The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Ergodicity
12 min read
The article explicitly references ergodicity as a key concept for understanding why surviving the 'valley of regret' matters - it's about whether time averages equal ensemble averages, which fundamentally changes how we should think about repeated bets and investments in junior developers
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Learning curve
13 min read
The entire article centers on the shape and duration of junior developer productivity curves - understanding the mathematical and psychological research behind learning curves provides crucial context for the 'valley of regret' model presented
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Survivorship bias
11 min read
The article's core argument about junior developer attrition and the importance of shortening ramp time implicitly deals with survivorship bias - we only see the successful juniors who made it through, not the 36% who left before becoming productive
Junior developer—obsolete accessory or valuable investment? How does the genie change the analysis?
Folks are taking knee-jerk action around the advent of AI—slowing hiring, firing all the juniors, cancelling internship programs. Instead, let’s think about this a second.
The standard model says junior developers are expensive. You pay senior salaries for negative productivity while they learn. They ask questions. They break things. They need code review. In an augmented development world, the difference between juniors & seniors is just too large & the cost of the juniors just too high.
Wrongo. That’s backwards. Here’s why.
Oops, I buried my lede. Here’s my number one lesson—manage juniors for learning, not production.
The Valley of Regret
A junior developer is a bet. You’re paying money today for productivity tomorrow. The shape of that bet looks something like this:
That red zone—the “valley of regret”—is where things go wrong. You’re spending money. You’re investing senior attention. And every month the junior is in that valley, something can happen: they get a better offer, they decide engineering isn’t for them, your startup runs out of runway, there’s a layoff.
The longer & deeper the valley, the more likely you never reach the other side.
This is why, when I talk to engineering managers, I hear the same thing: “We’d love to hire juniors, but we can’t afford the ramp time right now.”
Shrinking the Valley
I’ve been watching junior developers use AI coding assistants well. Not vibe coding—not accepting whatever the AI spits out. Augmented coding: using AI to accelerate learning while maintaining quality. Remember, you’re managing for learning, not production.
Managed for learning, the magnitude of the junior bet changes:
The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning.
Learning fast can become a habit. When a task is “completed”, there is always the opportunity to squeeze more juice from it:
How else could this
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.