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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?

#211
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Ever heard of "prompt injection" attacks?

This "super intelligent" and "capable" thing cannot even understand that your ssh keys are private and should not be sent to randos. It can solve complex math, but does not understand basic security/privacy.

What does that say to you?

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading comments like this is like watching an impaired pedestrian about to be run over by an approaching bus. You yell, you wave your arms, but they aren't paying attention. There's no way to warn them, so all you can do is... watch.

> There's no way to warn them, so all you can do is... watch …and then wake up from the nightmare wishing the stress from the job is lower. I can only laugh that some people truly believe that developers, one of the most ardent group at automating the tedious part of their job, would refuse to use an effective tool. You only need to look at the open source world to see people litterally scratching their own hitch eve…

>would refuse to use an effective tool.

No one said I don't use LLMs. I use LLMs daily...for search. That is its best use. That is my own judgement.

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

#213
post #148

Earlier 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.

Part of being in the office is that you pick up on what's going on around you. Coworkers might discuss some issue and you might decide to listen in, and so on. That's the bit I really notice I am missing out on when I work at home.

working at a fully remote company, this happened all the time in slack. people used slack constantly, socially and professionally. channels filled up with context, and it was not only easy but asynchronous to search or even just go back through a day's unread posts in a channel and see what things happened, reply about something, copy it over to a colleague and get them involved, hell even spin off a ticket from it with an automation. people were in hundreds of channels, and it was a firehose, but teams helped each other make the most of it

then we got acquired by a much larger onsite-first company, and their slack is dead. nobody posts anything unless they absolutely have to (i.e. "the men's toilet on the 3rd floor is overflowing" at least twice a week, or that some printer needs paper or toner). there aren't slack bots because nobody checks slack. everything else happens in person, in a servicenow ticket, or at most via email

their IT team has no idea how to support how we used slack before. in one case they told us to stop posting in a channel used by other parts of the company because we were generating too much disruptive activity. I can see the team cultures around it eroding week over week, but we're not in any office, so there aren't any in-person behaviors replacing it. we're all simply becoming increasingly isolated, losing track of each other both as people and in the work we're doing, and becoming unhappier and less effective

this shit isn't hard, but it requires effort and people who see the benefit of it. there's a perception that people with remote work skills can just roll up into an office and be as effective without changing any fundamental aspects of how they work, and vice versa, and it's all bullshit

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

#214
post #3

The paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6787638 Unclear if it's been peer reviewed. The abstract looks fairly convincing. But it is argued against by the majority of research on this topic.

The first handful of sentences from the abstract were a rather convincing case against the paper to me.

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

#215
Most comments are just older commenters confirming what everyone over 50 knows, which is that young people are slow and stupid and not as competent as we were back then nor as competent as we are now.

Every generation ever has known this once it got old enough ...

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

#217
I'm all in for remote working. My first job out of college has been remote. As much as I would love for a senior to help me out when stuck, my org completely made it clear they needed juniors who could independently own products end to end without handholding. It's frowned upon to not have domain knowledge there, and in fact within month of joining I had to answer any questions related to the domain handed to me. This burnt me out. I wish organizations did not expect this much from juniors. My only aid has been burning myself out to learn fast and use AI to confirm my learnings, costing my mental and physical health. If my company was onsite, it would have been even worse to have the answers ready on spot.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't fully agree. If the only way information and cross-pollination is through in-office water-cooler conversation, that's an organizational smell. If you have most of the work and conversation is done in public, you're not hiring very curious people.

Even in a relatively open organization where conversations and work are public/discoverable by default, there's still a huuuge difference between the level of curiosity required to join a convo happening in the office kitchen while you're waiting for a coffee to brew vs needing to spend your idle time at work discovering places (Slack channels or whatever else) to chime in while hoping you're not a distraction for ot…

In a large company you aren’t going to be in the same country let alone kitchen. Ok can eavesdrop on conversations across our slack channels no matter where they occur, in person I’d be limited to the small subset of people I sit near.
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