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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#231

Post by Herring »

antisthenes wrote: post #219
Herring wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean "we"? The rich are much much richer than they've ever been. The stock market is soaring. Companies are seeing record profits. GDP is through the roof.

http://web.archive.org/web/20200428221848/https://www.nytime...

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#232

Post by timoth3y »

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…

I think a lot of this has to do with the explosion of CEO (and by extension CxO) pay over the past 30 years.

Today, a CEO can turn in a few quarters of really solid earnings growth, they can earn enough to retire to a life a private jets. Back when CxO pay was lower, the only way to make that kind of bank was to claw your way into the top job and stay there for a decade or more.

The current situation strongly incentivizes short-term thinking.

With today's very high, option-heavy compensation a CEO making long-term investments in the company rather than cutting staff and doing stock buybacks is taking money out of his own pocket.

It's a perverse incentive.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#233

Post by robbiewxyz »

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?

Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing.

Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity.

A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#234

Post by somekyle2 »

tptacek wrote: post #28

Over the timeline in this post, ZIRP and the pandemic seem like equally important factors to LLMs in explaining hiring trends.

Yeah, it makes sense that going from a decade or so where SWE was one of the best possible career paths if you have any aptitude to a period where tech cos were staffing up aggressively (I recall reading ~60% growth), there's gonna be a hangover. The educational pipeline probably still has a few years of oversupply to work through, and all of the people laid off post covid still need to work. Even in a world where AI being able to automate some of the key skills required for SWE has no negative impact on employment, we'd expect a few more years of rough job prospects.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#235

Post by jltsiren »

mfbx9da4 wrote: post #92

Isn’t it also easier than ever to learn though? The moat that seniors built around their expertise enabled a juicy buffer of mediocre devs paid mediocre rates pushing up the value of mythical 10x engineers.

It's easier than ever to learn, if you want to learn. It's also easier than ever to not learn anything, if you only do what's expected from you.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#236

Post by silexia »

QuercusMax wrote: post #121
silexia wrote: post #110

A lot of this may be due to the recent far left changes in curriculum at many universities. A degree used to sort of a certificate an employer could rely upon that someone had basic skills. That is no longer the case. This makes older employees where the certificate was still reliable more attractive.

"far left changes"? What are you even talking about? You think there's some new "woke" CS curriculum which doesn't actually teach algorithms?

Grade inflation, everyone passes with A's, racial discrimination against asian and whites, etc.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#237

Post by nateglims »

rybosworld wrote: post #156

It's not obvious to me that AI is the reason for the hiring slowdown. ChatGPT was pretty useless when it first released. It was neat that you could talk to it but I don't think it actually became a tool you could depend on (and even then, in a very limited way) until sometime in 2024. Basically: - the junior hiring slowdown started in 2022. - but LLM's have only really been useful in a work context starting around 20…

I think the interest rate and shareholder pressure were the most immediate causes. In 2021 you could get head count to do trivial projects at many tech companies and by the end of 2022 you had layoffs and hiring freezes.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#238

Post by wwweston »

icedchai wrote: post #184
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…

There are some definite signs of over reliance on AI. From emojis in comments, to updates completely unrelated to the task at hand, if you ask "why did you make this change?", you'll typically get no answer. I don't mind if AI is used as a tool, but the output needs to be vetted.

Exactly. Use LLMs as a tutor, a tool, and make sure you understand the output.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#239

Post by newsclues »

Ethee wrote: post #193
newsclues wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Strange that this misinformation is never corrected.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#240

Post by kentm »

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…

> 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.

I've started viewing developers that have never maintained an existing piece of software for over 3 years with skepticism. Obviously, with allowances for people who have very good reasons to be in that situation (just entered the market, bad luck with employers, etc).

There's a subculture of adulation for developers that "get things done fast" which, more often than not, has meant that they wrote stuff that wasn't well thought out, threw it over the wall, and moved on to their next gig. They always had a knack of moving on before management could connect the dots that all the operational problems were related to the person who originally wrote it and not the very-competent people fixing the thing. Your average manager doesn't seem to have the capability to really understand tech debt and how it impacts ability to deliver over time; and in many cases they'll talk about the "rock star" developer that got away with a glimmer in their eye.

Saw a post of someone on Hacker News the other day talking about how they were creating things faster than n-person teams, and then letting the "normies" (their words not mine) maintain it while moving on to the next thing. Thats exactly the kind of person I'd like to weed out.

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