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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#191

Post by watwut »

QuercusMax wrote: post #138
mikepurvis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO teachability/curiosity is ultimately orthogonal to the more base question of money-motivation. In a previous role I was a principal IC trying to mentor someone who had somehow been promoted up to senior but was still regularly turning in code for review that I wouldn't have expected from an intern— it was an exhausting, mind-numbing process trying to develop some sense of engineering taste in this person, and all…

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 s…

That does not even sounds like a problem? Like when people are that picky about what exact personality the junior musr have that good work is not enough ... then there is something wrong with us.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#192

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mooreds wrote: post #98
shagie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested." Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. It is especially frustrating that the second gro…

> there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. Hmmm. Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories? Because I agree, if someone is delegating all their work to an LLM or similar tool, cut out the middleman. Same as if someone just copy/pasted from Stackoverflow 5 years ago. I think it is also important to think about incentives. What incentive doe…

having dealt with a few people who just copy/pasted Stackoverflow I really feel that using an LLM is an improvement.

That is at least for the people who don't understand what they're doing, the LLM tends to come out with something I can at least turn into something useful.

It might be reversed though for people who know what they're doing. IF they know what they're doing they might theoretically be able to put together some stackoverflow results that make sense, and build something up from that better than what gets generated from LLM (I am not asserting this would happen, and thinking it might be the case)

However I don't know as I've never known anyone who knew what they were doing who also just copy/pasted some stackoverflow or delegated to LLM significantly.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#193

Post by Ethee »

newsclues wrote: post #190
alecco wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Henry Ford wanted to raise salaries of his employees but the Dodge brothers (who owned only 10% of the company) successfully sued and "As of 2025, in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled, shareholder primacy is still upheld." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co .

My understanding is that that legal case really states that you can’t defraud your shareholders by funnelling money into other businesses they have no ownership in. It doesn’t set the legal standard that profits must be maximized which is impossible.

Correct, a quote from the linked wiki article: "Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting." — M. Todd Henderson

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#194

Post by water-data-dude »

mooreds wrote: post #98
shagie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested." Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. It is especially frustrating that the second gro…

> there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. Hmmm. Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories? Because I agree, if someone is delegating all their work to an LLM or similar tool, cut out the middleman. Same as if someone just copy/pasted from Stackoverflow 5 years ago. I think it is also important to think about incentives. What incentive doe…

Is/was copy/pasting from Stackoverflow considered harmful? You have a problem, you do a web search and you find someone who asked the same question on SO, and there's often a solution.

You might be specifically talking about people who copy/paste without understanding, but I think it's still OK-ish to do that, since you can't make an entire [whatever you're coding up] by copy/pasting snippets from SO like you're cutting words out of a magazine for a ransom note. There's still thought involved, so it's more like training wheels that you eventually outgrow as you get more understanding.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#195

Post by bitwize »

We are all systems analysts now. We are all business people. Or we're out of a job. Programming as a skill in itself is largely obsolete. It's all about understanding the business: what it needs, how it operates. That takes holistic thinking and people skills that programmers historically just didn't have. They'll adapt, or they'll leave the field.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#196

Post by ansgri »

zingar wrote: post #181
hex4def6 wrote: post #14

> 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…

Do you mind giving some examples of the work that annoys seniors?

For me the most annoying would be a technically correct solution that completely ignores the “higher-level style” of the surrounding code, at the same time defending the chosen solution by referencing some “best practices” that are not really applicable there for some higher-level reasons, or by insignificant performance concerns. Incidentally, LLMs often produce similar problems, only one doesn’t need to politely argue with them.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#197

Post by mikepurvis »

watwut wrote: post #191
QuercusMax wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

That does not even sounds like a problem? Like when people are that picky about what exact personality the junior musr have that good work is not enough ... then there is something wrong with us.

I don't think it's beyond the call of duty to expect someone to acquire context beyond their immediate assignments, especially if they have ambitions to advance. It's kind of a key prerequisite to the kind of bigger-picture thinking that says "hey I noticed my component is duplicating some functionality that's over there, maybe there's an opportunity to harmonize these, etc"

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#198

Post by dzonga »

I personally think - Juniors will be okay, if they stick to *fundamentals*

lots of "seniors" via title inflation dont have fundamentals anyways - hence a lot of broken software in the wild & also perverse incentives like Resume driven development. A.I is built on badly written open source code.

because once you have the fundamentals, built a few things - you would've battle scars which makes someone a senior

not the 'senior' we see in big corps or places cosplaying where promos are based on playing politics.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#199

Post by twosdai »

zingar wrote: post #181
hex4def6 wrote: post #14

> 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…

Do you mind giving some examples of the work that annoys seniors?

Writing unit tests, manual validation work, manual testing. Automating Deployments of infrastructure, DNS work, tracking down annoying one off bugs, fixing and validating dependency issues.

Basically this type of maintenance work for any sufficiently complex codebase. (Over 20k LOC)

When I was an QA intern / Software Dev Intern. I did all of that junk.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#200

Post by itsjamesmurray »

My team wrote about this same phenomenon in marketing: https://www.behindthecmo.com/p/the-seniorification-of-market...

Its a double edged sword too. I see it in my biz -- its easier to spend 40 hours training a model how to do things the way we like rather than hire someone junior and spend a month+ on onboarding. We are noticing hitting a wall to a certain point with clients still wanting to talk to a real person, but I can see that changing in the next ~5 years. Zero idea what happens to those junior folks that used to get trained (me being one that sat through a 3mo onboarding program!).

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