News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:AI is making junior devs useless by raw_anon_1111 on Sunday March 01, 2026 @12:19PM (#47208633)
This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade.

> The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.

This is also not true from small companies to FAANG - see “salary compression and inversion”

> That's how companies fail.

The company failing in the long term is really not any current employees main concern unless you are a founder if the average tenure is 3-5 years. Even the stock market doesn’t care about the long term viability of a company.

BigTech for instance can afford dead weight. Amazon has an internship program and for those who come back or through their non traditional programs for their internal consulting division (AWS Professional Services) they have a 3 (6?) month training program.

In ProServe at least (former employee) even for their l5/L6 employees, they have the 3 month training program - “AWSome Builder” where you simulate a customer project and have to pass.

After leaving AWS and being hired as a staff consultant by a third party company, they put me on a plane two weeks in to meet with a customer. They don’t even hire less than senior+ people in the US.

Re:AI is making junior devs useless by coffeebeqn on Sunday March 01, 2026 @03:50PM (#47210532)
If the median tenure is 3 years and the software business still is very profitable then people must be net useful within that 3 years. A lot of people also just don’t want to job hop much and honestly the interview culture keeps me from hopping more. I do still fall in the 3 years per hop but I’ve always had a good reason to- ie. layoffs, company going in a worse position than when I started, shit management at various levels, forever compounding responsibility…
Re:AI is making junior devs useless by coldtea on Sunday March 01, 2026 @02:40PM (#47209925)
>This is not true - the average tenure for a developer across the industry has been 3 years for well over a decade.

That counts temps, people who weren't a good fit and were let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of which bring the average down (but are not "hopping").

Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.

Re:AI is making junior devs useless by raw_anon_1111 on Sunday March 01, 2026 @02:54PM (#47210057)
Nope, it doesn’t count temps at all. This is easily Googleable.
Re:AI is making junior devs useless by coldtea on Sunday March 01, 2026 @06:27PM (#47211934)
That counts people who weren't a good fit and were let go early after hiring, mass layoffs, and mixes mixes startups and FAANG and consulting churn, none of which is the typical corporate IT worker scenario, and all of which bring the average down (but are not "hopping").

Corporate IT, government IT, smaller SMEs, and stable SaaS, have higher averages.

Re:AI is making junior devs useless by raw_anon_1111 on Sunday March 01, 2026 @07:00PM (#47212180)
Again do you have any actual evidence? Citations?
Re:AI is making junior devs useless by coldtea on Monday March 02, 2026 @06:27AM (#47216576)
Do you have actual evidence it excludes them?

You're making the stronger claim.

Experience says most absolutely don't jump ship every 2-3 years in the kind of companies I mentioned. Now, if you think companies are playing a rotating musical chairs game and are majority new people every 5 years, ...

Re:AI is making junior devs useless by raw_anon_1111 on Monday March 02, 2026 @02:51PM (#47223171)
Well your anecdotal experience means no more than mine across 10 companies - including startups, small to medium size “lifestyle companies” and two at the time I worked there F10 companies - GE and Amazon.

I can’t go to management - who when I was working as a tech lead pre 2020 - were CTOs, Directors, founders and at times having to talk to the PE owners without solid data.