a lot of junior eng tasks don't really help you become a senior engineer. someone needs to make a form and a backend API for it to talk to, because it's a business need. but doing 50 of those doesn't really impart a lot of wisdom
same with writing tests. you'll probably get faster at writing tests, but that's about it. knowing that you need the tests, and what kinds of things might go wrong, is the senior engineer skill
with the LLMs current ability to help people research a topic, and their growing ability to write functioning code, my hunch is that people with the time to spare can learn senior engineer skills while bypassing being a junior engineer
convincing management of that is another story, though. if you can't afford to do unpaid self-directed study, it's probably going to be a bumpy road until industry figures out how to not eat the seed corn
a lot of junior eng tasks don't really help you become a senior engineer. someone needs to make a form and a backend API for it to talk to, because it's a business need. but doing 50 of those doesn't really impart a lot of wisdom
same with writing tests. you'll probably get faster at writing tests, but that's about it. knowing that you need the tests, and what kinds of things might go wrong, is the senior engineer skill
with the LLMs current ability to help people research a topic, and their growing ability to write functioning code, my hunch is that people with the time to spare can learn senior engineer skills while bypassing being a junior engineer
convincing management of that is another story, though. if you can't afford to do unpaid self-directed study, it's probably going to be a bumpy road until industry figures out how to not eat the seed corn