A lot of people I know have multiple remote jobs. I guess, when you have multiple jobs mentoring juniors is just an unnecessary chore which you want to avoid as much as you can, since it takes precious time from doing “real” work.
What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
181–190 of 394 posts
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Or.. they might have enjoyed their time at the office and want the new generation to have that experience as well: D
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#183The 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…
>Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch
the real glory days were the 70's when we all had to share a single multitasked computer, and the terminals (not enough for everybody) were all connected by wires and formed a sort of hive around the mini in a room called "the bullpen". Senior, junior, multiple unrelated projects sitting shoulder to shoulder, the shared tips and techniques, the humor, man it was so much fun. The day my coworker learned to play Ride of the Valkyries on the VT-100 keyboard due to a bug in the autorepeat function... music! the shared computer disk could not have held a single mp3 had mp3's even been invented yet
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room. With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help. It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologi…
Guessing you maybe work in the consulting industry? The "seniors" tend to be glorified salespeople whose job is to put together presentations and reassure clients that everything's going well, while the one or more interns/recent grads do all the technical work. Some projects there'd be one junior literally writing every line of code while the seniors spent their entire time in meeting rooms talking about god knows w…
I have worked as a software development consultant for more than 20 years and have never seen what you describe.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#185I 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.
> The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead.
A lot of my past employers built their process around requesting additional headcount first, then determining the budget for the role second. It was in every manager’s best interest to maximize the budget for the role so they could hire the best candidate they could find. In practice this meant arguing that you needed someone senior or staff at minimum. Then the job posting got written. There was always a theory that we’d take great juniors but they would get filtered out before getting far enough. When they were told they had to lay off 2 people, they would cut the least experienced and hold on to the most experienced.
At other companies managers were given budgets and left to manage their headcount to fit. This created an inverse situation where they would try to get 3-4 juniors instead of 2-3 seniors or 2 staff level people. When layoffs came you would see teams choose to drop the one highly paid person instead of cutting 2 juniors.
So while your company lost their juniors, I know a lot of people angry that their companies let go of experienced people to keep the cheaper juniors around. Little policy changes can have an outsize effect
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fully agree. I'm all for remote work. However, in my first 2 years of programming, being able to go the the office, put my laptop and notebook down next to a senior dev, point and say, "Help me," was so valuable.
I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room. With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help. It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologi…
I have the same experience. Getting hired with this background is weird. I don’t know how confident I should or shouldn’t be. And I wasn’t in consulting until recently. I like to put the focus on understanding the end to end workflows more than spending time worrying about my solution being the absolute best that would make HN drool over though
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fully agree. I'm all for remote work. However, in my first 2 years of programming, being able to go the the office, put my laptop and notebook down next to a senior dev, point and say, "Help me," was so valuable.
seems more like a culture problem, i have my calendar very public, all my junior devs know ill get on a zoom with no hesitation and they actually seem to enjoy the screen sharing, every zoom is recorded with AI summary/transcript so they’re more focused on asking questions instead of taking notes (and i think they’re really solid juniors and actually go back and watch) there’s the whiteboard element but i’ve gotten p…
Tossing in my two cents here to agree with you. I worked remotely on and off from about 2014 onward until post-COVID RTO brought me into an office for 18 months before I became remote again. During that time (and across a bunch of companies) I went from desktop support to senior sysadmin to security on the cusp of senior security engineer.
In my experience the biggest factor in teams usually came down to the middle management layer. If their "style" was "watch over your shoulder, butts in seats" type of micromanagement then juniors didn't tend to progress unless they were self motivated to seek it out.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#188I 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.
> the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead This is a huge factor. I’ve seen teams admit that they are too “senior heavy” and then still hire senior engineers over junior when the rare position opens up. I’ve also seen teams cut college hiring and internships because head count is tight and they don’t expect positions to open up.
I'm in BigTech and these days we have to fight to even get backfill hiring. If we can get one head count per year we're aiming for someone that can handle a wider range of tasks.
Which is a damn shame because most juniors I've worked with are amazing and the most recent junior hire 1.5-2 years ago is so much better than I was their age it's almost embarrassing.
And my team is in an area termed "strategically important" before anything other than AI became an annoyance.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#189I 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.
This is complete bullshit. I worked in an office for many years. The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team" or even anyone in our so-called People team was precisely zero. They would keep to themselves at lunch, and reach out to Engineering only with tickets, or when they needed help with something computer-related. Engineers have a reputation for being loners,…
> The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team"
The fact that you read a comment saying that people have lunch with each other and respond saying you've never been asked to have lunch with anyone is interesting.
I guess it varies by company and what the culture is, but it's surely totally normal to just have a friend in sales or something and hear about something going on.
I really doubt the person you're replying to orders people to have lunch.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Or.. they might have enjoyed their time at the office and want the new generation to have that experience as well: D
And both of them are wrong, because they _should_ be trying to figure out what works best for the person; not what worked best for _them_ and forcing it on the person.