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

Post by Gormo » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #263

gedy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah "work from home" largely means "work from more affordable real estate". Very very few people do I know who work from home do it for digital nomad type reasons. Everyone else is due to not being able to afford anything near the office.

Each and every parent of 4+ whom I worked with lived in the middle of nowhere and would only emerge from the deep woods for an occasional workshop a few times a year. It's a lifestyle impossible if one has to show up an hour's drive away, every weekday.

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

mvdtnz wrote: post #170

vineyardmike wrote: post #116

Earlier 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 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.

Post by indoordin0saur » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #168

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…

Post by whstl » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #207

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.

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.

Post by qsera » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

maybe_pablo wrote: post #307

qsera wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ever heard of social engineering? Oh wait, I thought these things were super smart. I didn't expect "social engineering" to work on them. > models nowadays are way sharper than they were even a year ago. You are missing the point. If the thing can solve complex math problems and at the same time be so dumb as to fall for "social engineering", then that means that it is not "smartness" or "reasoning" that is helping…

By "heard of social engineering?" I meant that humans are vulnerable to malicious input too. Prompt injection is basically a simplified form of social engineering for language models. It looks different because models operate over much smaller and more explicit contexts than humans do and are explicitly trained to follow instructions, but the general idea is similar: malicious input tries to manipulate how the system…