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The Junior Hiring Crisis

people-work.io

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#31

Post by alephnerd »

Sadly - as I've mentioned on HN a bunch - junior salaries need to fall dramatically to somewhere in the $60k-$100k range in order to make it cost effective against automation/AI or offshoring.

The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async induced offshoring.

Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new grad range have largely risen because having experienced developers really does matter and provides positive business outcomes.

State and local governments needs to play the same white collar subsidy game that the rest of the world is playing in order to help fix the economics of junior hiring for white collar roles. This is why Hollywood shifted to the UK, VFX shifted to Vancouver, Pharma shifted to Switzerland, and Software to India.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#32

Post by CSSer »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #19
CSSer wrote: post #7

This article talks a lot about AI, but what I find odd is that in my relatively short (but long enough) ~9 yr career so far, this problem predates AI. I don't deny that it exacerbates it, but you don't kill a disease by addressing the symptoms. From the first time I was ever involved in the hiring process, senior leadership always encouraged me to hire more experienced staff, always most heavily scrutinized juniors,…

Yes, AI isn't helping but the corporate world has been doing this for decades! Junior devs are second class citizens internally. I don't blame them for moving on after a few years.

I guess I should clarify too: I don't believe in junior titles. They handicap people into the position you describe where they must move on to progress. When I describe "junior" above, I generally mean a candidate with <=1.5 years of experience. When I say mid I mean any amount of experience greater but not senior according to technical review. And yep, I know this is not the best heuristic because there are definitely people with no working experience who have mid-senior coding skills (although they're rare). I think that's sort of part of the problem too. Senior management is disincentived from understanding the roles and growth trajectories, so our heuristics for hiring are totally warped and stomped on.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#33

Post by devin-2030 »

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…

We might need a lot of young adults for war in the near future, according to some.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#34

Post by the_snooze »

dkdcio wrote: post #13
buellerbueller wrote: post #4

Want to stand out in a world where all the job applications are AI slop? Network. The original kind. Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human relationships matter.

genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if you’re a new grad where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on? I do think I could get a job from my network because I’ve worked in the industry for years and done good work; I’m a little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at least ignore those LinkedIn requests

For anyone still in school, networking is easy for students who take initiative. This doesn't mean going to networking events. It means actually doing things with actual people: get involved in undergraduate research, sports, arts, Greek life, volunteering, on-campus part-time jobs, etc. Universities have those low-barrier low-risk things going on that you can just try out. Students who do this get the inside track on opportunities that aren't broadly advertised, so they face far less competition and are likely better fits for those opportunities due to the experience they got by being involved.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#35

Post by supportengineer »

alephnerd wrote: post #31

Sadly - as I've mentioned on HN a bunch - junior salaries need to fall dramatically to somewhere in the $60k-$100k range in order to make it cost effective against automation/AI or offshoring. The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async induced offshoring. Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new grad range have…

My fear is that isn't low enough.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#36

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #2

That's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal" her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself). > The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer. Me…

People skills are so important, I agree. Intergenerational people skills are especially important; in most things that matter, the old guard are the ones keeping their eye on the younger hires, pattern matching what they see over months of observation to who they've seen succeed before.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#38

Post by alephnerd »

supportengineer wrote: post #35
alephnerd wrote: post #31

Sadly - as I've mentioned on HN a bunch - junior salaries need to fall dramatically to somewhere in the $60k-$100k range in order to make it cost effective against automation/AI or offshoring. The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async induced offshoring. Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new grad range have…

My fear is that isn't low enough.

Not really.

Building a GCC ends up costing around $60k-$100k per head in operating costs without subsidizes, and deploying vibe coding tools to fully replace an entire dev team end up in a similar price range (but conversely they could arguably enhance productivity for new grads and hires eg. Glean Search).

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#39

Post by viraptor »

avidiax wrote: post #12

This isn't the first time that the industry has foot-gunned itself. The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind. Even before LLMs, there were periods recently where multiple companies had "senior only" hiring policies. That just inflated what "senior" was until it was basically 5 years of experience. This time seems a bit different, however. There are both supply and…

> The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.

So the irony here is that LLMs are actually going to be decent at COBOL by default. And other uncommon/esoteric codebases. For example I vibe-ported some Apple ii assembly to modern C/SDL and... it works. It's stuff that I just wouldn't even attempt at manual development speed. It may be actually an easier path than training someone to do things, as long as you have a large enough test suite or detailed enough requirements.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#40

Post by tenacious_tuna »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #30
weatherlite wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.

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 less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the logic issues.

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