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

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

#171

Post by green7ea »

stult wrote: post #165
vineyardmike wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The R&D tax credit change actually took effect in 2022, and one of the few good things Trump's BBB did was reverse it

It only reversed it for within the US, I learned that when the company I worked for (owner was a US company) closed.

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

#172

Post by DangitBobby »

Grimburger wrote: post #127
class3shock wrote: post #118

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).

> companies trying to externalize training costs Why shouldn't they? You're commenting on a website where the common if not overwhelming view is that people should move jobs every 2 years or they are going to lose out.

Why do they hold that view, you reckon?

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

#173

Post by magicalhippo »

jdlyga wrote: post #143

The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So wh…

We hired two junior devs just before Covid lockdowns. The lockdowns were quite strict here in Norway, so even when it opened back up we could only have a fraction of the people in the office.

We did indeed notice it took very long to get them up to speed.

They didn't really get going until the lockdowns were fully lifted and people returned to office.

Hard to tell what would have happened without the two+ years of Covid restrictions, but with a sample size of two I feel like it wasn't a fluke.

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

#174

Post by strken »

qsera wrote: post #125
strken wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They happen all the time for me at small to medium companies. If the legal team is two people whose desks are by the door, then you are going to eat lunch together at some point. It would be weird not to! Just wait until someone says "anyone want a coffee?" or "who brought lunch?" and then stand up. Obviously this doesn't happen when the legal team is located three buildings away. At that point you might as well be r…

I think they say that the knowledge transfer did not happen during that. You don't want to bring work to people who are trying to take a break from it.

If you want to talk about work in any depth then you have to formalise it, yeah. The sales team might tell you they're frustrated by their process at lunch, but they're not going to sit down and explain the whole thing.

I've found the benefit of lunches together is that you get familiar with everyone, and they with you. There's more of an assumption of good will and competence between people who know each other.

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

#175

Post by hibikir »

closeparen wrote: post #161
jdlyga wrote: post #143

The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So wh…

Which is why junior and senior talent alike are forced back into the office. Except that tenured senior and staff employees from the boom times are in the San Francisco office, but all the new grad hires from the last 2-4 years are in various third world offices. And neither of them can get conference rooms, so everybody's on Zoom at their desk all day, trying to be heard over their neighbors.

So man companies that are doing RTO are in no way trying to reorg to make teams stay colocated, it's rather puzzling. I know a UK manager with only reports in the different parts of the americas, and there's never more than 2 in the same city, so for all intents and purposes, the teams are just fully remote but stuck badging in. And that's after a reorg this april, where many US managers got laid off.

Along with trends like having line managers be in charge of 20+ direct reports, it leaves people scratching their heads.

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

#176

Post by MagicMoonlight »

hibikir wrote: post #175
closeparen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why junior and senior talent alike are forced back into the office. Except that tenured senior and staff employees from the boom times are in the San Francisco office, but all the new grad hires from the last 2-4 years are in various third world offices. And neither of them can get conference rooms, so everybody's on Zoom at their desk all day, trying to be heard over their neighbors.

So man companies that are doing RTO are in no way trying to reorg to make teams stay colocated, it's rather puzzling. I know a UK manager with only reports in the different parts of the americas, and there's never more than 2 in the same city, so for all intents and purposes, the teams are just fully remote but stuck badging in. And that's after a reorg this april, where many US managers got laid off. Along with tren…

[flagged]

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

#177

Post by MagicMoonlight »

elictronic wrote: post #138
Grimburger wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies trying to externalize training costs Why shouldn't they? You're commenting on a website where the common if not overwhelming view is that people should move jobs every 2 years or they are going to lose out.

Tragedy of the commons, prisoners dilemma. Externalizing costs is a great short term strategy, for startups. We really should regulate any company over a certain size to force them to pay for their externalities but we all know they won’t happen. I’m sure this won’t have any lasting consequences or lead to the collapse of any economies.

In the UK they do have to pay a levy to fund apprenticeships, then they can claim money back to pay for apprenticeships. They also give preference in contracts to companies who hire apprentices.

It’s been very successful. Huge companies, including tech companies, will hire swathes of young people to fill apprentice slots.

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

#178

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

resident423 wrote: post #101
exabrial wrote: post #6

AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time. Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on th…

At the moment is the significant part, how long do we expect this to last now that AI is capable of generating novel ideas like solutions to Erdos conjectures?

The most difficult and time consuming tasks in my job as a software developer is talking to customers and figuring out what they need coupled with getting them to understand what is realistic and what is not. This is a process which takes months if not years, and requires aligning internal goals and tasks with external ones. LLMs can definitely help here, but I feel that the current mode of use where the users have to explicitly manage the tiny - relative to a human brain - context window is an obstacle. I don't know if what we need is a new architecture or just more clever context engineering, but I don't see an LLM actually taking over this type of work as things are now.

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

#179

Post by MagicMoonlight »

dodu_ wrote: post #133

What if is, and always was, having people with no discernible skills or expertise being in charge of filling the hiring pipeline?

What? You mean 20 year olds who have never used a computer shouldn’t be in charge of hiring the CTO? That’s crazy. They’re far more qualified than the people with real jobs. They did an e-learning course!

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

#180

Post by CamperBob2 »

mgfist wrote: post #142
qsera wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs enable a new kind of text search. It looks like reasoning and intelligence, but it is not. For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consider a traditional internet search that comes up with a stackoverflow answer as a machine generating "novel ideas" and answers. It is a clever marketing trick (touting Erdos solutions) employeed by AI companies.

Whatever LLMs are or are not, they've completely changed what I do for work. 9 months ago I was coding, today I prompt. Every line of code I commit is generated by LLMs. If you want to call it text search, be my guest. Doesn't change what it's done for the industry.

No, no, you don't get it. See, it's just like a text search, if a text search could return text that never existed before, and that solves original math problems, and answer your emails for you, ... and ...
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