HACKER Q&A
📣 tavro

Are junior devs getting worse?


i keep seeing claims that many new junior developers "can't really code" and i am curious how true that actually is from the perspective of senior engineers?

i recently started my "first" dev job (i am junior) but i have been coding since i was twelve. i still deal with impostor syndrome, but i do feel capable of building things and solving problems -- which makes me wonder if that is true for more juniors than people assume?

have you noticed any real change in junior skill levels? if yes, what is actually different? are juniors judged too harshly?

interested in honest observations, btw. :o)

  👤 ben_w Accepted Answer ✓
42 now, it's difficult to draw conclusions given the number juniors I've seen makes it more "anecdote" than "survey", but what I have seen is that juniors used to and still do usually miss half the picture*, but which half was never consistent: one example on the small-scale was in Swift, where optionals kept being declared with ! rather than ? because they didn't understand the difference; one on the big scale was having thousands of lines of code lying around commented out for lack of a better way to think about what they were doing. Looking at my own archived code from when I was a junior as well as all the others I can remember, the only commonality was insufficient (or absent) automated testing.

But have juniors gotten worse? I'd say no. Possibly because the languages themselves have gotten easier to work with, possibly because more and better checks have become automated by the compiler (e.g. on iOS, it now alerts you to not do do UI anywhere but the main thread, whereas 20-30 years ago in C you'd be lucky to get the correct warning about which line was missing a semicolon), and it is a small sample size, but I would say the code juniors produce today is (slightly) better than it used to be.

But even 20 years back, a decent junior given a goal and freedom abut how to reach it, could make some very nice end-results.

* Seniors don't get it all right either, it's more like missing a quarter, then an eighth, etc.

👤 dustingetz
hiring criteria is not uniform, it varies widely across all companies. Keyword driven hiring + contrived interviews that are disconnected from the actual work being performed (but easy to evaluate - this is substitution bias) has damaged engineering culture everywhere. The easy money period of 2018-2022 exacerbated these trends by removing accountability and causing rushed, loose hiring.
👤 mldev_exe
Not a senior developer, but I do believe that juniors are being judged too harshly simply because they had ChatGPT for college.