There is no doubt that juniors have much more difficulty starting their careers in tech nowadays.
This might be naive, but isn’t this purely a demographic/saturation effect?
What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
251–260 of 394 posts
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 crea…
I didn’t say any of that either, all I said was for ai, one type of task is easier than another
I said nothing about a human’s capabilities, which are most certainly different than an AI’s
This is the second time you’ve said a bunch of stuff I didn’t say, and then tried to argue with me over it.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#253You know that thing about the answer to any headline that’s a question being almost always “No”?
I’ve been fully remote for 17 years and, before that, did short periods of remote work as early as 2003.
The first junior I remember being onboarded remotely (into an irc-mostly, voice call for ultra rare cases job) was me and it worked pretty well.
From about 2010 to 2012 I grew the support team of a database services company from 2 to about 20 people (the 2 at the start was counting me). A lot of the new hires were junior when it came too dabatases, some just junior period, and it worked great too.
There were some in person meetings but the vast majority of onboarding and training happened remotely.
Maybe people invested in office real estate are perhaps biased to get the wrong answer on this one.
If I had time now, I’d write an article titled “is the FT right about the cause of weak junior hiring?”
I don’t have time, but you can apply that saying about headlines to my imaginary article.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Trump takes credit for fixing problems that he created in the first place.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#255NVIDIA is hiring wherever the talent is, learn from NVIDIA, stop whining.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood this argument. Most companies do not own their office buildings, but rather lease space from corporate landlords. It is in the best interest of these companies to dramatically reduce their lease burden via WFH. Why would a company totally unrelated to real estate investment act against its own self-interest just to prop up real estate investors?
The argument (which may or may not be valid, just explaining it) is that companies do not lease space (or take any action), people do. And the same individuals who are able to make leasing decisions for office space are co-invested in commercial real estate; even if the company doesn’t benefit from maintaining an expensive office, the C suite might; and if so, then of course that’s the decision that will be made.
>[T]he same individuals who are able to make leasing decisions for office space are co-invested in commercial real estate
But those individuals are much bigger shareholders in the company they work for. Downsizing the office footprint of a single company has a tiny marginal effect on the overall real estate market, but can incur enormous savings for the company, and enormous personal rewards to the people making the decision to downsize and save money.
Individuals are notoriously bad at considering collective externalities. If a CFO realizes that they could save tens of millions of dollars per year on real estate by switching to remote-only, they’re not going to then think “but if everyone did this, it would hurt the commercial real estate holdings I have in my portfolio.” No, the CFO is thinking “announcing that we’re saving 8 figures per annum on real estate is going to pop the share price of my company (and thus my equity holdings), and likely net me a really fat cash bonus.” By similar logic, CTOs, who likely have considerable technology investments, would want to needlessly maximize tech spend. Instead, they get lauded for cutting IT costs.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#257[flagged]
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#258Earlier 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.
seems more like a culture problem, i have my calendar very public, all my junior devs know ill get on a zoom with no hesitation and they actually seem to enjoy the screen sharing, every zoom is recorded with AI summary/transcript so they’re more focused on asking questions instead of taking notes (and i think they’re really solid juniors and actually go back and watch) there’s the whiteboard element but i’ve gotten p…
I'm sure this is quite a personal thing. I much prefer being in-person for that kind of interaction, and I don't think it's about efficiency as such, I just prefer being around people despite not being an extrovert - hybrid working is perfect for me.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#259My previous submission to the same article (without the syndication code, hence not recognized by the HN deduplication):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319392 (2 comments)
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's no way to warn them, so all you can do is... watch …and then wake up from the nightmare wishing the stress from the job is lower. I can only laugh that some people truly believe that developers, one of the most ardent group at automating the tedious part of their job, would refuse to use an effective tool. You only need to look at the open source world to see people litterally scratching their own hitch eve…
What if I don't want to automate away the part of my job that I actually like doing? What if, in my job as a programmer, I actually want to do programming?
People who demand programmers start using LLMs in their work don't understand that it is essentially like asking programmers to start doing accounting or HR. Something fundamentally different from what they love to do..