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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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161–170 of 535 posts

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#161
post #77

Short term thinking and short term profit seeking are going to destroy every industry they touch. This article failed to bring up 2 important points. Firstly, we've been here before, specifically in 2008. This was the real impact of the GFC. The junior hiring pipeline got decimated in many industries and never returned. This has created problems for an entire generation (ie the millenials) who went to college and acc…

Are you really saying the production turn around time of a multi-camera sitcom compared to full on movie quality TV shows is due to more writers?

Here’s a decent video about the impact of streaming on the traditional TV system:

https://youtu.be/b8eB-VnHdZ4

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#162

> 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 will naturally select for the people who are self driven learners. In a sense this is nothing new, just a continued progression of the raising of the bar of who is still able to contribute economic value to the market

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#163
This is true. As a startup founder I’ve invested heavily in mentoring juniors, and all of my current developers actually started as interns. They’ve grown fast and delivered real results because we gave them trust, support, and room to learn. The companies that say “there are no good juniors” are usually the ones that never bothered to train any.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#164

> 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…

I don't know if that's it. Speaking from outside the tech space: most of my office jobs since 2012 have been "doing the easy/annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to 'waste time' dealing with."

So, there are two parts to this:

The first is that a lot of those tasks are non-trivial for someone who isn't a digital native (and occasionally trivial for people who are). That is to say that I often found myself doing tasks that my bosses couldn't do in a reasonable time span; they were tasks which they had ALWAYS delegated, which is another way of saying that they were tasks in which proficiency was not necessary at their level.

This leads into the second part, which is that performing these tasks did not help me advance in relevant experience at all. They were not related to higher-level duties, nor did they endear me to the people who could have introduced me to such duties. My seniors had no interest in our growth as workers; anyone who wanted to see that growth had to take it into their own hands, at which point "junior-level" jobs are only worth the paycheck.

I don't know if it's a senior problem generally, or something specific to this cohort of Boomer/Gen-X seniors. Gun-to-my-head, I would wager the latter. They give enough examples in other arenas of public life to lend credence to the notion that that they simply don't care what happens to their juniors, or to their companies after they leave, particularly if there is added hassle in caring. This is an accusation often lobbed at my own generation, to which I say, it's one of the few things our forebears actually did teach us.

Yet again, AI is just a cover for mismanagement.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#165

> "Companies replace junior positions with AI + Senior engineers have been excused from mentorship responsibilities + Companies optimize for immediate results = A systemic issue that no one person can fix" They forgot to add in "Aging billionaires spend a trillion dollars on longevity research" which results in "110 year old Senior engineers still working"

touché (author here)

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#166
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…

> My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1

80% of the candidate I interview pass (leetcode style coding interview, as mandated by the company). This is actually annoying because I'll probably have to raise the bar and start rejecting very good candidates.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#167

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 d…

> 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).

With the way higher-ed works in the US, and the way certain schools opportunity hoard to an insane degree, that is effectively already the case for whole industries and has been so for decades at this point. It's practically an open secret that getting into some schools is the golden ticket rather than the grades you earn while there. Many top schools are just networking and finishing schools for whole "elite" industries.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#168

> 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…

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…

Funny, I was at my previous company almost exactly two years. They never even gave me a cost of living increase, much less a "raise." So I was effectively earning less each year. Change needs to happen from both sides if extended tenure is the goal.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#170
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…

> My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1 80% of the candidate I interview pass (leetcode style coding interview, as mandated by the company). This is actually annoying because I'll probably have to raise the bar and start rejecting very good candidates.

Sorry, flip that number around. 1 in 50 passes the interview.
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