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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?

#281

Post by kj4211cash »

Tade0 wrote: post #263
gedy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah "work from home" largely means "work from more affordable real estate". Very very few people do I know who work from home do it for digital nomad type reasons. Everyone else is due to not being able to afford anything near the office.

Each and every parent of 4+ whom I worked with lived in the middle of nowhere and would only emerge from the deep woods for an occasional workshop a few times a year. It's a lifestyle impossible if one has to show up an hour's drive away, every weekday.

Yes! I'm "only" a parent of 3 and live nowhere near my coworkers and would be happiest never going to the office. I have been told to travel across the country to HQ every 2 months for vague reasons. I wish I could better articulate to my managers the costs of this policy to my family. Usually female managers understand.

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

#282

Post by sweetheart »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #271
jvanderbot wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m kind of doing this right now for the first time as a founding engineer in a very small but tight knit team. On paper, I’m objectively in a less secure position, but holy shit is it nice to enjoy work consistently.

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

#283

Post by barbazoo »

grolingor wrote: post #17
flextheruler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's awful and the lack of any sympathy from people further along in their career with kids made it even worse. Everyone thinks it's great but I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation.

Should those other people be made to RTO and spend less time around their kids, to fill in your isolated lifestyle?

Instead we should probably find ways to have social lives outside of work.

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

#286

Post by maybe_pablo »

qsera wrote: post #211
CamperBob2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Ever heard of "prompt injection" attacks? This "super intelligent" and "capable" thing cannot even understand that your ssh keys are private and should not be sent to randos. It can solve complex math, but does not understand basic security/privacy. What does that say to you?

Ever heard of social engineering? Also, models nowadays are way sharper than they were even a year ago. They’re not going to make stupid mistakes like that unless you basically ask them to. GPT-5.x for example would bend over backwards to avoid even reading your passwords into context.

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

#287

Post by dymk »

Pavilion2095 wrote: post #239
munk-a wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously people are angry at the people pushing it, not the Claude LLM model weights itself.

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

#288

Post by PaulHoule »

vineyardmike wrote: post #116
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.

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…

That tax change got reversed!

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

#289

Post by maybe_pablo »

voidUpdate wrote: post #224
skydhash wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no way to warn them, so all you can do is... watch …and then wake up from the nightmare wishing the stress from the job is lower. I can only laugh that some people truly believe that developers, one of the most ardent group at automating the tedious part of their job, would refuse to use an effective tool. You only need to look at the open source world to see people litterally scratching their own hitch eve…

What if I don't want to automate away the part of my job that I actually like doing? What if, in my job as a programmer, I actually want to do programming?

That’s fair. I do think, however, that the software industry may become a bit like the clothing industry: there will still be an artisanal market for people who want human-made software, but to be honest I wouldn’t expect it to remain the mainstream option.

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

#290

Post by qsera »

maybe_pablo wrote: post #286
qsera wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of "prompt injection" attacks? This "super intelligent" and "capable" thing cannot even understand that your ssh keys are private and should not be sent to randos. It can solve complex math, but does not understand basic security/privacy. What does that say to you?

Ever heard of social engineering? Also, models nowadays are way sharper than they were even a year ago. They’re not going to make stupid mistakes like that unless you basically ask them to. GPT-5.x for example would bend over backwards to avoid even reading your passwords into context.

> Ever heard of social engineering?

Oh wait, I thought these things were super smart. I didn't expect "social engineering" to work on them.

> models nowadays are way sharper than they were even a year ago.

You are missing the point. If the thing can solve complex math problems and at the same time be so dumb as to fall for "social engineering", then that means that it is not "smartness" or "reasoning" that is helping it to solve those problems. Just some form of advanced, but yet dumb, search algorithm.

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