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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?

#351

Post by CamperBob2 »

weakfish wrote: post #344
CamperBob2 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really don't want to sound like an asshole, but I refuse the notion that an agent writes better code / prose than I do and I am concerned for anyone who does think that. Is it _faster_? sure! That is NOT better. Before you ask, I write code w/ agents daily, I find it useful, but it's not better than I am purely on quality.

What I've been seeing lately with Opus 4.7 under Claude Code is that it finds more bugs in my code than I find in its code. That, to me, makes it hard to argue that I am "better" than it is.

Certainly Claude/Codex's knowledge of algorithms and data structures is leagues ahead of any human programmer alive. Only its capacity for creating new ones on demand is weaker. Recent results from the mathematics field suggest that's a temporary state of affairs.

As far as prose goes, my best writing is indeed better than the best I've seen from LLMs. But that's a matter of opinion (mine.) On average the clanker wins, especially if conditioned to avoid LLM-isms.

The truth is that the models are getting better in both areas, while I'm not. Which IMHO is freaking awesome, not a reason to burn it all down.

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

#352

Post by shagie »

kxrm wrote: post #78
nickff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing…

I would argue that job hopping was a symptom of companies under compensating for the market. This is a common problem even above Junior level. It's been easier to get a raise by leaving to another company that will pay more, then by just asking your employer for more money. Again, the company has the control to avoid this.

It might be under compensating for the market at large, but the market has companies where the revenue per employee is orders of magnitude larger than other companies.

I've worked at small companies that had revenue per employee of under $150,000.

The NYT has a revenue per employee of $470k ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=New+York+Times+revenue+... ) ... and a profit per employee of $50k ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=New+York+Times+profit+p... ).

https://www.levels.fyi/jobs/company/the-new-york-times-compa...

If an employee there got an offer in Big Tech, they're going to make more.

Until you hit Big Tech or companies trying to compete with them for talent, you can always find an employer that will pay more than your current one.

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

#353

Post by foobarchu »

meta_gunslinger wrote: post #347
Cyph0n wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, downvoting is definitely a useful tool to signal that you don’t agree with an opinion or subjective statement. But yes, downvoting a factual statement makes no sense.

That's just silly. The fact that you disagree with an opinion does not mean that other people should not get the chance to be exposed to it. That's how echo-chambers form.

At the same time, the amount of disagreement an opinion gathers is an extremely important channel of information for determining whether you agree with someone's position. Silencing the disagreement with it gives an outsized benefit to harmful and malicious statements.

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

#354

Post by qsera »

jcalx wrote: post #349
qsera wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Social engineering won't work on a human security expert who knows and understands the implications of the information they are giving away Social engineering, like prompt injection, is a context attack — easy to spot if you're ready for it, but harder in different circumstances (rushed, panicked, tired, having a bad day, etc.). Troy Hunt (security consultant, creator of HaveIBeenPwned) and Cory Doctorow have both…

> easy to spot if you're ready for it

Are you serious? LLMs, being a computer program, should always "be ready"?

Unless you want to also claim that LLMs can be rushed, panicked, tired or can have a "bad day"!

Jesus! The mental gymnastics people will go through to justify LLMs is just absurd!

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

#355

Post by qsera »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #337
kakacik wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

>No, it did not.

It did. In the form of a pattern that humans are too incapable of recongizing. LLMs identify and repeat the pattern. That is all.

For example, if A -> B and B -> C, logic dictates A -> C. But LLMs will be able to state that A -> C, without actually using logic, if there is sufficient statements in its training data that says A -> B and B -> C and A -> C. So now if you say P -> Q and Q -> R, it will say that P -> R, when there is no explict P -> R in the training data and NOT using logic. For you, it looks like a new discovery inferred using logic when it is not. But that is how that happens..

It is just pattern recognition masquarading as logic, x, y, or z.

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

#356

Post by jolmg »

doubled112 wrote: post #276
jolmg wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A phone's font is large. A picture let's you see code/logs properly formatted and in proper context. It also gives you the opportunity to circle/arrow and otherwise annotate the points of interest while displaying context around.

A picture prevents you from copying, but often that's not as important. One can use judgment to determine whether a picture or text can be better.

Receiving such messages can sometimes mean I need to transcribe a bit of what I'm seeing, but the added clarity to what they're trying to communicate can be worth it. I welcome it.

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

#357

Post by mexicocitinluez »

sailfast wrote: post #306
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100%. It doesn’t pay the same kind of bills but it makes life 1000% better.

Agreed. I'm comfortable and occasionally get envious of the salaries others are posting but it's fleeting.

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

#358

Post by qsera »

maybe_pablo wrote: post #299
voidUpdate wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I can say for sure I'd rather wear long lasting, tested (second hand), human made clothing rather than Shein Slop

Sure, and I don’t disagree, but goods and services still need to scale to billions of people. Most people aren’t going to start knitting their own clothes, or have the time to, just like most companies probably won’t rely on fully hand-written software if cheaper automated alternatives are good enough. What you want or enjoy is one thing; the reality of society is another.

>won’t rely on fully hand-written software if cheaper automated alternatives are good enough.

By this logic, all non-outsourced development should be dead already.

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

#359

Post by mexicocitinluez »

sweetheart wrote: post #282
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't dreaded going to work in years. I also realized burnout is less about how much time you're putting in and much more about how that time is spent. And when I had micromanaging bosses every hour felt like 4.

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

#360

Post by trollbridge »

e40 wrote: post #294
PaulHoule wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That tax change got reversed!

Proof? I don’t believe it did. Edit: BBB? Is it in effect yet, though?

Yes, and it went into effect retroactively for all of 2025.
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