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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?

#271

Post by mexicocitinluez »

jvanderbot wrote: post #130
vineyardmike wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023. But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending…

My first and only layoff was effective 1h before that law went into effect. 1,000s of us were shunted off b/c an entire research arm was canned due to the changing cost of research s/w teams. I'm poorer but happier now b/c of it. That job was nuts.

I took a decent sized pay cut about 6 years ago to join a small company and build out our own product knowing that I may not get a raise for awhile but got to work on something cool with people I liked and I haven't regreted it for a moment. Looking forward to waking up to do work is a wild feeling.

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

#272

Post by weakfish »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #140
qsera wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs enable a new kind of text search. It looks like reasoning and intelligence, but it is not. For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consider a traditional internet search that comes up with a stackoverflow answer as a machine generating "novel ideas" and answers. It is a clever marketing trick (touting Erdos solutions) employeed by AI companies.

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.

Reading comments like this is like watching someone who is absolutely convinced that they have a crystal ball in their lap when at best they have a foggy piece of plastic. You could be right you could be wrong, but don’t act like you have such certainty.

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

#273

Post by CyanLite2 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #270
madrox wrote: post #114

I worked at a fully remote company that did the best job hiring juniors in my 20 year career. The talent and enthusiasm in that pool was great and really injected something into teams. What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.

Ok, but if it was ZIRP, why are people hiring expensive seniors when they could hire 3/5 no name juniors for the same cost?

Because most people aren't good at training the juniors.

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

#275

Post by lll-o-lll »

agentifysh wrote: post #201

Surprised none of these comments address the issue from cultural/generational value gap I increasingly find across different borders that Gen Z simply are not optimal or desirable for hire and its not just "remote coding jobs" but across the spectrum. In South Korea, there are lot of of 35yo+ getting hired while people in their early 20s struggling. I see the same outcome in different advanced economies and the answe…

> Perhaps the biggest difference I see from millenials and gen z is that the degree in which they realize the difference between having earned the right to expressing your opinion and expressing your opinion.

This made me laugh so hard! I am gen x, and we used to say exactly the same thing about you spoiled, entitled, narcissistic, gritless millennials!

You should have seen what it was like when I first started! You should have seen what I was like!

You’ve got it all wrong! It’s not the generational differences that are the problem, it’s these darn young people are too darn young! (And some of them are a completely useless waste of space, as I was until life slapped a bit of sense into me). It’s a bit over the top, but I really love Musashi (novel) for this representation of the worthless youth who needs to be tied to a tree and suffering to the point of death before finally breaking and getting his crap together (become a human being; not just an animal). Feels like an (exaggerated) representation of the genuine journey all young men must make.

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

#276

Post by doubled112 »

jolmg wrote: post #157
wombatpm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screen share on slack or teams gives you the same. I’d routinely work with remote teammates that way, and we’d jump in a control each others machines as needed. We’d do hours of that as a team, breaking into breakout rooms as necessary. Much more effective that a hot conference room

Even simply taking pictures of one's monitor and sending them along with text/whatsapp messages can be surprisingly practical, low friction, and effective. Adds the benefit of being asynchronous collaboration.

But not logs or code. Please do not send me screenshots of logs or code.

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

#277

Post by Mezzie »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #241
uejfiweun wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office work removes corporate friction at the expense of personal friction (commuting, dress codes, etc), while WFH removes personal friction at the expense of corporate fiction in the way you've just described. It's an interesting dichotomy. Given who the power lies with in our society, I think we all know which one will win out in the long run.

The first part of your post was very insightful, and I broadly agree. It is interesting that you consider (office) "dress codes" a personal friction. Do dress codes still really exist? I work in a very conservative industry, and the dress codes have changed dramatically in the last 10-20 years. For any other industry, I'm sure the changes are even greater. Also, I am the type of person that really likes to dress well…

Dress codes definitely exist, even if they're usually not stated.

I'm a woman. I also have MS. A lot of people with MS, myself included, experience something called the 'MS Hug', which is spasticity, pain, and tenderness in your ribcage muscles.

Wearing a bra for 9 hours a day ensures that I'm in a shit ton of pain. A full time RTO job would mean being in pain constantly so that other people aren't offended by my body. Right now I'm hybrid with one day a week in and I just load up on painkillers and muscle relaxers for that day, but even then I can only do so much because you can't just down 8mg of tizanidine and then drive home.

You wouldn't know any of this by looking at me.

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

#278

Post by cbdevidal »

rgblambda wrote: post #166
cbdevidal wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room. With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help. It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologi…

Guessing you maybe work in the consulting industry? The "seniors" tend to be glorified salespeople whose job is to put together presentations and reassure clients that everything's going well, while the one or more interns/recent grads do all the technical work. Some projects there'd be one junior literally writing every line of code while the seniors spent their entire time in meeting rooms talking about god knows w…

I just have never been in any kind of dedicated developer role. A sysadmin who happens to know development for the past 25 years.

And didn't know development at a high level; no one to guide, so I self-learned and acquired some bad habits that I'm now breaking, and didn't learn some necessary techniques that I'm now learning.

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

#279

Post by cbdevidal »

jaggederest wrote: post #192
cbdevidal wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room. With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help. It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologi…

I don't know how much experience you have, and this also goes broadly for those looking but not commenting here, but if any of you would like a mentor, I'm happy to volunteer, contact info in the profile. Mentoring is, as far as I'm concerned, the most rewarding thing in the industry, and I want to do as much of it as I can handle. Anyone else open to mentoring feel free to chime in, the more the better - mentoring i…

:-) I'll keep you in mind.

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

#280

Post by arrowsmith »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #237
tikhonj wrote: post #236

What 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

ZIRP will never happen again
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