What Organizations Get Wrong About Junior Engineers and AI

The First Job Gets Harder

Peter [0:04] Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale.

Dave [0:12] Hello, Dave. How are you doing? Peter, good to see you again. We've got an interesting conversation today. I've got three kids who have all gone through university and they're doing exciting things, but they've gone through that whole "how do you get that first job?" How do you get involved in organizations that are significantly impacted by AI? You've got kids heading in that direction as well.

Peter [0:36] Yeah, mine are about to head there. And that leads into the conversation of should they? Which is an interesting thing. Is that driven by them? Are they coming to you saying "why should I be doing this?" Or... no, both of them are very much dead set on university. That's where they're going. They're all in on that as an idea. I'm the one sort of going, huh?

Dave [0:58] It's an interesting question, isn't it? There's a lot of noise in the market. The data shows that interns and entry-level roles, many of the organizations you and I have both worked with over the years, have been hugely influential in just making those first few years on the job market, helping people get a foothold, get familiar with the work they're doing. Those numbers are definitely falling. People are struggling to get those starter jobs.

Peter [1:29] There are a lot of reasons, and a lot of them cross countries. I don't necessarily want to go into all of them, but between pandemics, people being shut at home, social networks, social media undermining trust, a whole bunch of things have all happened and put us in a situation where we probably have one of the largest proportions of young people out of work right now, across most countries. So it's not just one country, which is interesting in itself, and AI is just making that worse, perhaps. But let's put all that to one side. I think the conversation I was thinking would be good to have, especially around the engineering space, is something that came up in a talk at a conference I was at recently. The speaker, Christine, was making a very good case for why, as an organization, you should still be hiring junior engineers.

AI And The Vanishing Junior Tasks

Dave [2:36] Let's put some context around that. One of the big trends we're seeing is that as you introduce AI into that engineering space, the roles and tasks most commonly replaced are the ones junior engineers typically pick up and take care of. From a simple view of that world, it means as an organization you don't want to bring in junior engineers. You want engineers with a few years of experience, because that's where, matching up with the AI adoption technologies being used, the value starts getting created. Do I have that right?

Peter [3:15] Yes, and for lots of different reasons. One part of it is if you are looking after a legacy system of record and you've got a team there and three or four of your engineers just said, "I've been doing this for 45 years, I've had enough, I'm out of here," that's a lot of organizational knowledge walking out the door. If you don't have new people coming in that you can bring up to speed, who can start to unpack that tangled web of spaghetti code, because yes, we can look at replacing and modernizing it, but it's still going to be there for some time. If you don't have those people coming in and thinking about how you're going to do that, it can be difficult. And as we both know, the cost benefit of making that change can sometimes mean that even though it is possible, and even though that cost-benefit ratio has changed thanks to AI, it can still not be a particularly attractive thing to do. There are all these other things which seem more important that the business wants delivered. As an organization, it can feel like "we need to get this feature out the door, that's more important than doing that."

Dave [4:25] New stuff is always more exciting than maintaining and improving what's already there.

Fresh Questions That Change Teams

Peter [4:32] Some of the points Christine was making, which I think are very good, one of them stuck in my mind. New engineers coming in will ask interesting questions, questions that haven't been asked recently because they just don't have the context. Everybody else who's there is like, "well, it's always been done that way." Whereas your new junior engineers will come in and say, "but couldn't we just do it this way?" Sometimes they'll be right and sometimes they'll be wrong. But they will challenge the status quo, challenge what's there today. They'll look at things from an angle that may not have been seen before. That's one example of why it can be very valuable to have junior engineers at the table.

Dave [5:23] As you're describing that, I'm thinking of both the value of diversity, just different experiences coming to the table, but also the value of naivety. Coming in with a different perspective and just saying, "well, why on earth don't we do it this way?" That challenges the institutional thinking, or the acceptance of a status quo that may have been there for a long time.

Peter [5:48] Yeah. And of course, they'll find interesting ways to break things too, which can also be valuable.

Dave [5:54] Yes, absolutely. I also read a great story about an organization that had been struggling, as many have, with the adoption of AI and building traction, trying to get delivery teams and development teams actually using AI in their day-to-day work. One of the catalysts they found was that interns and new junior developers came in with a comfort level, an expertise, and an expectation to use these AI tools in nearly everything they looked at. What they found was that teams with junior developers or interns on them actually had the whole team leap forward in terms of adoption of these new ways of working. So in addition to the diversity and the naivety and the questions that get asked, there's also a new skill set that comes in with that fresh blood entering the organization.

