Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 394 posts

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#111

Post by matheusmoreira »

SilverElfin wrote: post #41
kxrm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires. I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentorin…

What do you mean by investing though? I think these days junior people have to just invest in themselves and learn by working right? It’s also hard for companies or managers to spend more on them when they can leave at any time, which means all that effort training them will just benefit some other employee. I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal, probably in response to abusive and exploita…

> I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal

Smart. Corporations aren't loyal either.

> even caring companies and managers

I'm not convinced there is such a thing.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#112

Post by cosmic_cheese »

From the corner of the industry visible to me, junior hiring was quite weak even prior to the pandemic. It existed but took considerable searching compared to mid-level and senior roles. Most companies wanted someone who could hit the ground running and not need much training or guidance.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#113

Post by lowbloodsugar »

uxhacker wrote: post #4

I have found working with remote first natives that the narrowness of their knowledge is also very high. When you work in an office there is a some knowledge transfer happening having lunch with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team. This non structured learning is missed in remote work.

lol. Apparently folks where I work don’t ever talk at lunch. I work remotely, and over the course of about 20 meetings I discovered that what everyone “knew” was wrong because none of them talked to each other and each assumed they knew how it worked. Each person knew their own piece and had an incorrect idea of everyone else’s. There were twenty different systems in twenty different heads. These people all shared an office and lunch space. I work remotely.

Any large scale engineering product where “who you’ve talked to” is how things “get done” is going to fail.

Really you are just outing yourself as a member of the political class: someone who believes feelings and opinions matter to the behavior of CPUs.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#114

Post by madrox »

I worked at a fully remote company that did the best job hiring juniors in my 20 year career. The talent and enthusiasm in that pool was great and really injected something into teams.

What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#115

Post by tibbar »

Eridrus wrote: post #97
dividefuel wrote: post #43

In my anecdotal experience in a FAANG, weak junior hiring started during the hiring freezes in mid 2022, and was made worse by the layoff cycles that began soon after. Once you know headcount is going to be extremely tight indefinitely, you want to use your precious few slots to hire someone that can deliver value pretty quickly, rather than take years to coach up. It personally seems hard to connect that to remote w…

And this is why people do studies, because anecdotal evidence is a hypothesis at best.

Given how many studies have built-in sampling bias or other surprising assumptions, I still welcome people gut-checking it vs their experience. (Plus, the stories are interesting, right?)

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#116

Post by vineyardmike »

madrox wrote: post #114

I worked at a fully remote company that did the best job hiring juniors in my 20 year career. The talent and enthusiasm in that pool was great and really injected something into teams. What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.

ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023.

But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#118

Post by class3shock »

Weak junior hiring is due to:

- Longtime trends of companies trying to externalize training costs.

- Avoiding hiring in general due to uncertainty in the economy.

- Companies dumping tons of money into AI thus having to cut money from other places, particularly ones that don't add much value in the quarter (internships).

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#119

Post by vineyardmike »

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #11
uxhacker wrote: post #4

I have found working with remote first natives that the narrowness of their knowledge is also very high. When you work in an office there is a some knowledge transfer happening having lunch with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team. This non structured learning is missed in remote work.

I don't fully agree. If the only way information and cross-pollination is through in-office water-cooler conversation, that's an organizational smell. If you have most of the work and conversation is done in public, you're not hiring very curious people.

Plenty of places are sub-optimal in organization (or some other aspect)… while still being functional and successful.

Same with writing bad code. We’ve all seen sub-optimal decisions in code or technical artifacts that go on to be successful products or tools. Most people can’t/wont/don’t work at the Pareto-optimal workplace.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#120

Post by karlgkk »

nilkn wrote: post #107
karlgkk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that sure sounds smart! The problem, of course, is that generating a one time solution to a problem is a much easier problem space than a many-input task with human product concerns

Synthesizing a ton of inputs to help clarify a decision or set of options is exactly one of the easiest and most powerful use cases for AI agents right now.

I didn’t say it wasn’t :)

All i said is that one type of task is easier than another

Post reply on HN