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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#101

Post by Tade0 »

aynyc wrote: post #78

I'm gonna get some downvote, but I'll say this. Over the last 10 years, the quality of the juniors trends opposite of salary curve. We don't have a crazy interview process, nor are we working on anything ground breaking. By any measurement, we are a run of the mill company that don't offer top end salary but market competitive. The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't…

> The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the name nor the high end salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and HR suck in general. My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1.

I'm sorry but to me this part reads like a humorous phrase that's popular in some circles in my region which goes:

"Maybe , but at least "

The companies I worked for used automated coding quizzes like Codility to weed out the worst applicants, but I suspect you're already doing that.

How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#102

Post by maciejzj »

This is truly heartbreaking, programming was the last profession beside medicine doctor that guaranteed young people good start in life in my country.

It is insane how much screwed over we are. I am about to turn 30 soon with 5 YoE, PhD in ML which supposedly is the cutting edge stuff. Yet I have no prospects to even buy a tiny flat and start “normal life”. AI eats its own tail, I have no idea what I should do and what to learn to have any sensible prospects in life.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#103

Post by geoffmanning »

hex4def6 wrote: post #14

> We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I referenced above cited the same thing - AI is getting good at automating junior work while only augmenting senior work. So the evidence doesn’t show that AI is going to replace everyone; it’s just removing the apprenticeship ladder. Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we c…

This assumes there will still be a demand for software developers in 5 years. I believe we'll be out of jobs much sooner than that.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#104

Post by QuercusMax »

zcw100 wrote: post #95
strickjb9 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand. In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing…

I don't know what world you're living in but software development has always been a cut throat business. I've never seen true mentoring. Maybe a code review where some a-hole of a "senior" developer would come in having just read "clean code" and use some stupid stylistic preferences as a cudgel and go to town on the juniors. I'm cynical enough to believe that this, "AI is going to take your programming job!" is just…

Wow, you must have worked in some REALLY toxic places. I had one toxic senior teammate when I first started out - he mocked me when I was having trouble with some of the dev environment he had created - but he got fired shortly thereafter for being bad at his job.

Everybody else through my 21-year career has almost universally either been helpful or neutral (mostly just busy). If you think code reviews are just for bikeshedding about style minutia, then you're really missing out. I personally have found it extremely rewarding to invest in junior SWEs and see them progress in their careers.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#105

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #91
beginnings wrote: post #60

for anyone with children, dont waste their time with traditional school, that path is stone dead and is leading nowhere but the abyss of the permanent underclass apologise for inflicting this era on them and teach them to be entrepreneurial, teach them how to build, teach them rust on the backend, teach them postgres, teach them about assets maintaining value while money loses its tell them to never under any circums…

Just don't have children. All this churn (learning whatever) isn't worth it (for them).

>Just don't have children.

Despite everything, I like it that humanity exists. I want humanity to continue to exist. I reject any notion or attitude that would, taken to its logical conclusion, result in the extinction of humanity. And, even more so, that would result in the extinction of my family and lineage. For your sake, I hope that this is just edgy horseshit that you will soon grow out of.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#106

Post by ch4s3 »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #91
beginnings wrote: post #60

for anyone with children, dont waste their time with traditional school, that path is stone dead and is leading nowhere but the abyss of the permanent underclass apologise for inflicting this era on them and teach them to be entrepreneurial, teach them how to build, teach them rust on the backend, teach them postgres, teach them about assets maintaining value while money loses its tell them to never under any circums…

Just don't have children. All this churn (learning whatever) isn't worth it (for them).

This is a weird take. There are plenty of ways to build a meaningful life that don't involve writing code or slinging emails and powerpoints for a living. The guy I call to do plumbing work has several kids and does fine for himself.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#107

Post by shinjitsu »

silisili wrote: post #84
elric wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It matches mine as well. People will pretend to be your best friend, but when push comes to shove, they will absolutely throw you under the bus. And maybe that's human nature, but I don't have it in me. The people who will give you credit where it's due and lift you in my experience are more rare than not, and almost always an older member, which perhaps is because they don't feel the need to prove themselves as much…

>Despising older folks has been a thing a long time, made famous by Zuck starting out.

and before that is was hippies with "Don't trust anyone over 30" which became deeply ingrained in at least American culture.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#108

Post by leptons »

austin-cheney wrote: post #27

There are two problems here. 1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior. 2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume. The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.

Retire? I can never retire. I'll likely die at my keyboard. Software has not provided the future I was hoping for.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#109

Post by rozap »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #69
strickjb9 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand. In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing…

> Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us. It's worth considering how aggressively open the door has been for the last decade. Each new generation of engineers increasingly disappointed me with how much more motivated they were by a big pay check than they were for anything remotely related…

This is what I see. Less of door slamming completely shut, more like, the door was enormous and maybe a little too open. We forget, the 6 month coding bootcamp to 6 figure salary pipeline was a real thing for a while at the ZIRP apex.

There are still junior engineers out there who have experiments on their githubs, who build weird little things because they can. Those people were the best engineers anyway. The last decade of "money falls from the sky and anyone can learn to code" brought in a bunch of people who were interested in it for the money, and those people were hard to work with anyway. I'd lump the sidehustle "ship 30 projects in 30 days" crowd in here too. I think AI will effectively eliminate junior engineers in the second camp, but absolutely will not those in the first camp. It will certainly make it harder for those junior engineers at the margins between those two extremes.

There's nothing more discouraging than trying to guide a junior engineer who is just typing what you say into cursor. Like clearly you don't want to absorb this, and I can also type stuff into an AI, so why are you here?

The best engineers I've worked with build things because they are truly interested in them, not because they're trying to get rich. This is true of literally all creative pursuits.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#110

Post by silexia »

A lot of this may be due to the recent far left changes in curriculum at many universities. A degree used to sort of a certificate an employer could rely upon that someone had basic skills. That is no longer the case. This makes older employees where the certificate was still reliable more attractive.
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