Peter [6:54] And one of the other pieces is that they're asking these questions, they're new to the organization, and they probably cost you a little less too. They are going to be the lifeblood of the organization eventually. This is a topic you see all over the news: "we've got the senior engineers." Well, eventually you won't have the senior engineers. The assumption seems to be "we're going to make the models good enough that they can run the entire system, no humans will need to watch it at all, and then we'll be golden."

Dave [7:30] There are a lot of ifs, ands, and buts in that conversation.

Interns As The AI Adoption Spark

Dave [7:34] There's also this question of desire to work and how you bring people into your organization. Because if you're bringing people in saying "fill this role for a short period of time and eventually we'll automate it and you're out," the motivation, the desire to learn, to progress, to turn up and get engaged with that organization is severely impacted. That's really not something that gets people jumping up and down saying, "okay yeah, let me go do that."

Peter [8:12] Exactly. And there's also the societal piece of it. Everybody in the latest generation is a snowflake and lazy. Which is something that's been recurring for a long time.

Dave [8:30] Our generation may well have been accused of the same thing back in the day. They just didn't use the word snowflake.

Peter [8:38] Yes, we did get accused of being lazy. I certainly don't feel lazy.

Dave [8:43] Every generation says that about the new generation coming in. That's a fact of life in many ways.

Peter [8:54] And it has been for centuries. If I remember correctly, the earliest recorded one was around 750 BC, something like that. Somebody had written down that this new generation of layabouts was going to be... I can't remember the exact quote, but it was very much saying the younger generation coming in, and so it happens continuously. There is that lifeblood, that new way of looking at things, that learning, as you were saying, that helps all of the teams around them succeed because they start to look at things differently. That can be incredibly valuable. So there's definitely a story to be told for why we should still be bringing junior engineers into the organization, not least because they will eventually become your senior engineers. You need some kind of thought process around how you're going to get there, unless your thought process is "I'm never going to need them." One of the interesting counter-questions at the conference was, "well, why don't I just let somebody else hire them as junior engineers and wait until they're intermediate engineers, then I'll hire them?"

Dave [10:09] I'm intrigued by that.

Belonging, Mentorship, And Long-Term Talent

Dave [10:10] Before we dive into that particular rabbit hole, I think there's a piece where we started talking about the fact that every generation thinks the next one coming into the workforce is lacking in some way, whether it's called lazy or something else. It is a transformational change, right? If you're coming in from education, whatever the background might be, there is going to be some kind of transition that has to happen. We've all been through it. But there's also what you were just saying, which is do we really need junior engineers giving us something valuable? We've identified a number of different areas where they are valuable. There's value through the diversity and the perspectives they bring. But there's also a huge amount of value in just building commitment and belonging to an organization. Those first one or two career steps are often formative in terms of how we view ourselves in the workforce and how we view the companies we work with. I've certainly seen that very strongly. People who have great experiences with those first few companies, where they're well cared for and mentored and supported, have a really strong connection to those original companies, good work practices, and an expectation of how to contribute. Then there are people who have poor experiences, and that haunts them for a while.

Peter [12:06] Yeah, and it's valuable too because somebody who sees that and knows what they want isn't going to waste your time if this isn't the organization for them.

Unknown [12:15] Yes.

Peter [12:16] They will be out of there faster, which is also something you should keep an eye on because that might mean there's something wrong on your side. It's not just that they're snowflakes. They may be looking for something your organization isn't giving them.

Three Takeaways And Closing

Peter [12:28] If we were to bring this conversation together, what three points would you want to pull out? Any particular nuggets you think would be worth taking away?

Dave [12:40] I really liked what you said, the 750 BC example. We forget that. As agile coaches and organizational consultants, we often talk about having a beginner's mind and getting back to what it feels like to be a beginner when we've become very experienced. We often forget that. As a reminder, every generation views the one coming in as not ready, whatever the phrase is. We just need to remember that's normal. It's not something particular to where we are today. It's always been a perspective.

Peter [13:23] And it comes with every new generation.

Dave [13:26] Absolutely. The second point is the externalities. It's very easy to look at junior engineers and what they contribute to the product being built. What we don't count is the shift in understanding that comes through the naivety and the diverse perspectives, whether they bring in new technologies, new ways of thinking because it's in their DNA as they come in, or just through asking questions without fully understanding the consequence. That naivety can be such a powerful influence on an organization.

Peter [14:12] I think my takeaway is that teams who have that person asking those questions actually grow faster and come together faster because they get to explore things they hadn't necessarily thought about before. That's a good one. Okay, that'll wrap it up for today. As always, you can reach out to us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Don't forget to hit subscribe and tell your friends, and we'll look forward to next time.

Dave [14:40] Excellent. Until next time.

Peter [14:42] You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.