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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?

#331

Post by throwaway2037 »

Mezzie wrote: post #277
throwaway2037 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bod…

Hat tip. Thanks for the honest reply. First hand accounts like this make HN a better place. I'm sorry you need to suffer from that. I wish you luck finding a job that will allow you to do 100% WFH!

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

#332

Post by closeparen »

jansan wrote: post #191
closeparen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why junior and senior talent alike are forced back into the office. Except that tenured senior and staff employees from the boom times are in the San Francisco office, but all the new grad hires from the last 2-4 years are in various third world offices. And neither of them can get conference rooms, so everybody's on Zoom at their desk all day, trying to be heard over their neighbors.

Good thing there are companies outside San Francisco, too. Actually, almost every company is not in San Francisco if you think about it.

What happened to onshore development in Silicon Valley in 2022 happened to corporate America’s IT departments in the early 2000s.

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

#334

Post by randusername »

hmokiguess wrote: post #274

Why does it have to be one thing? It's likely a whole lot of things that are contributing to this, including education and their parenting.

IMO it's multi-faceted but all revolving around how broken hiring is for juniors.

- HR is rarely equipped or incentivized to select true entry-level candidates without an obvious record of success in a similar prior role

- Algorithmic job boards are brutal and they make juniors anxious or under pressure to have all the answers if they are seen at all

- Seniors that in the past would take hiring risks because they saw something of their own children in a junior candidate are, in 2026, a lot more likely to still have young children they want to WFH focus on

- College is very expensive now and CS programs can be selective. I continually see a disconnect where seniors interview for the curiosity and passion that served them well in their career but the candidate's parents told them to do CS for the ROI. Fair I guess, but these are different people to manage.

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

#335

Post by waynesonfire »

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.

> My first and only layoff

Won't be your last.

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

#336

Post by CamperBob2 »

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?

This "super intelligent" and "capable" thing cannot even understand that your ssh keys are private and should not be sent to randos.

When somebody posts their private keys to Github, it's usually a human. Enough said.

(And if you had ever used Claude Code, you'd know that it nags you endlessly about key hygiene.)

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

#337

Post by CamperBob2 »

kakacik wrote: post #233
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 ...

But most of the stuff it returns existed before, and llm's parent company during their training part stole all that info, legal or not who cares right. The rest is combined in sort of least-resistance-path which can produce impressive results but its not what you wrote. Many people don't actually care much about morality in their lives only when its convenient for them, and this is a prime example of such tunnel visi…

But most of the stuff it returns existed before

No, it did not.

Start with clean llm, no external previous ideas of humans inserted into it, and let it generate some wisdom on its own and then lets talk.

An LLM is about as likely to do that as you are. The ability to generate "wisdom" ab initio cannot possibly be a criterion for intelligent reasoning. The ability to arrive at novel mathematics proofs, on the other hand, is good enough for me.

Intelligence means making the most of the resources and information available, not the ability to speedrun the Big Bang. LLMs are certainly smarter than humans who dismiss them as "text searchers."

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

#338

Post by maybe_pablo »

qsera wrote: post #319
maybe_pablo wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "heard of social engineering?" I meant that humans are vulnerable to malicious input too. Prompt injection is basically a simplified form of social engineering for language models. It looks different because models operate over much smaller and more explicit contexts than humans do and are explicitly trained to follow instructions, but the general idea is similar: malicious input tries to manipulate how the system…

>I meant that humans are vulnerable to malicious input too. No they are not. Social engineering won't work on a human security expert who knows and understands the implications of the information they are giving away. Your analogy is pointless.

Sure they are, if the human expert follows instructions from a manager or a client, if they are of utility to anybody, then they are vulnerable to social engineering and malicious input. An attack may be easy or hard depending on the expert's training, but nobody is flawless.

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

#339

Post by CamperBob2 »

weakfish wrote: post #272
CamperBob2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The foggy piece of plastic writes better code and better text than I do. I don't know about you, but that makes me sit up and stop waving my hands dismissively.

As for "certainty," that's a luxury nobody has.

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

#340

Post by Mezzie »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #331
Mezzie wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bod…

Hat tip. Thanks for the honest reply. First hand accounts like this make HN a better place. I'm sorry you need to suffer from that. I wish you luck finding a job that will allow you to do 100% WFH!

Fortunately, there is flexibility on the 1 day a week in the office for me, so if I'm having a really bad day, I don't have to go. I've had full WFH in the past and it's worked well for me. I've also ended interviews when I'm told the job is 3+ days in office.

I know a lot of people with disabilities that can work if we're WFH, but the requirements of full RTO would push us out of the workplace. I can do 1-2 days, but more than that would end up being very difficult. I can borrow energy/slam caffeine/take an extra Adderall on office days and then just recover the next day or go to bed as soon as I get home, but doing that 5 days a week isn't going to work.

I understand where the RTO advocates are coming from. I do find those 3/4 days a month in the office to be helpful for context building, and there are a lot of jobs that do benefit from that in person collaboration.

My job is primarily supporting people across several countries with a side of system maintenance. There's not really any point to me being in the office more than I am. In fact, being able to work effectively remotely is a key skill for doing this job.

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