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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#291

Post by throwaway2037 »

parliament32 wrote: post #258
ike2792 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.

This has been a thing for a long time and I've thought about it quite a bit, but I still have no solutions. I'm pretty sure it just comes down to bean-counting: "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $100k" vs "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $120k" is effectively the same thing, and there's a clear "spend money, acquire person" transaction going on. Meanwhile, "we spent $20k on an asset we already ha…

In my view, I have observed many good, underpaid engineers because they choose stability over higher pay. Most people are happy with slow and stead pay rises while working at the same company. Companies know this and pay accordingly. Only your top 1-10% of employees need more careful "TLC" to give higher raises and regular off-cycle feedback: "You're doing great. We are giving you a special raise for your efforts." You can mostly afford to lose the rest.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#292

Post by venturecruelty »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #274
icedchai wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some definite signs of over reliance on AI. From emojis in comments, to updates completely unrelated to the task at hand, if you ask "why did you make this change?", you'll typically get no answer. I don't mind if AI is used as a tool, but the output needs to be vetted.

What is wrong with emojis in comments? I see no issue with it. Do I do it myself? No. Would I pushback if a young person added emojis to comments? No. I am looking at "the content, not the colour".

The point is that heavy emoji use means AI was likely used to produce a changeset, not that emojis are inherently bad.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#293

Post by gishh »

semiquaver wrote: post #182
Zarathruster wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I keep hearing this and find it utterly perplexing. As a junior, desperate to prove that I could hang in this world, I'd comb over my PRs obsessively. I viewed each one as a showcase of my abilities. If a senior had ever pointed at a line of code and ask…

> embarrassed to check in a pile of slop Part of being a true junior, especially nowadays, is not being able to recognize the differences between a pile of slop from useful and elegant code.

More to the point, I think part of being a senior is being able to dig up code you wrote a few years ago and say “how awful”

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#294

Post by venturecruelty »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #201
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #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…

Those of us familiar with the Dilbert comic strip of the '90s-'00s are having a good chuckle at the idea that there was ever a social contract. What you think of as a social contract was a fiction enabled only by the explosive growth of the software industry during the Internet and mobile web of the last twenty years. It's easy to be generous to employees when the profits just keep growing on their own. It's easy to…

The last social contract between companies and employees was during the New Deal era. It's been downhill ever since.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#295

Post by nobodyandproud »

leptons wrote: post #108
austin-cheney wrote: post #27

There are two problems here. 1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior. 2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume. The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.

Retire? I can never retire. I'll likely die at my keyboard. Software has not provided the future I was hoping for.

Is that a monetary future unfulfilled, or something else?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#296

Post by shagie »

anal_reactor wrote: post #259
shagie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested." Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. It is especially frustrating that the second gro…

> This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested." I've learnt that saying this exact phrase does wonders when it comes to advancing your career. I used to argue against stupid ideas but not only did I achieve nothing, but I was also labelled uncooperative and technically incompetent. Then I became a "yes-man" and all problems went away.

I was attempting to mock Claude's "You are absolutely right" style of response when corrected.

I have seen responses to PRs that appear to be a copy and paste of my feedback into it and a copy and paste of the response and fixes into the PR.

It may be the that the developer is incorporating the mannerisms of Claude into their own speech... that would be something to delve into (that was intentional). However, more often than not in today's world of software development such responses are more likely to indicate a copy and paste of LLM generated content.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#297

Post by [deleted] »

silexia wrote: post #236
QuercusMax wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"far left changes"? What are you even talking about? You think there's some new "woke" CS curriculum which doesn't actually teach algorithms?

Grade inflation, everyone passes with A's, racial discrimination against asian and whites, etc.

[deleted]

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#298

Post by QuercusMax »

silexia wrote: post #236
QuercusMax wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"far left changes"? What are you even talking about? You think there's some new "woke" CS curriculum which doesn't actually teach algorithms?

Grade inflation, everyone passes with A's, racial discrimination against asian and whites, etc.

/eyeroll

OK, you're one of those people. Good grief, get a grip.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#299

Post by fatty_patty89 »

lordnacho wrote: post #202
dataviz1000 wrote: post #149

Ask HN: I have a friend of a friend in his mid 20s who finished a masters degree in data science focused on AI. There isnt a job for him and I think hes given up. In Letters to a Young Poet Rilke responded to a young aspiring poet who asked how a person knows whether the artistic path is truly their calling: > “There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; se…

99% of us can't live like that. The other place you will meet struggling artists is sports. Train several times a week, neglect your social life, your studies, just learn how to chase after a ball. Only people who are crazy driven will actually do this. The ones who don't make it, they try to climb up from lower league clubs. They go on and on, carving out a career. But most kids do not have a burning passion for any…

> There's so much that a person who can code and can deal with statistics can apply himself do.

Can you give a few examples please?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#300

Post by shagie »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #271
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with an intern at work who I suspect is doing exactly this, I discussed this with a colleague. One way seems to be to organize a face to face meeting where you test their problem solving skills without AI use, the other may be to question them about their thought process as you review a PR. Unfortunately, the use of LLMs has brought about a lot of mistrust in the workplace. Earlier you’d simply assume that a…

> Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice Hot take: This reads like an old person looking down upon young people. Can you explain why it isn't? Else, this reads like: "When I was young, we worked hard and listened to our elders. These days, young people ignore our advice." Every t…

> Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT. In my (somewhat contrived) example, the how is changing, but not the what.

The tangent to that is it is also changing with the how much one internalizes about the problem domain and is able to apply that knowledge later. Hard fought knowledge from the old days is something that shapes how I design systems today.

However, the tendency of people who reach for ChatGPT today to solve a problem results in them making the same mistakes again the next time since the information is so easy to access. It also results in things that are larger are more difficult... the "how do you architect this larger system" is something you learn by building the smaller systems and learning about them so that their advantages and disadvantages and how and such becomes an inherent part of how you conceive of the system as a whole. ... Being able to have ChatGPT do it means people often don't think about the larger problem or how it fits together.

I believe that is harder for a junior who is using ChatGPT to advance to being a mid level or senior developer than it is for a junior from the old days because of the lack of retention of the knowledge of the problems and solutions.

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