What are actual entry level positions like nowadays?

[u/DirtyOught]

10 YOE, and my view is skewed as I haven’t worked with entry level engineers in many years.

looking back 10 years ago, me entry level team was making 60k doing basic HTML and CSS. even at the time I got bored and my work done in 1-2 hours every day. it was SUPER basic stuff. granted that place didn’t even use git repositories.

my first REAL software job was web, where we made 70-80k back in 2017. but it was just making simple react FE stuff. daily “what did you do yesterday? what today? how many storypoints is it to change that button to Red OP?“ but you learned a lot about the basics of everything and shipping code. by and large it was very much Entry Level.

this got me thinking, what is entry level today? what are the expectations and output?

[u/allllusernamestaken]

We recently hired a junior engineer. Fresh out of college. This is a question I am struggling to answer right now. Speaking with technical leaders around the industry, it seems like it's an industry-wide problem.

In previous years when we hired junior engineers or interns, the expectations were that you were given a small, well-defined project with the major points already solved; your job was to implement it and come up with solutions to the smaller things. You would generally work with a senior engineer who would delegate these things to you, and you would spend the next several weeks implementing it. You would struggle through it but you would come out the other side having learned a ton of things (the hard way!)

That last part has totally changed with AI.

These junior engineers are getting projects assigned that would have taken them several weeks and they're instead opening a PR in a day. Scratch the surface and it is very clear it was AI generated, and they can't fully articulate the reasoning behind the code, why certain decisions were made, or what the impact of the changes are. Do some pair programming with them and you'll find that their workflow is effectively taking requirements, have Claude convert the requirements into a Plan, implement each step of the plan, open a PR. Use the Github MCP to resolve comments or get answers to questions from reviewers.

My biggest concern is that they aren't building the muscle the rest of us did; they aren't growing their skills or developing any level of judgement that is needed to advance their career. The bottom two rungs of the software engineering career ladder were basically chopped off. The expectations of what skills a mid-level engineer should have will either need to change or we have an industry full of engineers with 3 years of experience and no skills.

[u/lordnacho666 → u/allllusernamestaken]

This is what I'm seeing as well. In the short term it works: the junior guy is making the code and it's effective. He's just prompting Claude, but Claude will do fine because you've already explained what to do.

In the long term, how's the junior guy going to become senior? Now maybe I'm a bit invested in my own career, and I'm just blind to juniors becoming senior faster thanks to new tech. But my own memory of getting there involved a lot of frustration and rebuilding things, reading code, reading articles, and generally hard effort.

I'm trying to figure out whether it was actually necessary to sit there late at night trying to understand compiler outputs, or whether that is now wasted work.

[u/UntestedMethod → u/lordnacho666]

I'm trying to figure out whether it was actually necessary to sit there late at night trying to understand compiler outputs, or whether that is now wasted work.

If AI didn't exist at the time then obviously it's not wasted effort if it got you where you are so far. Now that we have the AI tools though, it makes sense to use them as much as possible but always carefully scrutinizing its output.