss critical security and performance considerations
- Struggle to debug AI-generated code
- Build fragile systems they don’t fully understand
Source: Page 4 “Beyond Vibe Coding” by Addy Osmani
Who do you hire in an Agentic Coding world?
Bearing all this in mind… does this change the ROI of hiring junior vs senior developers? If, like me, you decided you’d rather have experienced developers hired as dev managers for AI crews; Why are some companies pushing to let them go? While correctly considering they could reduce staff while maintaining similar productivity; could HR be using an outdated model for layoffs that considers only Seniors’ base pays and benefit costs?
One possibility is they are holding a misguided assumption of the stereotypical senior developer resistant to change, stridently averse to AI doing their craft for them. Yet I’ve only seen the opposite, the typical senior is someone like me… been in the industry for decades and happily assumed a role of AI mentorship…. but am I an anomaly or is that stereotype false?
Either way, I think this is a misstep and miscommunication between HR being told to reduce headcount in favor of AI tools, and the engineering group realizing what would make the most effective staff to remain. This coming year will bear this strategy out, but I believe there are struggles ahead for those teams composed of mainly juniors.
That said, those juniors will gain some valuable experience solving issues they allow their digital colleagues to make. I just hope management will realize the value of that experience before the next round of AI reductions.