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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#201

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #56

> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees. Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process…

Those of us familiar with the Dilbert comic strip of the '90s-'00s are having a good chuckle at the idea that there was ever a social contract. What you think of as a social contract was a fiction enabled only by the explosive growth of the software industry during the Internet and mobile web of the last twenty years. It's easy to be generous to employees when the profits just keep growing on their own. It's easy to overlook mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) when as many warm bodies are possible are needed to fulfill business objectives.

That's all over now; the growth spurt of a young software industry has given way to maturity. We'll be navigating an employment environment much like what the norm is in other technical professions with tougher standards and fiercer competition for good jobs.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#202

Post by lordnacho »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #149

Ask HN: I have a friend of a friend in his mid 20s who finished a masters degree in data science focused on AI. There isnt a job for him and I think hes given up. In Letters to a Young Poet Rilke responded to a young aspiring poet who asked how a person knows whether the artistic path is truly their calling: > “There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; se…

99% of us can't live like that.

The other place you will meet struggling artists is sports. Train several times a week, neglect your social life, your studies, just learn how to chase after a ball.

Only people who are crazy driven will actually do this. The ones who don't make it, they try to climb up from lower league clubs. They go on and on, carving out a career.

But most kids do not have a burning passion for anything. They are curious, they're smart, they want to explore the world. But they haven't found a calling. If they try to go through the eye of the needle, they find it's quite hard, because those paths are taken by guys with a mental lock on a certain career.

What to tell the guy? He's picked the subject that is the most useful for learning about the world. Go around and look at things. There's so much that a person who can code and can deal with statistics can apply himself do.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#203

Post by jghn »

Zarathruster wrote: post #171
strickjb9 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand. In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing…

> Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand. I keep hearing this and find it utterly perplexing. As a junior, desperate to prove that I could hang in this world, I'd comb over my PRs obsessively. I viewed each one as a showcase of my abilities. If a senior had ever pointed at a line of code and ask…

> If I'd ever answered "I don't know," I would've been mortified.

I'm approaching 30 years of professional work and still feel this way. I've found some people are like this, and others aren't. Those who aren't tend to not progress as far.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#204

Post by alephnerd »

Atomic_Torrfisk wrote: post #157
Herring wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders. Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about? This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism. If you want raw unfiltered capitalism, vote for the billionaire. You can't vote for the billionaire and expect safety nets. That's madness.

> What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders. You are not wrong, but the contract is/was metaphorical. For a long time people were able to make a living for themselves by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with a career which payed off. That was the invisible "contract". Hell I went to university for things which seem like academic navel gazing, but I still got a good tech job on the other…

> For a long time people were able to make a living for themselves by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with a career which payed off

Recessions like the GFC, the Dot Bomb, the early 90s, the Asian Financial Crisis, the early 80s, Stagflation, and others show otherwise.

The extended bull run that SWEs had from the early 2010s to 2022 was an outlier, and the whiplash being felt today is comparable to what law and finance grads faced in the 2010s, accounting majors in the 2000s, and Aerospace/MechE majors in the 1990s.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#205

Post by andrewmutz »

kulahan wrote: post #150
andrewmutz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One would assume the solution is to simply offer a good package and retain employees with that. I returned to an old company after a few years of floating around because I realized they had the perfect mix of culture and benefits for me, even if the pay isn't massive. You're falling for the exact same fallacy experienced by failed salesmen. "Why would I bother investing time in this customer when they're just going t…

They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire the people who've got experience.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#206

Post by RustySwarf »

It's like the whole idea of a company has inverted. Instead of "We'll assemble a team, then use that capability to make things, and solve problems" the idea is "the machine basically runs itself, how much can we get away with minimizing upkeep?"

Default "people have value because human attention solves problems", has become default "existing org structure has value because existing revenue streams are stable."

The idea of a company used to contain an implied optimism. "If we get capable people together, we can accomplish great things!" Now that optimism has been offloaded to the individual, to prove their worth before they can take part.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#207

Post by jeremyjh »

Herring wrote: post #159
moregrist wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism is when the state (ie: the government) _owns_ industries. A social contract is an implicit agreement that everyone more or less accepts without anything being necessarily legally binding. For example, the courtesy of two weeks notice in the US is a social contract: there’s nothing legally requiring it, but there are _social_ consequences (ie: your reference might be less positive) if you don’t follow it. Ev…

It's not that I don't like it. It's more that I think you're being lied to. Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should. But they still buy into the system that is impoverishing them. The top 10% of income earners in the US account for 50% of consumer spending. LMK if you think that's part of the contract. https://www.marketpla…

Inequality going up means the situation is changing and that is what people are complaining about. There definitely has been a culture shift as MBAs took over executive leadership and their compensation packages skyrocketed. Companies were always for the share holders but there used to be more consideration of the longer-term value for the company that amounted to appreciation of and fairer treatment for both employees and customers.

I also think though that individual experiences of this kind are more about specific companies maturing than a widespread culture shift. A lot of people on these forums worked in tech companies that are relatively young and have changed a lot over the past two decades.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#209

Post by alephnerd »

supportengineer wrote: post #151

Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first? Single-Payer health care would help our industry immensely if it came to pass. Imagine having no fear any more.

> Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first

It actually might help.

This is the model used in Eastern Europe and India - the vast majority of new grads are hired by mass recruiters like EPAM, WITCH, Deloitte, and Accenture at low base salaries but also the expectation that they self train and learn how to become productive SWEs, or they just stagnate at the low rungs. Japan, Korea, and China use a similar model as well.

But honestly, even FTE isn't much of a headache if I can hire a junior SWE for $60k-80k, invest in training them, and then bumping salaries to market rate after they have matured. This is what a number of traditional F500s like Danaher [0], AbbVie [1], and Capital One [2] do via Leadership and Trainee Development Programs, and honestly, it's much easier to make a case to hire someone if they have a couple of years of real world work experience.

[0] - https://jobsblog.danaher.com/blog/leadership-development-pro...

[1] - https://www.abbvie.com/join-us/student-programs.html

[2] - https://www.capitalonecareers.com/get-ahead-with-early-caree...

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#210

Post by loeg »

andrewmutz wrote: post #136
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…

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…

Arguably, the cross-pollination of developers moving around is good for employers.
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