The Junior Hiring Crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#391

Post by _carbyau_ » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 4:19 AM UTC

crisdux wrote: post #373

_carbyau_ wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, multinational businesses are multinational . They don't have to hire in any given country. Given the current state of affairs in the US, I'd be moving the balance elsewhere too.

Corporate greed and government collusion have revived indentured servitude through work visas, sanctuary based illegal immigration and virtual offshore outsourcing. You are supporting a vile practice.

I never said I supported such. Merely that if I were in control, I'd probably do the same.

The US has rules to play by, the corporations are playing by them. Recently some of the rules seem to involve specific donations but it is the current set of rules.

In this case, the corporations have global reach, so they may decide that other countries people can be more productive per $. Whether importing or offshoring. Are they correct? That's up for debate.

If you are a US citizen, then this is the result of the policies of your country.

Go be upset at the US system, not a random outsider who is suffering the effects of it all as much as anyone else. :-)

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#392

Post by shagie » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 4:23 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #379

johnnyanmac wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that and had some hard anxiety myself back then. Even these days I may be a bit shakey when love coding in an interview setting? But is the false negative for a nervous pair programmer worse than a false positive for a leetcode question? Ideally a good interviewer would be able to separate the anxiety from the actual thinking and see that this person can actually think, but that's another undervalued ski…

I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people. It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months. Given how much these orgs pay, both direct to head hunters and indirect in interview time, might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test. That also lets you evaluate longer term habits like punctual…

Sunk cost. You've spent... 20 to 100 hours on interviews. Maybe more. Doing it again is another expense.

Onboarding. Even with good employees, it can take a few months to get the flow of the organization, understanding the code base, and understanding the domain. Maybe a bit of technology shift too. Firing a person who doesn't appear to be preforming in the first week or two or three would be churning through that too fast.

Provisional hiring with "maybe we'll hire you after you move here and work for us for a month" is a non-starter for many candidates.

At my current job and the job previous it took two or three weeks to get things fully set up. Be it equipment, provisioning permissions, accounts, training (the retail company I worked at from '10 to '14 - they sent every new hire out to a retail store to learn about how the store runs (to get a better idea of how to build things for them and support their processes).

... and not every company pays Big Tech compensation. Sometimes it's "this is the only person who didn't say «I've got an offer with someone else that pays 50% more»". Sometimes a warm body that you can delegate QA testing and pager duty to (rather than software development tasks) is still a warm body.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#393

Post by alvah » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 4:29 AM UTC

Herring wrote: post #159

moregrist wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism is when the state (ie: the government) _owns_ industries. A social contract is an implicit agreement that everyone more or less accepts without anything being necessarily legally binding. For example, the courtesy of two weeks notice in the US is a social contract: there’s nothing legally requiring it, but there are _social_ consequences (ie: your reference might be less positive) if you don’t follow it. Ev…

It's not that I don't like it. It's more that I think you're being lied to. Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should. But they still buy into the system that is impoverishing them. The top 10% of income earners in the US account for 50% of consumer spending. LMK if you think that's part of the contract. https://www.marketpla…

"Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should."

The second part of your sentence is not necessarily true. It might be true in some or even many cases, but it's certainly not something you can just assert & move on, as if it's a physical law.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#394

Post by SchemaLoad » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:00 AM UTC

dangus wrote: post #229

gessha wrote: post #228

One thing that I hypothesize about junior developers is that you need to leapfrog the handholding period and go straight to the medium/senior position on your own. You can acquire the medium/senior level of knowledge and experience making all the mistakes and bad choices by yourself and learning from the experience.

Are you saying this plan is realistic or more like a pipe dream? This is kind of like saying “Get your flight hours in on Microsoft Flight Simulator and then Delta Airlines will hire you.” All unpaid and in your spare time between your two minimum wage jobs, of course.

Maybe software development will become more like a doctor or an engineer where you are expected to come fully trained on your own time and dime.

It's sad that the great opportunities have become more out of reach. But that seems almost expected for a job that's relatively easy, safe, and pays well.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#395

Post by shagie » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:15 AM UTC

throwup238 wrote: post #377

nradov wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who would write the guild membership or licensure criteria? How much should those focus on ReactJS versus validation criteria for cruise missile flight control software?

Guild members? Who else? You’re asking these rhetorical questions as if we haven’t had centuries of precedent here, both bad and good. How does the AMA balance between neurosurgeons and optometrists? Bar associations between corporate litigators and family estate lawyers? Professional engineering associations between civil engineers and chemical engineers?

