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

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

#101

Post by mikeocool »

km144 wrote: post #98
mikeocool wrote: post #47

Pre-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 w…

I think AI is a great learning tool - I have learned a ton from it.

But when I just ask to do a thing and then read the code (typical in a professional environment when there’s pressure to get shit delivered), i have not found that be an effective learning method.

When I’m learning from it I typically go out of my way to have it explain how to do things and things are the way they are. And I often leave the actual typing the code to myself, since that tends to force an active understanding that’s not required when you’re just reading.

If folks have other ideas on how to get that active understanding, I’d love to hear them. Because telling people they should type code seems like it’s going the way of telling people to write cursive.

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

#102

Post by nomel »

eitally wrote: post #68
d0100 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months The sad reality for smaller companies is that we cannot compete salary-wise, which means training juniors that will leave the minute they become productive But mostly the issue is with the market, there are only so many things you need a junior to do in a body shop that is getting squeezed Other companies are als…

FWIW, your pessimism isn't entirely well-founded. If you're in a hot, tech-centric market, then yes, staff will be far more inclined to job hop for comp increases. But if you're hiring remote or you're located outside one of the very few tech hubs, employees value quality of life and workplace culture/relationships much more highly relative to comp. E.g. If you're hiring a SWE in Nashville or Portland or Columbus the…

I think those sorts of priorities come later. I've never known a junior engineer that prioritized anything much beyond "holly shit, someone finally gave me a job, and I'm making money!". Then, with something on their resume, they realize how they're currently being taken advantage of, and hop to a significant pay increase.

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

#103

Post by DANmode »

mikeocool wrote: post #47

Pre-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…

SAT for junior developers; questions are code snippets and architectural decisions.

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

#104

Post by foldr »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #76
foldr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Clause change doesn't rescue the logic. If anything it makes it harder to process. Refusing to hire junior engineers won't fix your actual problem. Fixed. I would click that.

> Clause change doesn't rescue the logic

I don’t understand what you mean here.

> Fixed

Your edit is the same in terms of the negatives (though refusing to do something isn’t really the same as just not doing it). But you’ve changed what it says by referring to “your actual problem” instead of “the problem you think you have”.

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

#105

Post by Yopolo »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #70
mikeocool wrote: post #47

Pre-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…

Do you think that its possible to raise the bar for junior engineers such that "you have AI now, so I need you to own farther up the review chain yourself"? I feel like I could answer either way. No, you need reps on projects to have that kind of judgement, that's what makes a senior. But also yes, while it will take the junior way longer to do that kind of review, they have the time to do it now, and its now the bot…

We have the same issue and now spending more time/energy on optimizing the code review agent.

This might lead to more automatisation and not less if it works. After all we might extract everything critical to us.

We also now expect juniors to review the other ones code first.

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

#106

Post by suzzer99 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #79
suzzer99 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is standard because after a year of experience, a fresh junior dev is worth roughly twice as much on the open market. Most companies won't give a 100% raise because it would upset the apple cart with other employees wanting similar raises. So the junior dev has to move on to get paid what they're worth.

> This is standard because after a year of experience, a fresh junior dev is worth roughly twice as much on the open market. My internal Brandolini's Law alarm is ringing loud and clear on this one. Absolutely not. This is only true for the best junior devs in the most competitive markets. From my professional experience, it is very difficult to keep star junior devs. The "gravity" pulling them away is simply too str…

Doesn't that support my argument? They leave because they can make more money elsewhere.

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

#107

Post by bluGill »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #100
bluGill wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

In this case until I started asking hard questions about how do I see what my code is doing (remember I was new and he was experienced - the correct assumption is my code was bad) he wouldn't have known there was a bug. Nothing was working, but only because software wasn't setting the correct values. Only after we dug in did we realize that the verification was destructive, so my checking that the settings were correct (which passed) reset the settings, and it didn't work in test. Or something like that - this was nearly 30 years ago, if you think I (or anyone) remembers details perfectly that long you have bigger problems than my memory.

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

#108

Post by johnsmith1840 »

bluGill wrote: post #107
johnsmith1840 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

In this case until I started asking hard questions about how do I see what my code is doing (remember I was new and he was experienced - the correct assumption is my code was bad) he wouldn't have known there was a bug. Nothing was working, but only because software wasn't setting the correct values. Only after we dug in did we realize that the verification was destructive, so my checking that the settings were corre…

Wasn't trying to argue just chatting about wfh

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

#109

Post by RobRivera »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #29
RobRivera wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a poorly instructed llm? Or a poorly constructed thought?

It's lived experience. My management is a lot happier when I move too fast to really pay attention to the problems and use my expertise, and the output is good enough that nobody really complains. Building most software is no longer skilled work; it takes minimal training. The industry just hasn't caught up yet.

Ouch, I painfully agree :l

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

#110

Post by wizzwizz4 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #89
daun_gee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

So, you're trying to upset (former) bullying victims, while having the people you're trying to criticise dismiss you as a mere bully? I don't see how this is an effective strategy. > “That movie was so developmentally disabled”. Nobody says this , and it's been 14 years since this article was published. The euphemism treadmill continues up until people stop treating the attribute as slur-worthy – which was the primar…

Update: no part of this stuck with me after all, not even the part I found annoying.
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