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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#271

Post by throwaway2037 »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #113
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…

Dealing with an intern at work who I suspect is doing exactly this, I discussed this with a colleague. One way seems to be to organize a face to face meeting where you test their problem solving skills without AI use, the other may be to question them about their thought process as you review a PR. Unfortunately, the use of LLMs has brought about a lot of mistrust in the workplace. Earlier you’d simply assume that a…

    > Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice
Hot take: This reads like an old person looking down upon young people. Can you explain why it isn't? Else, this reads like: "When I was young, we worked hard and listened to our elders. These days, young people ignore our advice." Every time I see inter-generational commentary like this (which is inevitably from personal experience), I am immediately suspicious. I can assure you that when I was young, I did not listen to older people's advice and I tried to do everything my own way. Why would this be any different in the current generation? In my experience, it isn't.

On a positive note: I can remember mentoring some young people and watching them comb through blogs to learn about programming. I am so old that my shelf is/was full of O'Reilly books. By the time I was mentoring them, few people under 25 were reading O'Reilly books. It opened my eyes that how people changes more than what people learn. Example: Someone is trying to learning about access control modifiers for classes/methods in a programming language. Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT. In my (somewhat contrived) example, the how is changing, but not the what.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#272

Post by fundad »

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…

I entered the job market in late 2000. There was no reason to hire a junior engineer when every hiring manager and senior engineer knew 10 friends who recently lost their jobs. I found work on less desirable projects and yes it affected my career trajectory and it sucked. Starting out has always sucked for most people.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#273

Post by bsder »

carlosjobim wrote: post #15
pelagicAustral wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I would also ad to the mix that young folk these days are incredibly overconfident and averse to criticism. A few years back they got a junior dev in here, and I was supposed to help him get on our stack, and ultimately mentor him. This kid would not accept seniority, would constantly and publicly try to divert from the stack we worked with, he would not take any input on his work without actively fighting th…

> young folk these days You should have stopped to think about why such a person was hired in the first place, while there are an endless supply of very talented, hard working, and honest young people who would never be given a chance at all. But if I guess right, hiring is not seen as the responsibility of your company. And that's the core of the problem.

> You should have stopped to think about why such a person was hired in the first place

The hiring process is probably barely better than random, and, probably even closer to random for a junior hire.

Junior hires mostly don't know anything. So, you're pretty much hiring on "seems smart, curious, and enthusiastic" and praying a lot that you can train them. You're simply going to get misses.

This is one of the advantages that you get running "cooperative engineering" programs. You get to vet juniors before they get welded into your pipelines.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#274

Post by throwaway2037 »

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.

What is wrong with emojis in comments? I see no issue with it. Do I do it myself? No. Would I pushback if a young person added emojis to comments? No. I am looking at "the content, not the colour".

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#275

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#276

Post by nunez »

Annie! Good to see you hit front on here!

You're totally right. 10 minutes on /r/cscareerquestions (without even sorting by `top`, though it's more brutal if you do) is enough to confirm it.

I normally wouldn't cite Reddit as a source, but this same subreddit was overflowing with posts on fending off recruiters and negotiating already-sky-high comp packages just two years ago. Seeing how quickly the tables turned is sobering.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#277

Post by gishh »

tartoran wrote: post #225
izacus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Toxicity is spread out and touching most of the industry. Is it fully toxic? Absolutely not. But I found some level of toxicity everywhere I worked for the past 20+ years in this industry.

[flagged]

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#278

Post by throwaway2037 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #259
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…

> 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.

This. May you have great success! My PR comments that I get are so dumb. I can put the most obvious bugs in my code, but people are focused in the colour of the bike shed. I am happy to repaint the bike shed whatever colour they need it to be!

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#279

Post by [deleted] »

tartoran wrote: post #225
izacus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Toxicity is spread out and touching most of the industry. Is it fully toxic? Absolutely not. But I found some level of toxicity everywhere I worked for the past 20+ years in this industry.

[deleted]

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#280

Post by ryandrake »

watwut wrote: post #223
QuercusMax wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intelli…

I am honestly totally fine with person like that. Sounds like someone easy to work with. I dunno, not having preference between working on three parts of the system is not abnormal. Most people choose randomly anyway. Just pick the two you like the most.

Yea a lot software developers I’ve worked with, across the full spectrum of skill levels, didn’t have a strong preference about what code they were writing. If there is a preference, it’s usually the parts they’ve already worked on, because they’re already ramped up. Strong desire to work on a specific piece of the code (or to not work on one) might even in some cases be a red flag.
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