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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?
#232The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So wh…
It might be because I spent most of my childhood in teamspeak/mumble talking to others, but my first real time job was just a few months prior to the covid lockdowns and I have been (almost) fully remote since then. I personally had no issues adapting and becoming productive even without a senior engineer next to me since I could always reach out via slack anyways.
Of course other persons have other needs though
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#233Earlier 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 ...
But most of the stuff it returns existed before, and llm's parent company during their training part stole all that info, legal or not who cares right. The rest is combined in sort of least-resistance-path which can produce impressive results but its not what you wrote. Many people don't actually care much about morality in their lives only when its convenient for them, and this is a prime example of such tunnel vision.
Start with clean llm, no external previous ideas of humans inserted into it, and let it generate some wisdom on its own and then lets talk. (btw thats how I would expect we could get closer to AGI with these statistical models, but thats just my opinion)
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#234[flagged]
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
RTO mandates are primarily pushed by the managerial class, not the capitalist class. Both want to blame AI so its not clear they want to avoid doing so.
Managers, like police and prosecutors, are enforcers for the capitalist class. This is why they are not part of the working class. Managers do the job of squeezing surplus value from workers, rather than producing real Value themselves. Relationship to capital determines class.
That argument only holds if you think RTO increases output. Infact it has to create more value than the costs t imposes otherwise it reduces profits. I am not convinced this is true.
I think your overall picture is simplistic too. Many managers (and police, and prosecutors) act contrary to the interests and wants of the capitalist class. Managers have their own interests which are frequently at odds with those of their employer. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/agency-...
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#236What if it's interest rates?
I'm amazing at how anybody can discuss any questions about the tech job market without addressing the end of zero-interest rate policy. "It's interest rates, stupid" ought to be the first thing we consider, and stuff about AI/remote/etc only comes in when we have a specific reason to consider it.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#237What if it's interest rates? I'm amazing at how anybody can discuss any questions about the tech job market without addressing the end of zero-interest rate policy. "It's interest rates, stupid" ought to be the first thing we consider, and stuff about AI/remote/etc only comes in when we have a specific reason to consider it.
I guess we'll know for sure when they come down again
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#238Follow the money.
ZIRP caused a massive overhiring in certain fields, especially in tech. The post-COVID hiring started to cool down around 2.5 years ago, and hit rock bottom 1 year ago. There were almost 4 times as many listings at the peak, 4 year ago, than there were 1 year ago.
A quick data point: US Software job listings
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
US interest rates
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
So companies are flush with cash, and ride a bubble where there's a huge demand for digital tools. People that enrolled college during the height of the bubble were promised jobs left and right, and good salaries. People need to remember that these sort of things rarely change overnight - there can be a latency that takes months to years.
At least to me, it seems like a classic example of a boom and bust. When I did my EE degree, everyone that specialized in control / automation were guaranteed a oil & gas job, many had a job offer 1 year before the graduated. The petro companies would wine and dine us, and we could send out competing offers to negotiate.
Then came a huge crash, and almost no one had a job. The offers were rescinded, multi year hiring freeze. All in all very bad times.
I'm not at all buying the argument that WFH has any serious effect on junior hiring.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#239AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time. Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on th…
AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.
A text generator can't be responsible for decisions that people make. You're giving them too much agency. Idk how they did it, but so many people seem to hate AI instead of people who are pushing it.
Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
#240What if hiring offshore developers is to blame for not hiring onshore ones?
If remote work is to blame, wouldn't that also indicate that you couldn't outsource part of your work to lower salaried countries. A lot of companies have their senior staff at the home office, then outsource the more trivial tasks to e.g. India.
Managing people is hard, managing remote people makes it hard to hide that you're a poor manager. If you want to allow for remote work, you need to invest in management training. You should do that for onsite as well, but it will be less visible that you if you skip that step.
What if unrealistic economical growth is to blame for weak junior hiring?