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What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

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Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#161

Post by closeparen »

jdlyga wrote: post #143

The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So wh…

Which is why junior and senior talent alike are forced back into the office. Except that tenured senior and staff employees from the boom times are in the San Francisco office, but all the new grad hires from the last 2-4 years are in various third world offices. And neither of them can get conference rooms, so everybody's on Zoom at their desk all day, trying to be heard over their neighbors.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#162

Post by nilkn »

karlgkk wrote: post #120
nilkn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Synthesizing a ton of inputs to help clarify a decision or set of options is exactly one of the easiest and most powerful use cases for AI agents right now.

I didn’t say it wasn’t :) All i said is that one type of task is easier than another

I don't think that part is true, either. The average human could be trained to use an agent to synthesize information in their job to help make product decisions. The average human could not be trained to evaluate whether a reasoning model produced a correct proof in research-level mathematics. To be sure: reviewing a candidate proof at this level written by AI is significantly easier and faster than writing and creating it from scratch. But it's still not something hardly any humans could credibly do.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#163

Post by moezd »

Anything to avoid Peter principle at all costs, I guess. I will spell it out: We have an aging middle manager problem in IT. Those with less desire to catch up on things have mandate and budget to pursue projects with sunken cost fallacies, they overestimate the cost of architectural change and they don't take criticism well.

That's what's causing junior hiring to fail, because they don't want to hire juniors with passion, because especially with AI assisted tooling, these juniors suddenly seem a lot more capable than those aging guys who need their third meeting before lunch. Thus they hire the fresh graduate as an impressionable and yet unreliable junior instead.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#164

Post by uejfiweun »

jdlyga wrote: post #143

The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So wh…

Office work removes corporate friction at the expense of personal friction (commuting, dress codes, etc), while WFH removes personal friction at the expense of corporate fiction in the way you've just described. It's an interesting dichotomy. Given who the power lies with in our society, I think we all know which one will win out in the long run.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#165

Post by stult »

vineyardmike wrote: post #116
madrox wrote: post #114

I worked at a fully remote company that did the best job hiring juniors in my 20 year career. The talent and enthusiasm in that pool was great and really injected something into teams. What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.

ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023. But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending…

The R&D tax credit change actually took effect in 2022, and one of the few good things Trump's BBB did was reverse it

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#166

Post by rgblambda »

cbdevidal wrote: post #159
mc3301 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. I'm all for remote work. However, in my first 2 years of programming, being able to go the the office, put my laptop and notebook down next to a senior dev, point and say, "Help me," was so valuable.

I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room. With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help. It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologi…

Guessing you maybe work in the consulting industry?

The "seniors" tend to be glorified salespeople whose job is to put together presentations and reassure clients that everything's going well, while the one or more interns/recent grads do all the technical work. Some projects there'd be one junior literally writing every line of code while the seniors spent their entire time in meeting rooms talking about god knows what.

Dressing smart, talking smoothly, and being older looking (to imply experience to clients) are the attributes that get you a senior role.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#167

Post by skipkey »

jdlyga wrote: post #143

The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So wh…

So in the 2010s I was working in game development for a company that mostly did Facebook and mobile games. I'm an early bird, I would usually be in the office at 6-6:30am. The next person would show up usually about 10-15 minutes before the 10am standup, so I'd have 3 hours of quiet productivity.

Generally I'd get all my deliverables done by the time that anyone else showed up, so after standup I'd just circulate and see what everyone was working on, and if I saw someone who was frustrated, I'd see if they wanted help. This let me help train and teach the kids, which I really enjoyed.

That's the one reason I don't like fully remote/zoom jobs. I really enjoy the interaction and the ability to teach.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#168

Post by closeparen »

exabrial wrote: post #6

AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time. Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on th…

The narrative "we don't need as many staff because of AI" is a labor disciplining device whether or not it is true. Remaining engineers, loaded up with more projects under the threat of layoffs and with no outside opportunities, work nights and weekends to get them done. Then it is literally true that we accomplished more with less. And in a sense it is even "because of AI." But not in the way that you're supposed to think they mean it.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#169

Post by munk-a »

nickff wrote: post #87
munk-a wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your junior employees frequently job hop as soon as they have been trained up then your company is mismanaged. There are always personal reasons (I ended up immigrating to another country as I was coming into Senior-hood because my partner couldn't affordably immigrate into the US) but if it's a pattern then that pattern is owed to undercompensation and other failures of management. In the 2000s it was seen as ver…

What is the benefit (to the company) of paying to train a junior, which costs their wage, along with a significant proportion of a senior’s wage, if there is no long-term savings on the junior’s wages later on? This seems like a prisoner’s dilemma where every company counts on another to do the ‘apprenticeship’ training.

There is a wide gap between an intermediate dev and a senior dev - and a senior dev that's spent years learning your codebase and problem area has a lot of tools ready to go that a newly hired dev won't even if they are quite proficient.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#170

Post by mvdtnz »

vineyardmike wrote: post #116
madrox wrote: post #114

I worked at a fully remote company that did the best job hiring juniors in my 20 year career. The talent and enthusiasm in that pool was great and really injected something into teams. What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.

ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023. But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending…

The layoffs are happening all over, not just in USA. Atlassian has cut jobs. Spotify. Wisetech. Xero. It's happening all over. This is not a USA tax policy problem.
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