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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#211

Post by izacus »

dgunay wrote: post #154
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…

Why didn't companies just grant raises more aggressively? Was the ease of poaching engineers not a clear market signal?

Same reason why companies don't pay everyone 10 million bucks a month. Where do you think the money comes from?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#212

Post by QuercusMax »

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.

When presenting the three projects, I gave pros and cons about each one, like "you'll get to learn this new piece of technology" or "a lot of people will be happy if we can get this working". Absolutely no reaction, just "I don't care, pick one".

This guy claimed to want to get promoted to Senior, but didn't do anything Senior-shaped. If you're going to own a component of a system, I should be able to ask you intelligent questions about how you might evolve it, and you should be able to tell me why someone cares about it.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#213

Post by vkou »

water-data-dude wrote: post #194
mooreds wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cutt…

> Is/was copy/pasting from Stackoverflow considered harmful?

It at least forces you to tinker with whatever you copied over.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#214

Post by izacus »

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…

The game theory here says that such a company will be outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend money+time on retention and training but instead invests that money in poaching.

What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using that saved money to poach your best employees.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#215

Post by ghaff »

itsjamesmurray wrote: post #200

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, b…

I'm not sure how much is about LLMs directly. But as I've written elsewhere, there's definitely a circular pattern where a lot of junior employees think this is going to be an 18 month thing and companies allocate training and mentoring budgets accordingly.

There is a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that junior hiring--at least in the software space--is fairly difficult currently. Via internships at good schools etc. may be better but I have to believe that off the street from bootcamps and the like is pretty tough.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#216

Post by izacus »

zcw100 wrote: post #148
QuercusMax wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you must have worked in some REALLY toxic places. I had one toxic senior teammate when I first started out - he mocked me when I was having trouble with some of the dev environment he had created - but he got fired shortly thereafter for being bad at his job. Everybody else through my 21-year career has almost universally either been helpful or neutral (mostly just busy). If you think code reviews are just for b…

Sure have. Finance, research labs, government contracting. Can't wait for people to chime in with their horror stories. I've seen some of the most dysfunctional crap you can imagine.

You seem to have chosen the most toxic (and famous for it workplaces) and now you're misleadingly claiming that's the whole industry.

It is not.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#217

Post by jmyeet »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #128
jmyeet wrote: 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?

There are multiple factors.

For example, the death of optical media has had a massive impact on the entertainment industry, particularly movies. Matt Damon has spoken about this, on Hot Wings of all places [1].

Streaming began as a alternate path for monetizing old content other than cable TV syndication. And it was excelelnt for this in the early years. At that time it was bonus income.

But streaming also ushered in a golden age for watching serialized content so it's a mixed bag.

Loss of writers is just one factor. Filming fewer episodes, moving production out of the US and loss os residuals all contribute to killing this ecosystem.

[1]: https://streamable.com/pedvjq

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#218

Post by gunsch »

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…

Pair programming! Get hands-on with your junior engineers and their development process. Push them to think through things and not just ask the LLM everything.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#219

Post by antisthenes »

Herring wrote: post #122
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not socialism to note that in the past, some companies have believed that their optimal relationship with their employees required recognizing their value and awarding them accordingly, thusly allowing them to attract/retain the best employees as well as maximizing the quality of the output from those employees. There has always been such a spectrum, that's not socialism. The trend to notice is that the spectru…

There's never been any such contract. You guys must not have studied the Great Depression at school. Or more to the point, productivity has consistently outpaced pay for most of the US workforce since the mid-1970s. That's ~50 years that companies have been ripping you off. It's only now you notice, because rent/mortgage/school/medical have finally become so much larger than pay. Well now you get to live through the…

> That's ~50 years that companies have been ripping you off. It's only now you notice, because rent/mortgage/school/medical have finally become so much larger than pay.

The alternate way of looking at it is that the 50s to mid 70s era saw a period of unprecedented prosperity and now we are just seeing a reversion to the mean.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#220

Post by crisdux »

It feels like there is a psyop going on. Blaming job loss and less entry level jobs on "AI". The real simple reason... Jobs are going overseas, many of them junior level jobs. They are laying off people and then hiring a proportional amount of people overseas. Why are folks falling for this AI nonsense?
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