People keep saying this — but if I had to give a junior the level direction I give an AI bot everyday, beyond their first few weeks, that person would be on a pip pretty quickly.

Maybe I’m just fortunate, but most places I’ve worked the difference between jr and senior has been the scope they owned and the amount of time spent architecting/reviewing/mentoring vs heads down coding. Seniors are not just handing off grunt work to juniors.

The grunt work, not the hard work.

I do the hard work of software Eng away from my computer, trying to think clearly about the problem(s).

If teams are hiring Junior developers to give them "grunt work," they're doing something wrong to begin with.

That probably felt very nice to say, but it's wrong. Everyone starts somewhere. Nobody can start out architecting the login infrastructure for the 250 applications at a major company, all of which already have their own login system and local considerations. Everybody starts out on some simple work. They have to. It's all they can do on day one. It's all I could do. It's all anyone can do.

I'm fairly worried that AI as it is developing now is going to be the most effective ladder pull in the world. While a new dev is grappling with "grunt work", they're learning. I'm working with them, explaining why this was done and why that was done, and why, yeah, that's busted, but actually not for the reason you think, and they're learning a lot more than just how to accomplish the specific task nominally laid out in the specific ticket they are working on. If they do the work by just asking an LLM for the answer and they actually get it, they may finish the task today... but what of their progress in five years? Ten? I'm very concerned that juniors leaning on AI will discover that in five years, the easy stuff is still easy, but the hard stuff is still as incomprehensible as it was five years ago.

"All of which have their own login system"

You do realize that SAML has been around for a long time? If anything what you want is an executive to tell everyone to use SAML rather than a "senior architect".

If you think you can walk up to 250 legacy systems and "just" do anything, you are not an experienced developer.

An executive can certainly issue the mandate but the project to make it happen is going to be a very detailed one.

It's a good project to do. There shouldn't be 250 ways of doing authentication. Authorization is rather difficult to just wave a magic wand and harmonize, but authentication shouldn't be a cookie here, and a JWT token there, and a microservice with its own tokens that also integrate with some vital system over there, and Basic Auth with LDAP creds over there, and so on.

But the project is going to be a lot more than just standing in a room and shouting "HEY EVERYONE USE SAML, ok, cool, project is now spec'd, timelined, prioritized, and staffed problem solved".

Juniors are far more valuable to your organization than just grunt work. They offer fresh perspectives from an 'untainted' perspective. They might know about new technology or understand how customers interact with your system better than the senior engineer who has been behind the desk for so long that all they see is the bugs and issues. AI cannot do anything like this, it can only affirm what you ask of it and in the ways you ask it.

Of course many organizations don't like the whole 'training' people thing anymore so it's rough for junior devs out there. Good for my career since I can demand a premium since the pool of experienced engineers will only go down over time, but ultimately bad for software as a whole.