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Please don't use human slurs for computer programs you don't like.
> Please don't use human slurs for computer programs you don't like.
Good point. We should use different slurs for machines than the ones we use for humans :-)
Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
91–100 of 117 posts
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree with the sibling comment and also don't understand how the title is "offensive". I literally can't think of anything that could be offensive about any term in the title or the title as a whole.
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Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#93[dead]
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI is pretty good at debugging and fixing it. It's quite a bit better at it than writing the code, to be honest. And, you're right, I used to enjoy my job a lot more before AI. But in the end, the paychecks keep coming, and I can produce a lot of acceptable code quickly with little skill. Skill in coding no longer makes economic sense.
This approach accumulates codebase-understanding debt and the call to pay the piper could come at any time
Maybe. Challenge for you: take the last 10 production outages, and paste the symptoms into Fable or Opus 5, and ask it for a diagnosis.
How many does it one shot in less time than your outage lasted?
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#95Pre-AI juniors were valuable because on many tasks, it was faster for me (senior eng) to write a quick spec have a conversation with a junior, and have them go off for a few hours or a few days and write the code, and then come back with it for review. I could do that with several junior engineers and pretty reasonably paralellize the work. Now a junior takes my spec, drops it into Claude, and submits a PR a few minu…
The other challenge with real people is the emotional aspect. Easier and faster to tell ai the code it wrote is terrible and needs to be redone completely, or maybe you just end the session and use a new model. Trickier to do with a human.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#96The "not hiring juniors" thing started before agentic LLMs were a thing, but it was close enough that it's easy to mistake it for causation. The fact that people retroactively attribute this explanation to an industry trend just reinforces it in people's minds, otherwise people might have tried to hire juniors again and realized that it's not such a bad idea. By not hiring juniors, you're putting mid-level work on seniors, who could otherwise be dedicating themselves to solving hard-and-expert-level problems. You're handicapping your company.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#97I'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…
The $100,000 H1B fee is probably one of the only ambiguously good things the Trump admin did.
Genuinely need a skilled worker? Well $100,000 is quite a lot, but not absurd relative to US salaries.
Just trying to bring over an Indian to work as an indentured slave and undercut American workers? Not so fast.
It's honestly a much better model than what most European countries do, which is make the company do a massive amount of paperwork to prove they can't hire a local (also costs a lot, but in a much more annoying and inefficient way)
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#98Pre-AI juniors were valuable because on many tasks, it was faster for me (senior eng) to write a quick spec have a conversation with a junior, and have them go off for a few hours or a few days and write the code, and then come back with it for review. I could do that with several junior engineers and pretty reasonably paralellize the work. Now a junior takes my spec, drops it into Claude, and submits a PR a few minu…
> because it's really hard to learn anything by skimming code that's being pooped out by Claude.
I think this is pretty dubious. It's true that you have to do more proactive learning with an agentic workflow, but it doesn't mean you can't learn stuff. Software engineers forged in the age of AI are not learning the same things their predecessors did or thinking about code in the same way, but the more curious people will still be better at the job, which is I think how it's always been. It seems a little unclear how much "AI brain rot" will be a force unto itself that neuters even the smartest of the juniors, but I think it's still an open question.
Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The $100,000 H1B fee is probably one of the only ambiguously good things the Trump admin did. Genuinely need a skilled worker? Well $100,000 is quite a lot, but not absurd relative to US salaries. Just trying to bring over an Indian to work as an indentured slave and undercut American workers? Not so fast. It's honestly a much better model than what most European countries do, which is make the company do a massive a…
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Re: Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
WFH is good or bad depending on what task you need to do. My first year out of college (roughtly 1998!) my boss looked at me one day and said "you are on a complex problem: don't you dare come to the office tomorrow as we don't want you distracted". However I only made it a few hours at home because I soon ran into a problem where I needed to talk to someone else (my code was working all along but there was a hardwar…
That example, if you never came in the only thing an observing boss would likely know of is that you failed to do a task. It's also super easy for that FPGA engineer to not tell others he made the mistake.
I notice a general problem of wfh is people have zero connection to each other. It's easy for everyone to get "corporate" with one another because they have literally no care or connection to each other. It's really hard to let your coworker look bad if you hang out and chat every day. Not a lot of people I know are willing to toss a friend under the bus but wfh makes it less likely to have a real relationship.
Old friends and long time coworkers that are good at their job have basically no problems wfh.