Earlier quoted context omitted.
That tax change got reversed!
Proof? I don’t believe it did. Edit: BBB? Is it in effect yet, though?
Yes.
What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
341–350 of 394 posts
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#342The 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…
Opt-in versus opt-out. Active versus passive. A lot of mentorship is just role modeling, juniors observing how seniors conduct themselves in various situations by proximity.
$DAYJOB might as well be fully-remote since the team is heavily distributed and it's the same problem.
I think it's a problem for all workers, not just juniors. Maybe 1 person in the org sees the whole elephant. Way too many "organizational branch mispredictions" from incomplete mental models colliding.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#343As someone who worked remote for 8 years I can see a few reasons
- Really hard to get juniors up to speed when they are remote, when I started out as a junior I sat around a bunch of senior folks, and inhaled in all the knowledge via the interactions we had all day.
- In my previous company, we hired a bunch of juniors who clearly were not self-motivated. There were few who were actively disengaged, would not even care to turn the camera on. They were a few boot-camp grads who though motivated, I could not for the life of me teach computer fundamentals. You can't learn a 4 yr degree's worth of stuff in 6 months at a bootcamp.
Yes Covid was great for us senior folks who did not need direction and were disciplined, but really bad for junior folk.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading comments like this is like watching someone who is absolutely convinced that they have a crystal ball in their lap when at best they have a foggy piece of plastic. You could be right you could be wrong, but don’t act like you have such certainty.
The foggy piece of plastic writes better code and better text than I do. I don't know about you, but that makes me sit up and stop waving my hands dismissively. As for "certainty," that's a luxury nobody has.
I really don't want to sound like an asshole, but I refuse the notion that an agent writes better code / prose than I do and I am concerned for anyone who does think that.
Is it _faster_? sure! That is NOT better.
Before you ask, I write code w/ agents daily, I find it useful, but it's not better than I am purely on quality.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true as stated. However, it is important context that the time bomb was originally introduced in Trump's signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in his first term. So, yes, Trump's OBBBA fixed it, but Trump's TCJA caused it in the first place, too.
This is a fair criticism and I am not defending the practice. My understanding is that time-bombs like this are very regularly introduced into all sorts of bills, party-agnostic. It's how they can say things like "We saved $X over Y years!" where a lot of the time-bombs go off half-way through the 'Y-years" bit unless renewed. Please correct if I'm wrong about this. I only know what I read, which is hard to trust any…
They’ve been regularly introduced in a party-agnostic way, exclusively by republicans. But yea, “party agnostic”.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm glad reading your comment, because i nearly always get that feeling with FT articles, and very often with Economist patronizing subset of articles.
Can you provide some example financial/economic newspapers and magazines that do not give you "that feeling"?
Deutsche Welle and usually Reuters, sometimes AP News. To your point, it _is_ somewhat random
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
What could possibly trigger people to down vote this absolutely neutral, and 100% factual, normal post? Cant the moderators not explain, than down voting is not for things you don't agree with?
Uh, downvoting is definitely a useful tool to signal that you don’t agree with an opinion or subjective statement. But yes, downvoting a factual statement makes no sense.
That's just silly. The fact that you disagree with an opinion does not mean that other people should not get the chance to be exposed to it. That's how echo-chambers form.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first handful of sentences from the abstract were a rather convincing case against the paper to me.
You only needed to read the "first handful of sentences from the abstract" to dismiss an EIGHTY-TWO page paper? Can you share a sample sentence and what you don't like about it?
> Can you share a sample sentence and what you don't like about it?
I suspect you can find the first sentences without aid. Try reading them yourself first.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>I meant that humans are vulnerable to malicious input too. No they are not. Social engineering won't work on a human security expert who knows and understands the implications of the information they are giving away. Your analogy is pointless.
> Social engineering won't work on a human security expert who knows and understands the implications of the information they are giving away
Social engineering, like prompt injection, is a context attack — easy to spot if you're ready for it, but harder in different circumstances (rushed, panicked, tired, having a bad day, etc.).
Troy Hunt (security consultant, creator of HaveIBeenPwned) and Cory Doctorow have both been successfully phished [0][1]. They're both tech- and security-savvy people who "should have known better" but it happened to them anyway. But maybe you're different... you'd never fall for an online scam, right? [2]
[0] https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mail...
[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-05...
[2] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/09/youd-never-fa...
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The first part of your post was very insightful, and I broadly agree. It is interesting that you consider (office) "dress codes" a personal friction. Do dress codes still really exist? I work in a very conservative industry, and the dress codes have changed dramatically in the last 10-20 years. For any other industry, I'm sure the changes are even greater. Also, I am the type of person that really likes to dress well…
Fair enough. I'm feeling more than a bit pessimistic right now to be honest, looking at the CEOs gleefully talking about how we're gonna have to find new jobs. Hopefully the pendulum does swing the other way again.
On the dress code, for me personally, unless I'm at home in commando sweatpants and a sweatshirt, there is always a low grade cognitive tax of me being uncomfortable in the garb that society deems acceptable to wear in an office. And I'm one of the lucky ones, I can wear khakis and a polo. My heart goes out to those poor Wall Street guys who are stuck in suits all day.