> Professional engineering associations between civil engineers and chemical engineers?

One takes the FE exam ( https://ncees.org/exams/fe-exam/ ). You will note at the bottom of the page "FE Chemical" and "FE Civil" which are two different exams.

Then you have an apprenticeship for four years as an Engineer in Training (EIT).

Following, that, you take the PE exam. https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/ You will note that the PE exams are even more specialized to the field.

Depending on the state you are licensed in (states tend to have reciprocal licensing - but not necessarily and not necessarily for all fields). For example, if you were licensed in Washington, you would need to pass another exam specific to California to work for a California firm.

Furthermore, there is the continuing education requirements (that are different for each state). https://www.pdhengineer.com/pe-continuing-education-requirem...

You have to take 30 hours of certified study in your field across every two years. This isn't a lot, but people tend to fuss about "why do CS people keep being expected to learn on our own?" ... Well, if we were Professional Engineers it wouldn't just be an expectation - it would be a requirement to maintain the license. You will again note the domain of the professional development is different - so civil and mechanical engineers aren't necessarily taking the same types of classes.

These requirements are set by the state licensure and part of legislative processes.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#396

Post by moosedev » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:41 AM UTC

shagie wrote: post #300

throwaway2037 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prob…

They’re going to get promoted anyway. The “senior” title will simply (continue to) lose meaning to inflation.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#397

Post by chanux » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:47 AM UTC

> When tech companies started giving engineers an alternative career path to management by letting them climb the ranks as individual contributors instead of having to be managers, I thought that was definitely the right move. Still do. However, the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.

Interesting observation. I have personally tried to avoid getting into people manager positions (as I believed I'd be Peter Principled) but always took it as my duty to share knowledge and mentor the curious and the hungry (and even the ones that are not so). It's actually a very rewarding feeling when I hear good things about people who learned with me.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#398

Post by wyclif » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:47 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #312

throwaway2037 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The answer to this (throughout the ages) should be the same: read the authoritative source of information. The official API docs, the official language specification,…

[Disclaimer: I'm a Gen Xer. Insert meme of Grandpa Simpson shouting at clouds.]

I think this is undoubtedly true from my observations. Recently, I got together over drinks with a group of young devs (most around half my age) from another country I was visiting.

One of the things I said, very casually, was, "Hey, don't sleep on good programming books. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. MIT Press. No Starch Press. Stuff like that."

Well, you should've seen the looks on their faces. It was obvious that advice went over very poorly. "Ha, read books? That's hard. We'd rather just watch a YouTube video about how to make a JS dropdown menu."

So yeah, I get that "showing my age" remark. Used to be the discipline in this industry is that you shouldn't ask a question of a senior before you'd read the documentation. If you had read the documentation, man pages, googled, etc., and still couldn't come up with an answer, then you could legitimately ask for a senior mentor's time. Otherwise, the answer from the greybeards would have been "Get out of my face, kid. Go RTFM."

That system that used to exist is totally broken now. When reading and understanding technical documentation is viewed as "old school", then you know we have a big problem.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#399

Post by dcchambers » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:50 AM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #251

dcchambers wrote: post #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.

From an individual senior exec point of view - all staff are replaceable. You just hire from outside the company. People don't think in terms of shared commons and that if all companies are doing the same thing then there won't be much of a "senior" market left to hire.

When companies stop hiring juniors it completely kills the employee leveling process. It all but stops the creation of skilled senior employees.

You say you can just hire from outside the company - but what do you do when there is no one left to hire because the talent pool is completely drained?

Abandoning the junior employee will slowly drain that talent pool until there are no seniors available to hire, the "just hire from outside the company" plan doesn't work any more.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#400

Post by venturecruelty » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:21 AM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #305

kalinkochnev wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a new college grad I might be able to add some insight. We're stuck in a stalemate where the sheer volume of applications for employers to handle and applicants to send makes them take shortcuts, leaving both sides wonder why people aren't trying. If somebody has to send in 300-500 applications (which is not unheard of) and answer the same questions till they go blind, it's not surprising that certain things are m…

>Applicants don't have any reason to believe their info isn't thrown in the trash by an LLM as soon as it is sent. That's leading to an escalation where because applicants believe their apps are just getting fed to the LLMs, employers have to use an LLM. ;-/

Look at the power dynamics then. Who has more power in this situation: people with rent and mortgages? Or companies with more money than God? Companies could simply stop using LLMs and tomorrow and be fine. They brag about laying off thousands while turning record profits; they can turn off the slop machines.

Let's not blame the people with no power in this situation.