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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?

#371

Post by vineyardmike »

tcp_handshaker wrote: post #314
mvdtnz wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

While factually correct, the US tax change was a huge driver of global layoffs. And the original comment didn’t just mention US tax policy as a source of layoffs, and the alternative source provided would apply globally.

The tax change impacted US company spend on their overseas businesses, so of course they’d be impacted, and it would indirectly impact overseas supplies of domestic business. Beyond that, it sets a tone and many in business are quick to follow the behaviors of others.

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

#372

Post by mgfist »

qsera wrote: post #202
mgfist wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Those are 2 different things so yeah I naturally would have a different reaction.

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

#373

Post by arexxbifs »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #370
arexxbifs wrote: post #227

What if there are several reasons all at once? * Economy is tighter overall. * Covid overhiring followed by firing means fresh graduates face competition from a large cohort of people with a few years of work experience. * Even if it's not necessarily true, if the C-suite _believes_ that AI can replace juniors, that's enough to funnel money away from hiring and into AI investments. When money for hiring is tight, sen…

Its AI. Both AI actually being good now, and CEOs believing AI is good. Even at most big tech companies, L3 engineers were basically the "claudes" of their team (or at least, 80% of their job was basically to be a "claude"). You give them some well scoped, largely coding task (that you either delegate as part of a larger project, or just something you don't want to do), and then they execute it. Once they build trust…

Meta fired 8,000 employees not two weeks ago: "[Meta] revealed to employees in April that it would conduct a major round of layoffs the following month while nixing plans to fill 6,000 open positions. The company told workers in a memo at the time that the job cuts were intended to help offset investments into other areas like AI." [1]

That sounds exactly like funneling money away from hiring and into AI investments to me.

As for COVID overhiring, Amazon doubled their workforce during the pandemic. I'm sure plenty of those hires are still employed. During their latest layoff, they also spoke about "shifting resources to invest more in artificial intelligence".[2]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/meta-layoffs-zuckerberg-says... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/amazon-cut-thousands-of-engi...

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

#374

Post by blharr »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #242
honkycat wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS. Pairing works great over zoom

When I compare pair programming in person vs. by video chat, there is no comparison. In person is always more effective. That said, if you have no choice (your pairing partner is not in the same office), then video chat is way better than 10 years ago, and is a reasonable alternative.

As someone who has poorer vision than average, pair programming in person as the observer is almost impossible. Id have to ask the driver constantly for clarification on what they typed or have them increase their text size to something that would be uncomfortable to them.

That's just to say its not always more effective

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

#375

Post by mgfist »

qsera wrote: post #318
retsibsi wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 it to solve those problems. Just some form of advanced, but yet dumb, search algorithm. I'm not just trying to be snarky, but I have no idea how to read this without taking the implication that humans are advanced, yet dumb, searc…

A human being who states X (implying they know it to be true) will behave in a way that is consistent with X being true. An LLM will happily say X and behaves in contradiction to X. Because it does not reason. Its behavior is not derived from things that it claim (or appears) to know.

> A human being who states X (implying they know it to be true) will behave in a way that is consistent with X being true.

That is literally not true and why we talk about "stated vs revealed preference" and such.

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

#376

Post by jazz9k »

Remote work takes the same discipline as running your own company.

I've been working remotely for 20 years now, and most people just can't handle it and are either distracted, slacking off, or just not working.

I've seen lots of people fired over it, and ruined it for everyone.

I'm a consultant now and no longer have to hope and dream that my employer will let me work remotely. It's in my contract.

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

#377

Post by weakfish »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #351
weakfish wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I've been seeing lately with Opus 4.7 under Claude Code is that it finds more bugs in my code than I find in its code. That, to me, makes it hard to argue that I am "better" than it is. Certainly Claude/Codex's knowledge of algorithms and data structures is leagues ahead of any human programmer alive. Only its capacity for creating new ones on demand is weaker. Recent results from the mathematics field suggest t…

I think it's pretty good at review and finding bugs, but IME it's really not great at designing solutions to non-trivial problems, which IME is the part of the job that makes me "good" at it. YMMV

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

#378

Post by [deleted] »

waynesonfire wrote: post #335
jvanderbot wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first and only layoff was effective 1h before that law went into effect. 1,000s of us were shunted off b/c an entire research arm was canned due to the changing cost of research s/w teams. I'm poorer but happier now b/c of it. That job was nuts.

> My first and only layoff Won't be your last.

[deleted]

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

#379

Post by chopete3 »

bradleyy wrote: post #131

What if Financial Times has a vested interest in the real estate industry, and therefore wants RTO mandates? Something something AI I mean.

In capitalistic economies everything will have a vested interest.

Especially anything done by an entity linked to for-profit.

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

#380

Post by qsera »

mgfist wrote: post #375
qsera wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human being who states X (implying they know it to be true) will behave in a way that is consistent with X being true. An LLM will happily say X and behaves in contradiction to X. Because it does not reason. Its behavior is not derived from things that it claim (or appears) to know.

> A human being who states X (implying they know it to be true) will behave in a way that is consistent with X being true. That is literally not true and why we talk about "stated vs revealed preference" and such.

Obviously, we only considering about a honest human here.
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