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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?

#201

Post by agentifysh »

Surprised none of these comments address the issue from cultural/generational value gap

I increasingly find across different borders that Gen Z simply are not optimal or desirable for hire and its not just "remote coding jobs" but across the spectrum.

In South Korea, there are lot of of 35yo+ getting hired while people in their early 20s struggling.

I see the same outcome in different advanced economies and the answer is quite simple, Gen Z, are simply not equipped to work or put up with grit that is needed. They are too self centered and contradictory to their own interests. They expect others to bend over backwards for them without any merit.

Perhaps the biggest difference I see from millenials and gen z is that the degree in which they realize the difference between having earned the right to expressing your opinion and expressing your opinion.

Unfortunately, from personal anecdotes and others, gen z simply are not aware and thus stuck in a loop. Frankly, I don't have any sympathy. I don't know where this entitlement comes from but its not helpig them and it certainly will not improve outcomes.

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

#202

Post by qsera »

mgfist wrote: post #142
qsera wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs enable a new kind of text search. It looks like reasoning and intelligence, but it is not. For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consider a traditional internet search that comes up with a stackoverflow answer as a machine generating "novel ideas" and answers. It is a clever marketing trick (touting Erdos solutions) employeed by AI companies.

Whatever LLMs are or are not, they've completely changed what I do for work. 9 months ago I was coding, today I prompt. Every line of code I commit is generated by LLMs. If you want to call it text search, be my guest. Doesn't change what it's done for the industry.

Sure, as I said, a better search can bring pretty dramatic change in how you work.

> Every line of code I commit is generated by LLMs...

Imagine if someone told you "Hey, this stackoverflow site is great. Everything I commit in my work is copy pasted from it!". What would you think about their work? Is that something worth bragging about?

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

#203

Post by antoinealb »

Aurornis wrote: post #66
antoinealb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO. I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.

This is a weird conspiracy theory. You'd have to believe that real estate investors were pulling the strings in companies to get them to spend more money with no upside. Like they're just milking these companies for rent and the companies are doing it because they want to give money to the real estate investors? Even in the rare case where real estate investors are also investors in the startup, my experience is that…

That's not what I believe. Other posters have explained it well, but to respond myself:

1. Some large tech companies are also large real estate funds. Google had >100B$ in real estate positions (although mixed between datacenters and office parks) [0]. So its not that they are milked for rent, but more that they would be loosing some money here, although not much. 2. People making decisions are also probably invested in the real estate market, and therefore have money to loose from a collapse of real estate value.

I also gave more thought to it, and I don't see it as impossible that WFH reduces employee's productivity (from the perspective of the employer). However, that is also true of other worker's rights like vacation time or sick leave. RTO mandates are an act of control of workers, from the managing class, and pushing it as "because of productivity" does not change that.

And again: I personally like working more from an office. I don't want to force others to follow my preferences.

[0] https://www.realtygroupfl.com/blog/posts/2022/02/02/google-r...

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

#204

Post by kaashif »

andy99 wrote: post #34
embedding-shape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that seems obvious to me, even to me as a programmer who likes to be able to take long stretches of solitude to really nail the solution to a problem. The indirect transfer of knowledge, understanding and alignment that happens when you're not just sitting at your desk working on your things, seems invaluable once you've had the experience of a workplace where that happens naturally and seems to be able to "ste…

The best remote jobs I’ve had included many hours a week of no-agenda calls with colleagues, just catching up and talking about what we’re up to. This is very hard to make happen. Most people don’t want to, don’t see it as work, or more likely just don’t know anyone well enough to call and shoot the shit. But imo this is the only real way. Just doing transactional interactions, it’s very tough to stay well connected.

Doing that kind of thing over Zoom just always felt fake and not fun to me.

Maybe some people are wired differently where that works, and I'm stuck having to meet people in person to connect with them for real. Which could be a disadvantage for me.

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

#205

Post by teaearlgraycold »

jansan wrote: post #191
closeparen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good thing there are companies outside San Francisco, too. Actually, almost every company is not in San Francisco if you think about it.

My brain can't understand companies not in San Francisco.

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

#206

Post by distances »

rgblambda wrote: post #166
cbdevidal wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Not at all my experience of consulting companies. What I saw was that they were very useful training pipelines for juniors.

The companies would staff projects with a mix of seniors and juniors. Seniors to get started fast, in the right direction, and actually guarantee the delivery; juniors to keep the costs lower and to have a pipeline of new people. Hands-on from day 1, sitting with seniors in a project with clear timelines and deliverables, with projects and technologies changing regularly, tended to level up the newcomers fast.

This was in small to midsize (50-500) consulting companies where the projects did not come via CEOs being buddies with others.

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

#207

Post by magicalhippo »

mc3301 wrote: post #148
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…

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.

Part of being in the office is that you pick up on what's going on around you. Coworkers might discuss some issue and you might decide to listen in, and so on.

That's the bit I really notice I am missing out on when I work at home.

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

#208

Post by Rapzid »

qsera wrote: post #132
resident423 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment is the significant part, how long do we expect this to last now that AI is capable of generating novel ideas like solutions to Erdos conjectures?

LLMs enable a new kind of text search. It looks like reasoning and intelligence, but it is not. For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consider a traditional internet search that comes up with a stackoverflow answer as a machine generating "novel ideas" and answers. It is a clever marketing trick (touting Erdos solutions) employeed by AI companies.

That's one way to look at it. Kinda like a way to look at cargo planes is in terms of boxes and sticks.

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

#209

Post by murderfs »

grolingor wrote: post #17
flextheruler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's awful and the lack of any sympathy from people further along in their career with kids made it even worse. Everyone thinks it's great but I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation.

Should those other people be made to RTO and spend less time around their kids, to fill in your isolated lifestyle?

By that logic, we should eliminate paternity and maternity leave, because why should people without children work to fill in the gaps left by parents?

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

#210

Post by wvenable »

agentifysh wrote: post #201

Surprised none of these comments address the issue from cultural/generational value gap I increasingly find across different borders that Gen Z simply are not optimal or desirable for hire and its not just "remote coding jobs" but across the spectrum. In South Korea, there are lot of of 35yo+ getting hired while people in their early 20s struggling. I see the same outcome in different advanced economies and the answe…

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