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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#111

Post by samdoesnothing »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #30
weatherlite wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.

The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;) While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in…

Can you post a repo so we can see what it's generating?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#112

Post by lordnacho »

dkdcio wrote: post #13
buellerbueller wrote: post #4

Want 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.

genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if you’re a new grad where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on? I do think I could get a job from my network because I’ve worked in the industry for years and done good work; I’m a little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at least ignore those LinkedIn requests

People are free to network right here on HN, and they do. I placed a friend I found here with another friend, so it does work.

However, it takes time.

If you need a job right now, it won't happen via ordinary networking, by which I mean networking with people whose job isn't recruitment.

If you think of networking as a pleasant way to keep some interesting ideas flowing and making some friends, circulation will get you things that you never even thought of.

(The best professional recruiters actually stir the pot for years and years before getting a return. Constantly keeping up with what various people are doing, just in case the time is right for someone to move on.)

I'm actually a bit surprised, because as a young guy I didn't do any networking beyond connecting with colleagues, which certainly helped. But I'm finding lots of young guys will reach out to me for advice. It's a good habit, but one I suspect more than half the population doesn't practice.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#113

Post by supriyo-biswas »

mooreds wrote: post #98
shagie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested." Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. It is especially frustrating that the second gro…

> there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. Hmmm. Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories? Because I agree, if someone is delegating all their work to an LLM or similar tool, cut out the middleman. Same as if someone just copy/pasted from Stackoverflow 5 years ago. I think it is also important to think about incentives. What incentive doe…

Dealing with an intern at work who I suspect is doing exactly this, I discussed this with a colleague. One way seems to be to organize a face to face meeting where you test their problem solving skills without AI use, the other may be to question them about their thought process as you review a PR.

Unfortunately, the use of LLMs has brought about a lot of mistrust in the workplace. Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice as they see it as sermonizing when an “easy” process to get “acceptable” results exists.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#114

Post by QuercusMax »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #51
giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;) While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in…

> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output which means either devs will take over architectural roles (which already exist and are filled) or architects will take over dev roles. same goes for testing/QA - these are already positions within the industry in addition to being hats that we sometimes put on out of necessity or personal interest.

I've seen Product Manager / Technical Program Manager types leaning into using AI to research what's involved in a solution, or even fix small bugs themselves. Many of these people have significant software experience already.

This is mostly a good thing provided you have a clear separation between solution exploration and actually shipping software - as the extra work put into productionizing a solution may not be obvious or familiar to someone who can use AI to identify a bugfix candidate, but might not know how we go about doing pre-release verification.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#115

Post by lll-o-lll »

mooreds wrote: post #98
shagie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested." Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. It is especially frustrating that the second gro…

> there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. Hmmm. Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories? Because I agree, if someone is delegating all their work to an LLM or similar tool, cut out the middleman. Same as if someone just copy/pasted from Stackoverflow 5 years ago. I think it is also important to think about incentives. What incentive doe…

> Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories?

Yes, it should be obvious. At least at the current state of LLMs.

> There's the long term incentive, but is there a short term one?

The short term incentive is keeping their job.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#116

Post by QuercusMax »

Herring wrote: post #75
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #56

> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees. Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process…

What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders. Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about? This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism. If you want raw unfiltered capitalism, vote for the billionaire. You can't vote for the billionaire and expect safety nets. That's madness.

Henry Ford for all his faults (and there were MANY) at least understood that you gotta have a customer base for your products, and that paying workers well helps everybody out.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#117

Post by QuercusMax »

ilc wrote: post #97

I think AI clouds the real issues around Junior hiring. Defective companies. Let's say you hire your great new engineer. Ok, great! Now their value is going to escalate RAPIDLY over the next 2-3 years. And by rapidly, it could be 50-100%. Because someone else will pay that to NOT train a person fresh out of college! What company hands out raises aggressively enough to stay ahead of that truth? None of them, maybe a M…

I actually got a major raise after 6m, and then another major raise 1y into my career, because my boss recognized my value.

Sadly this is not as common as it should be - but I've also mentored folks at FAANGs who got promoted after 1y at the new-hire level because they were so clearly excelling. The first promotion is usually not very hard to attain if you're in the top quartile.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#118

Post by anonymous908213 »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #80
anonymous908213 wrote: post #54

This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a networking service, something which is not really made clear until near the end. The article is self-serving in identifying the solutions ("do things related to the service we offer, and if that doesn't work, buy our service to help you do them better"), but it is a subject worth talking about, so I will offer my refutation of their analysis and solution. The…

The problem is that praying that someone stumbles upon your brilliant hobby projects and offers you a job is a terrible bet. Yes, you have to be good a software development, but being good at software development doesn't land you job. Being good at software development, and cutting through the noise gets you a job. Because even if all those laid off people are incompetent, they're still applying for the same jobs you…

> and it is very difficult to identify who's who.

That's exactly what the portfolio is for. Having an actual body of work people can look at and within a couple of minutes of looking think "wow, this person will definitely be able to contribute something valuable to our project" will immediately set you apart from every applicant who has vague, unreliable credentials that are only extremely loosely correlated with competence, like university trivia. You do need to get as far as a human looking at your portfolio, which isn't a guarantee on any given application, but once you get that far your odds will skyrocket next to University Graduate #130128154 who may have happened to get human eyes on their application but has nothing else to set them apart.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#119

Post by tempire »

Nothing has changed. The problem is the same as it always was.

There is an unbounded amount of opportunity available for those who want to grab hold of it.

If you want to rely on school and get the approval of the corporate machine, you are subject to the whims of their circumstance.

Or, you can go home, put in the work, learn the tech, become the expert, and punch your own ticket. The information is freely available. Your time is your own.

Put. In. The. Work.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#120

Post by QuercusMax »

teeray wrote: post #88

> the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation. This is because "management" includes a bunch of BS that few engineers want to actually deal with. Performance discussions, 1:1s, being hauled into mandatory upper-level meetings, not actually building things anymore, etc. If it was simply pairing with juniors from time to time…

Many companies have different career tracks for managers than for individual contributors (even tech leads are considered ICs). Mentoring junior engineers is absolutely in scope for what senior ICs can be recognized for.
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