Artificial intelligence can make it difficult for junior developers to advance to senior positions. With programming tasks being automated, they risk not gaining the necessary hands-on experience, while employers' demands on junior developers have increased significantly over the past five years.
Artificial intelligence can make it difficult for junior developers to advance to senior positions. With programming tasks being automated, they risk not gaining the necessary hands-on experience, while employers' demands on junior developers have increased significantly over the past five years.
This was stated by Darko Meszaros, Distinguished Developer Advocate of Amazon Web Services (AWS), during an online briefing for journalists from Central and Eastern Europe. According to the expert, a particular danger is the situation when junior developers rely entirely on large language models (LLM), accept generated code and do not try to figure out technical problems on their own.
"If a junior developer just lets the LLM do all the work and accepts the results, they're unlikely to gain the necessary experience. Experience comes from working through complex problems and finding solutions. And most simple tasks today are so easy for LLMs to do that you don't even need to delve into them," Meszaros explained.
According to the expert, there is no ready-made solution to this problem yet. One possible approach, he sees, is for junior developers to work alongside experienced engineers so that beginners can adopt their knowledge and learn from their colleagues' mistakes.
Meszaros hopes that in the next few years, AI will enable programmers to build more complex, productive, and scalable systems. Instead of simple to-do list applications, junior developers will be working on tasks comparable to debugging interrupt requests on an IBM PC. He believes that this experience will help them reach the senior level, although the industry has not yet moved to creating software of this complexity.
In the meantime, the expert advises actively using AI for training, experimenting with code, and fixing bugs yourself. He explained the importance of this approach using the example of his own interviews at Amazon, during which he asks candidates what they last broke.
"If a person hasn't broken anything, that's a problem for me. Because it's when you break something and then try to fix it that you really learn," the expert explained.
According to Meszáros, the transition from training to your first job as a junior developer is more challenging than ever before. That's why it's important to not only master AI tools, but also learn to solve technical problems on your own and critically evaluate generated code.
