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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#251

Post by _carbyau_ »

dcchambers wrote: post #53

The companies that are abandoning junior roles are making a life-or-death bet that AI will eventually replace ALL work. Because those senior people will NOT be around forever. And they have killed their talent development and knowledge transfer pipelines. Either direction you take it, this feels like a lose-lose situation for everyone.

From an individual senior exec point of view - all staff are replaceable. You just hire from outside the company.

People don't think in terms of shared commons and that if all companies are doing the same thing then there won't be much of a "senior" market left to hire.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#252

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

jpalomaki wrote: post #222

We have articles that are very skeptical about whether AI companies will ever make any money. And then we have others claiming that AI is already having such a significant impact on hiring that the effects are clearly visible in the statistics.

In 2000 a lot of internet companies went under while the internet had a huge impact on business and wider society.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#253

Post by gwbas1c »

One of the critical flaws in the article is that the first chart only looks back 5 years, and the second only looks back 10.

The boom-bust recession cycle is roughly every 10 years. You can't say that AI is impacting hiring when your data just looks like the typical 10 year cycle. Your data needs to go back further.

That being said, what's more likely going on:

1: There are always periods where it's hard for recent college grads to get jobs. I graduated into one. Ignoring AI, how different is it now from 10, 20, and 30 years ago?

2: There are a lot of recent college grads who, to be quite frank, don't work out and end up leaving the field. (Many comments in this thread point out how many junior developers just shouldn't be hired.) Perhaps we're just seeing many companies realize it's easier to be stricter about who they hire?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#254

Post by icedchai »

x0x0 wrote: post #175
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…

My 2 cents: they're too expensive. We had code school grads asking for $110-$130. Meanwhile, I can hire an actual senior engineer for $200 and he/she will be easily 4x as productive and useful, while also not taking a ton of mentorship time. Since even that $110 costs $140, it's tough to understand how companies aren't taking a bath on $700/day.

Yep, the value isn't there. I'm on a very lopsided team, about 5 juniors to 1 senior. Almost all of the senior time is being consumed in "mentorship", mostly slogging through AI slop laden code reviews. There have been improvements, but it's taking a long time.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#255

Post by icedchai »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #40
giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;) While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in…

> Well now you get to read it. Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR. I'd worry l…

At least they're running the test suite? I'm working with guys who don't even do that! I've also heard "I've fixed the tests" only to discover, yes, the tests pass now, but the behavior is no longer correct...

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#256

Post by Herring »

QuercusMax wrote: post #147
Apocryphon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The behavior you’re describing really got big in the 80s with Jack Welch at GE. Which, admittedly, is nearly half a century ago.

Many of our current society's problems can be directly traced back to Reagan-era policies. Anyone who seriously believes in trickle-down Reaganomics is a fool or a liar.

Those economic policies were a backlash to the 1970s Civil Rights pushes. You can always count on racists to destroy themselves rather than to stop abusing others.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#257

Post by icedchai »

ricardobeat wrote: post #208

> “I’m an IC not a manager,” became an acceptable argument to avoid this work Has anyone ever seen a manager mentoring ICs? I haven't. This is a senior/staff/principal responsibility.

I have, but these were generally founder types that accidentally became managers. They weren't "career managers." The career managers delegate that work.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#258

Post by parliament32 »

ike2792 wrote: post #174
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…

When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.

This has been a thing for a long time and I've thought about it quite a bit, but I still have no solutions.

I'm pretty sure it just comes down to bean-counting: "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $100k" vs "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $120k" is effectively the same thing, and there's a clear "spend money, acquire person" transaction going on. Meanwhile, "we spent $20k on an asset we already have" is.. a hard sell. What are you buying with that $20k exactly? 20% more hours? 20% more output? No? Then why are we spending the money?

It's certainly possible to dance around it talking about reducing risk ("there's a risk this person leaves, which will cause...") but it's bogged down in hypotheticals and kinda a hard sell. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#259

Post by anal_reactor »

shagie wrote: post #73
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…

> 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…

> This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested."

I've learnt that saying this exact phrase does wonders when it comes to advancing your career. I used to argue against stupid ideas but not only did I achieve nothing, but I was also labelled uncooperative and technically incompetent. Then I became a "yes-man" and all problems went away.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#260

Post by agumonkey »

strickjb9 wrote: post #57
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…

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…

New students are presented with agentic coding now, so it's possible that CS will become a more abstract spec refine + verify. Although I can't make it work in my head, that's what I took from speaking with a young college student.
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