The Junior Hiring Crisis

I grew up in the 70s. The hand wringing then was calculators. No one was going to be able to do math anymore! And then wrist watches with calculators came out. Everyone is going to cheat on exams, oh no!

Everything turned out fine. Turns out you don't really need to be able to perform long division by hand. Sure, you should still understand the algorithm at some level, esp. if you work in STEM, but otherwise, not so much.

There were losses. I recall my AP physics professors was one of the old school types (retired from industry to teach). He could find the answer to essentially any problem to about 1-2 digits of precision in his head nearly instantly. Sometimes he'd have to reach for his slide rule for harder things or to get a few more digits. Ain't no one that can do that now (for reasonable values of "no one"). And, it is a loss, in that he could catch errors nearly instantly. Good skill to have. A better skill is to be able to set up a problem for finite element analysis, write kernels for operations, find an analytic solution using Mathematica (we don't need to do integrals by hand anymore for the mot part), unleash R to validate your statistics, and so on. The latter are more valuable than the former, and so we willingly pay the cost. Our ability to crank out integrals isn't what it was, but our ability to crank out better jet engines, efficient cars, computer vision models has exploded. Worth the trade off.

Recently watched an Alan Guth interview, and he made a throwaway comment, paraphrased: "I proved X in this book, well, Mathematica proved...". The point being that the proof was multiple pages per step, and while he could keep track of all the sub/superscripts and perform the Einstein sums on all the tensors correctly, why??? I'd rather he use his brain to think up new solutions to problems, not manipulate GR equations by hand.

I'm ignoring AGI/singularity type events, just opining about the current tooling.

Yah, the transition will be bumpy. But we will learn the skills we need for the new tools, and the old skills just won't matter as much. When they do, yah, it'll be a bit more painful, but so what, we gained so much efficiency we can afford the losses.

I suspect this junior hiring crisis thing is linked to the ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days.

When I was starting, you were checked for potential as a trainee. In my case, options trading. They checked over that you could do some mental arithmetic, and that you had a superficial idea of what trading was about. Along with a degree from a fancy university, that was all that was needed. I didn't know much about coding, and I didn't know much about stochastic differential equations.

A couple of weeks ago, a young guy contacted me about his interview with an options trading firm. This guy had spent half a year learning every stat/prob trick question ever. All those game theory questions about monks with stickers on their foreheads, all the questions about which card do you need to turn over, the lot. The guy could code, and had learned a bunch of ML to go with it. He prepared for their trading game with some really great questions to me about bet sizing.

I was convinced he was simply overly nervous about his prospects, because I'd never met someone so well prepared.

Didn't get the job.

Now I can assure you, he could have done the job. But apparently, firms want to hire people who are nearly fully developed on their own dime.

When they get their analyst class, I guess there is going to be nobody who can't write async python. Everyone will know how to train an ML on a massive dataset, everyone will already know how to cut latency in the system.

All things that I managed to learn while being paid.

You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where people have to already know the job before they get their first job. Where everyone is like a doctor: already decided at age 16 that this was the path they wanted to follow, choosing classes towards that goal, and sticking with it until well into adulthood. And they have to essentially pay to get this job, because it comes at at cost of exploring other things (as well as actual money to live).

It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation.

It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have them leave as soon as they can get a better offer?

I had one fairly-junior teammate at Google (had been promoted once) who was a competent engineer but just refused to make any choices about what to work on. I was his TL and I gave him a choice of 3 different parts of the system to work on, and I was planning to be building the other two. He got his work done adequately, but his lack of interest / curiosity meant that he never really got to know how the rest of the system operated, and got frustrated when he didn't advance further in his career.

Very odd. It was like he only had ever worked on school projects assigned to him, and had no actual interest in exploring the problems we were working on.

I love building software because it's extremely gratifying to a) solve puzzles and b) see things actually working when I've built them from literally nothing. I've never been great at coming up with projects to work on, but I love working on solving problems that other people are passionate about.

If software were "just" a job without any of the gratifying aspects, I wouldn't do nearly as good a job.