The Junior Hiring Crisis
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The Junior Hiring Crisis
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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#2That's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal" her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself).
> The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer.
Mentoring is difficult; especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors.
For myself, I'm happily retired from the Rodent Rally, and find that LLMs have been a huge help, when learning new stuff.
Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#3The most frustrating thing about this whole junior position drought is how it simultaneously affects those who are passionate and get it, not only the opportunist bootcamp alumni who were lured by the prospect of high earnings.
If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#4Want to stand out in a world where all the job applications are AI slop? Network. The original kind.
Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human relationships matter.
Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#5That's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal" her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself). > The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer. Me…
I think I would also ad to the mix that young folk these days are incredibly overconfident and averse to criticism. A few years back they got a junior dev in here, and I was supposed to help him get on our stack, and ultimately mentor him.
This kid would not accept seniority, would constantly and publicly try to divert from the stack we worked with, he would not take any input on his work without actively fighting the process and will crowd the conversation at team meetings with never-ending Reddit-tier takes that contributed to nothing other than fill his ego.
In the end I managed to convince my boss to get him out, and he now works in Cyber, which will probably cause even more damage in the long run, but at least I can now say "not my problem".
Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#6The most frustrating thing about this whole junior position drought is how it simultaneously affects those who are passionate and get it , not only the opportunist bootcamp alumni who were lured by the prospect of high earnings. If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
/r/cscareerquestions the horror eg. applied to 2000 jobs got 1 offer
Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#7This article talks a lot about AI, but what I find odd is that in my relatively short (but long enough) ~9 yr career so far, this problem predates AI. I don't deny that it exacerbates it, but you don't kill a disease by addressing the symptoms. From the first time I was ever involved in the hiring process, senior leadership always encouraged me to hire more experienced staff, always most heavily scrutinized juniors, and had negotiations fall through with mid-level candidates the most. This was despite juniors passing technical screens with strong showings. This was not at a Fortune 500. This was a micro-cap subsidiary of a private, billion dollar company.
And although it hasn't discouraged me, I have to admit that I've been burned by juniors when caught in the middle between them and senior leadership on output expectations or strategy because frankly it's much more challenging to mentor how to navigate company politics than it is to mentor professional coding acumen. I want to be humble here. I don't think that's the junior's fault.
It feels like these problems go a lot deeper than AI. Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team. We've all experienced this. It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#8That's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal" her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself). > The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer. Me…
> especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors
What world is this? This not match my experiences at all. Is this a common sentiment among your peers?
Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#9That's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal" her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself). > The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer. Me…
> where we are taught to despise older folks
9 times out of 10 it goes the other way around. Most young people have only had very negative interactions with their seniors, which has been wholly on the part of the senior. The current young generation is very respectful towards older people.
Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis
#10We're still in the early days. It's gonna get a lot worse, if the LLM scaling laws are to be believed.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...