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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#351

Post by johnnyanmac »

Herring wrote: post #75
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…

What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders. Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about? This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism. If you want raw unfiltered capitalism, vote for the billionaire. You can't vote for the billionaire and expect safety nets. That's madness.

>Companies have always been for shareholders.

well we can trace that back to the 1920's, for one example.

>Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about?

Are you aware of what a "social contract" is? There's nothing wrong with seeking to fill in gaps of knowledge.

>This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism.

I'd be down for it, but this is almost orthogonal to the main point of the discussion. Social contracts exist in all forms of governing. Even rampant capitism has the bare bones social contract of "don't make your customers TOO angry so you can maximize extraction".

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#352

Post by johnnyanmac »

Herring wrote: post #256
QuercusMax wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of our current society's problems can be directly traced back to Reagan-era policies. Anyone who seriously believes in trickle-down Reaganomics is a fool or a liar.

Those economic policies were a backlash to the 1970s Civil Rights pushes. You can always count on racists to destroy themselves rather than to stop abusing others.

That LBJ quote rings true more and more with each passing year.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#353

Post by peteforde »

I am genuinely baffled by the notion that experienced developers have a moral obligation to mentor junior developers in additional to their actual job-related tasks.

They do not. Mentoring is rewarding work, but it is work.

I also find it objectionable that if you're simply not interested in mentoring, you're a jerk. Some people just aren't good at it, some people are genuinely swamped with existing responsibilities, and some people might just want to focus on their goals... and that's fine. There is no but.

Some folks just don't like other people that much, and prefer working alone. Also fine, and kudos for being self-aware enough to not inflict yourself on people who probably wouldn't enjoy your oversight either. This should be celebrated as a communications success.

All of which brings me to the truth: if a company wants to mentor junior developers - and there are many, many excellent reasons to develop talent long-term - then they should make sure that they have suitably experienced people who have opted-in to mentorship, and make sure that their success metrics and remuneration reflect the fact that a significant portion of their time is acknowledged to be dedicated to mentorship. Otherwise, you're describing a recipe for legitimate resentment.

Likewise, if you're a junior developer desperate for mentorship... I understand that your instinct is to take any offer that will have you. But if you're able to have an honest conversation with the recruiter about what kind of mentorship culture exists in a company, you might be saving everyone a lot of pain and frustration.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#354

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

The problem is "Seniors" started becoming worse a decade ago. Not only wouldn't they mentor, but they wouldn't lead by example. Problem-solving on their own, collaborating with peers, sharing information/communication, doing proper due diligence, organizing and improving themselves and their team/product/business. This was around the same time bootcamps started flooding the industry with amateurs with no experience. These neophytes were then competing with more experienced people for the same jobs, because hiring in tech is more Ouija board than accurate assessment of professional engineering.

Amidst this influx of applicants, junior and intermediate staff began getting Senior titles to justify pay raises. Soon those exact same people were moving from job to job as a "Senior", but without the relevant criteria that would've qualified for that title a decade before. You can still see people get promotions without having accomplished anything, much less learned anything, but they did keep the lights on. Today there's a sea of "Senior" engineers that can basically write code (and not especially well), but lack all the other "non-coding" skills that Seniors should have.

Even if you hired 100K new Juniors tomorrow, there's nobody to train them, because most of the people working today are practically Juniors themselves. Each "generation" is getting worse than the one before, because they're learning less from the generation before, and not being required to improve. There's still good engineers around, but finding them is like playing Where's Waldo? - and you have to know what Waldo looks like, which you won't if you're not experienced!

The fix isn't going to be learning to network ("relational intelligence") and mentoring more. The fix is for us to stop letting the industry devolve. Treat it like the real engineering professions, with real school requirements, real qualifications, real apprenticeships, real achievements (and titles that aren't meaningless). Otherwise it'll continue to get worse.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#355

Post by thayne »

strickjb9 wrote: post #57
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…

Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand. In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing…

> I think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are still valuable.

But it's hard to know if a candidate is one of those when hiring, which also means that if you are one of those juniors it is hard for you to prove it to a prospective employer.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#356

Post by johnnyanmac »

newsclues wrote: post #190
alecco wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Henry Ford wanted to raise salaries of his employees but the Dodge brothers (who owned only 10% of the company) successfully sued and "As of 2025, in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled, shareholder primacy is still upheld." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co .

My understanding is that that legal case really states that you can’t defraud your shareholders by funnelling money into other businesses they have no ownership in. It doesn’t set the legal standard that profits must be maximized which is impossible.

It technically doesn't. But that's what corporate ran away with and how they justify it. So it de facto did. Shaped a century of labor law around it.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#357

Post by johnnyanmac »

icedchai wrote: post #350
johnnyanmac wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered regulting AI use, or is it just easier to be mad at the workers and do nothing?

Yes, we are working on some guidelines, but there are layers of bureaucracy...

That's fair. I'm sorry for being snippy. It just feels weird how my junior years always felt like I was on the edge of a needle for being fired because I didn't work "fast enough". Then I hear stories of this vibe coded slop and everyone seeks to be shrugging in confusion.

Its even more frustrating knowing those people went through a overly long gauntlet and prevailed over hundreds of other qualified would-be engineers. Its so weird just seeing an entire pipeline built around minimizing this situation utterly fail.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#358

Post by nradov »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #335
getnormality wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no fix for this problem in hiring upfront. Anyone can cram and fake if they expect a gravy train on the other end. If you want people to work after they're hired, you have to be able to give direct negative feedback, and if that doesn't work, fire quickly and easily.

>Anyone can cram and fake if they expect a gravy train on the other end. If you're still asking trvia, yes. Maybe it's time to shift from the old filter and update the process? If you can see in the job that a 30 minute PR is the problem, then maybe replace that 3rd leetcode round with 30 minutes of pair programming. Hard to chatGPT in real time without sounding suspicion.

That approach to interviewing will cause a lot of false negatives. Many developers, especially juniors, get anxious when thrown into a pair programming task with someone they don't know and will perform badly regardless of their actual skills.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#359

Post by Madmallard »

ah979 wrote: post #284
Madmallard wrote: post #250

This is entirely due to sociopaths that stole trillions in assets from the general population then bought out law makers to not outlaw their blatant copyright infringement so they can make themselves richer with some self-proclaimed 'noble' aim. The general population is being rapidly sacked as a 'necessary' expense of criminal elites. No one should be happy about this.

Yes, and that.

If you look at the “who is looking for work december 2025” there are hundreds of replies of people with 5+ years experience

we’re so cooked

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#360

Post by kovezd »

ilc wrote: post #97

I think AI clouds the real issues around Junior hiring. Defective companies. Let's say you hire your great new engineer. Ok, great! Now their value is going to escalate RAPIDLY over the next 2-3 years. And by rapidly, it could be 50-100%. Because someone else will pay that to NOT train a person fresh out of college! What company hands out raises aggressively enough to stay ahead of that truth? None of them, maybe a M…

What you are saying is not a hiring problem, but an education one.

If colleges stayed up to date, and teach valuable skills, the jump wouldn't be so steep!

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