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Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

franciscotrindade.me

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Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

#31

Post by petcat »

lbriner wrote: post #14

I'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI. What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because…

I think it is less about junior engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.

This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.

[0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...

Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

#33

Post by Varelion »

lbriner wrote: post #14

I'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI. What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because…

The goal is prevent homegrown talent, and give a reason to import H2B of offshore.

Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

#34

Post by danielvaughn »

lbriner wrote: post #14

I'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI. What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because…

Totally agree about remote work for juniors. Even as a senior I feel like it's diminished some of my skills, in spite of all the benefits it brings.

Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

#36

Post by johnsmith1840 »

lbriner wrote: post #14

I'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI. What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because…

Agreed wfh to me is just generally bad for any creative work but for a new person it must be taking aways years of development.

Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

#37

Post by wizzwizz4 »

stalfosknight wrote: post #28
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use human slurs for computer programs you don't like.

Why are we defending the feelings of chatbots? Does the word clanker upset you too?

It mildly upsets me, because I think the impulse to denigrate that which we oppose is a harmful one which, if cultivated, we can all too readily turn on people who don't deserve it. But it's not a real slur for real people. (Note that in Star Wars, where many people got this slur from, droids are – or at least, have the potential to be – people, albeit they are usually enslaved, and subject to arbitrary mind wipes.)

However, I couldn't care less about the feelings of chatbots. What I do care about is the feelings of the people to whom the slurs were originally directed, and (generally) the kind of culture that this creates. The use of slurs is a symptom, rather than a cause, but complaining about slurs does get people asking the kinds of questions you're asking, which is a positive.

I would not have said anything if the word "clanker", alone, had been used. But if you look at GP's other comments, I think you'll see evidence to support my musings about the kind of attitude that the practice of slur use cultivates.

Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

#39

Post by danielvaughn »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #10

Hiring seniors is a waste of money. You need someone who knows enough to drive LLMs, but not too much more. The LLMs are good enough to do the debugging, the coding, and a big part of the design work and system architecture. Most of the work today is manual testing and feeding the bugs back into the LLMs.

I've been programming for 15 years, but I've never really taken the plunge into 3D work. Always wanted to. So I figure, now that coding agents are so powerful, let's see if I can make something!

I've tried 3 experiments so far, and have given it serious effort. They're all terrible.

The reason they're terrible is that it's a skill issue. I don't have 3D skills. I don't know the lingo, I don't know how to describe my problems, and I don't know when the agent is shooting itself in the foot.

Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

#40

Post by foldr »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #6
uberman wrote: post #2

I'm not sure what the article actually has to say about the topic it presents. It seems to want to be something about not hiring junior talent (something by the way not restricted to the tech industry) but instead it ends up more a critique about people wanting to use a waterfall pipeline.

I'm just staring at the title, wondering how this offensive, double-and-a-half-negative phrase made it all the way to the frontpage. I'm going to skip this one for that obvious reason.

It's not really a double negative as the negations are in different clauses. If you remove both negations, you get a completely different statement:

> Hiring junior engineers will solve the problem you think you have.

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