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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.

The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;) While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in…

> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output

which means either devs will take over architectural roles (which already exist and are filled) or architects will take over dev roles. same goes for testing/QA - these are already positions within the industry in addition to being hats that we sometimes put on out of necessity or personal interest.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#52
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/cscareerquestions the horror eg. applied to 2000 jobs got 1 offer

Honestly, with the AI slop of resumes, I applied to dozens of jobs, and only got a callback to ones I had either a recruiter for or direct connections to, after 20 years of experience. Because I didn't have a big fat "worked at google for 10 years" on my resume. And I'd like to think of myself as someone who can take a very bad situation and make it look smooth.

Other than Indeed/Hired all my other roles were from recruiters, I don't have a degree so it's harder for me to get a job application wise, at least now I have the 6 yrs+ experience which isn't a lot but better than 0

Will say what's gotten me hired are my projects eg. robotics or getting published online for hardware stuff, I work in the web-cloud space primarily though, hardware would be cool but hard to make that jump

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#53
The companies that are abandoning junior roles are making a life-or-death bet that AI will eventually replace ALL work.

Because those senior people will NOT be around forever. And they have killed their talent development and knowledge transfer pipelines.

Either direction you take it, this feels like a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#54
This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a networking service, something which is not really made clear until near the end.

The article is self-serving in identifying the solutions ("do things related to the service we offer, and if that doesn't work, buy our service to help you do them better"), but it is a subject worth talking about, so I will offer my refutation of their analysis and solution.

The first point I'd like to make is that while the hiring market is shrinking, I believe it was long overdue and that the root cause is not "LLMs are takin' our jerbs", but rather the fact that for probably the better part of two decades, the software development field has been plagued by especially unproductive workers. There are a great deal of college graduates who entered the field because they were promised it was the easiest path to a highly lucrative career, who never once wrote a line of code outside of their coursework, who then entered a workforce that values credentialism over merit, who then dragged their teams down by knowing virtually nothing about programming. Productive software engineers are typically compensated within a range of at most a few hundred thousand dollars, but productive software engineers generally create millions in value for their companies, leading to a lot of excess income, some of which can be wasted on inefficient hiring practices without being felt. This was bound for a correction eventually, and LLMs just happened to be the excuse needed for layoffs and reduced hiring of unproductive employees[1].

Therefore, I believe the premise that you need to focus entirely on doing things an LLM can't -- networking with humans -- is deeply faulty. This implies that it is no longer possible to compete with LLMs on engineering merit, and I could not possibly disagree more. Rather than following their path forward, which emphasises only networking, my actual suggestion to prospective junior engineers is: build things. Gain experience on your own. Make a portfolio that will wow someone. Programming is a field that doesn't require apprenticeship. There is not a single other discipline that has as much learning material available as software development, and you can learn by doing, seeing the pain points that crop up in your own code and then finding solutions for them.

Yes, this entails programming as a hobby, doing countless hours of unpaid programming for neither school nor job. If you can't do that much, you will never develop the skills to be a genuinely good programmer -- that applied just as much before this supposed crisis, because the kind of junior engineer who never codes on their own time was not being given the mentorship to turn into a good engineer, but rather was given the guidance to turn them into a gear that was minimally useful and only capable of following rote instructions, often poorly. It is true that the path of the career-only programmer who goes through life without spending their own time doing coding is being closed off. But it was never sustainable anyways. If you don't love programming for its own sake, this field is not likely to reward you going forward. University courses do not teach nearly effectively enough to make even a hireable junior engineer, so you must take your education into your own hands.

[1] Of course, layoff processes are often handled just as incompetently as hiring processes, leading to some productive engineers getting in the crossfire of decisions that should mostly hurt unproductive engineers. I'm sympathetic to people who have struggled with this, but I do believe productive engineers still have a huge edge over unproductive engineers and are highly likely to find success despite the flaws in human resource management.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#55
post #41

> We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I referenced above cited the same thing - AI is getting good at automating junior work while only augmenting senior work. So the evidence doesn’t show that AI is going to replace everyone; it’s just removing the apprenticeship ladder. Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we c…

“automate it away” ironically still requires a human in the chain to determine what to automate, how, and to maintain that automation. Whether it be derived from an ai or a systemd script or an Antikythera mechanism. Now if you leave that to seniors you just ate a big chunk of their day playing shephard to a dozen plus “automated” pipelines while they still have stuff to do outside the weeds. Now you need more senior…

The process of setting up and maintaining automation should be less labor intensive than just doing it manually (or else why would you automate it?) and almost always requires a more advanced skillset than doing the manual task.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#56
> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees.

Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process of gutting multiple departments as fast as possible with little regard for the long term consequences. This is not the only company that I know of acting in this way (acting like they're about to go bankrupt when in fact they are seeing record profits).

To me the societal risk is that an entire generation of employees becomes extremely jaded and unmotivated, and fairly so. We used to work under the assumption that if our company is successful, then the employees would be successful. Record profits == raises for all, bonuses for all. And while we know that that connection was never that strong, it was strong enough to let us at least pretend that it was a law of universe.

That fundamental social contract is now at its breaking point for so many workers. Who can really blame people for putting in minimal effort when they have so much evidence that it will not be rewarded?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#57

> We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I referenced above cited the same thing - AI is getting good at automating junior work while only augmenting senior work. So the evidence doesn’t show that AI is going to replace everyone; it’s just removing the apprenticeship ladder. Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we c…

Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand.

In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing breaks down when you're basically collaborating with a model through a proxy.

I think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are still valuable. But it's hard to get past "why bother mentoring when I could just use AI directly?"

I don't have answers here. Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.

The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;) While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in…

> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output

Which stands to reason you'll need less of them. I'm really hoping this somehow leads to an explosion of new companies being built and hiring workers , otherwise - not good for us.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#59

Sadly - as I've mentioned on HN a bunch - junior salaries need to fall dramatically to somewhere in the $60k-$100k range in order to make it cost effective against automation/AI or offshoring. The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async induced offshoring. Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new grad range have…

> The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer

It was always a weird US thing driven by huge companies and VCs. In other western, developed countries ~$50k equivalent would be normal. Even adjusting for other provided social benefits, there's still a long way down...

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#60
for anyone with children, dont waste their time with traditional school, that path is stone dead and is leading nowhere but the abyss of the permanent underclass

apologise for inflicting this era on them and teach them to be entrepreneurial, teach them how to build, teach them rust on the backend, teach them postgres, teach them about assets maintaining value while money loses its

tell them to never under any circumstances take on a mortgage, especially not the 50 year variety. tell them to stay at home for as long as possible and save as much as possible and put it into assets: gold, silver, bitcoin, monero

they must escape the permanent underclass, nothing else matters

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