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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#371

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

venturecruelty wrote: post #287
johnnyanmac wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must ask once again why we are having these 5+ round interview cycles and we aren't able to filter for qualities that the work requires of its talent. What are all those rounds for if we're getting engineers who aren't as valued for the team's needs at the end of the pipeline?

It's the cargo cult kayfabe of it all. People do it because Google used to do it, now it's just spread like a folk religion. But nobody wants guilds or licensure, so we have to make everyone do a week-long take-home and then FizzBuzz in front of a very awkward committee. Might as well just read chicken bones, at least that would be less humiliating.

Guilds and licensure perform gatekeeping, by definition, and the more useful they are at providing a good hiring signal, the more people get filtered out by the gatekeeping. So there's no support for it because everyone is afraid that effective guilds or licensing would leave them out in the cold.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#372

Post by l2silver »

Alright, bring on the downvotes.

It's the bloated junior salaries that have killed their market. I never like hiring juniors, I never like working with juniors, and I'd rather pay the extra 20-30% and get someone more experienced. I'm sorry, but if you don't get into FANG, you should basically be working for nothing until you have some experience. It's cruel, it's not fair, but it's just not worth it for the employer. Especially in today's world where there is no company loyalty.

All this BS about AI taking away the stuff that juniors did, in my field, software development, that was never the case. I never worked in a place where the juniors had different work than the seniors. We all did the same things, except the juniors sucked at it, and required handholding, and it would have been faster and better if they weren't there.

The real trick is finding companies that do very simple work, simple enough that juniors can thrive on day one. It won't be the best experience, but it is experience, and the rest is what you make of it.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#373

Post by crisdux »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #242
crisdux wrote: post #220

It feels like there is a psyop going on. Blaming job loss and less entry level jobs on "AI". The real simple reason... Jobs are going overseas, many of them junior level jobs. They are laying off people and then hiring a proportional amount of people overseas. Why are folks falling for this AI nonsense?

Meh, multinational businesses are multinational . They don't have to hire in any given country. Given the current state of affairs in the US, I'd be moving the balance elsewhere too.

Corporate greed and government collusion have revived indentured servitude through work visas, sanctuary based illegal immigration and virtual offshore outsourcing. You are supporting a vile practice.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#374

Post by ljhsiung »

timoth3y wrote: post #232
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…

I think a lot of this has to do with the explosion of CEO (and by extension CxO) pay over the past 30 years. Today, a CEO can turn in a few quarters of really solid earnings growth, they can earn enough to retire to a life a private jets. Back when CxO pay was lower, the only way to make that kind of bank was to claw your way into the top job and stay there for a decade or more. The current situation strongly incenti…

While I definitely agree CEO pay is quite egregious, in theory, to mitigate short-sighted quarterly earnings hyperoptimization, couldn't a board simply tie equity incentives to performance targets and timeframes though?

Lip Bu Tan, for instance, has performance targets on a five year timeline, which are all negated if the stock falls below a certain threshhold in 3 years. [1]

Or, ever controversial Elon Musk, certainly has an (also egregious) $1 Trillion dollar pay package, but it has some pretty extreme goals over 10 years, such as shipping 1 million Optimus robots [2].

All in all, we can debate about the Goodharting of these metrics (as Musk is keen to do), but I feel boards of these public companies are trying to make more long-term plans, or at least moving away from tying goals to pure quarterly metrics. Perhaps we can argue about the execution of them.

Note: I own neither of these stocks and my only vested interest is buying the S&P.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/14/new-intel-ceo-lip-bu-tan-to-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#375

Post by [deleted] »

watwut wrote: post #191
QuercusMax wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had one fairly-junior teammate at Google (had been promoted once) who was a competent engineer but just refused to make any choices about what to work on. I was his TL and I gave him a choice of 3 different parts of the system to work on, and I was planning to be building the other two. He got his work done adequately, but his lack of interest / curiosity meant that he never really got to know how the rest of the s…

That does not even sounds like a problem? Like when people are that picky about what exact personality the junior musr have that good work is not enough ... then there is something wrong with us.

[deleted]

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#376

Post by jrs235 »

knollimar wrote: post #266
ike2792 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.

And retraining that candidate probably costs you a month of productivity, too.

https://codegood.co/writing/why-your-best-engineers-are-inte...

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#377

Post by throwup238 »

nradov wrote: post #365
venturecruelty wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the cargo cult kayfabe of it all. People do it because Google used to do it, now it's just spread like a folk religion. But nobody wants guilds or licensure, so we have to make everyone do a week-long take-home and then FizzBuzz in front of a very awkward committee. Might as well just read chicken bones, at least that would be less humiliating.

And who would write the guild membership or licensure criteria? How much should those focus on ReactJS versus validation criteria for cruise missile flight control software?

Guild members? Who else?

You’re asking these rhetorical questions as if we haven’t had centuries of precedent here, both bad and good. How does the AMA balance between neurosurgeons and optometrists? Bar associations between corporate litigators and family estate lawyers? Professional engineering associations between civil engineers and chemical engineers?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#378

Post by contrarian1234 »

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…

I think this is the crux of it. When i got my first job I probably made half the salary of the senior engineer in our division. I am 100% sure I was not half as productive. Juniors take a lot of training and time and aren't very productive, but their salaries are actually not reflective of that. The first few months at your first job you're probably a net loss in productivity.

If salaries reflected productivity, you'd probably start out at near minimum wage and rapidly get raises of 100% every half year.

On top of that, if the junior is successful he'll probably leave soon after he's up-and-running b/c the culture encourages changing jobs every 1-2 years. So then you need to lock people down with vesting stock or something..

It seems not easy at all. Even if you give aggressive raises, at the next interview they can fake/inflate their experience and jump in to a higher salary bracket

Hiring and training junior developers seems incredibly difficult and like a total waste of energy. The only time I've seen it work is when you get a timid autistic-savant-type who is too intimidated with interviewing and changing jobs. These people end up pumping out tons of code for small salaries and stay of for years and years. This is hitting the jackpot for a company

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#379

Post by koolba »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #363
nradov wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand that and had some hard anxiety myself back then. Even these days I may be a bit shakey when love coding in an interview setting? But is the false negative for a nervous pair programmer worse than a false positive for a leetcode question? Ideally a good interviewer would be able to separate the anxiety from the actual thinking and see that this person can actually think, but that's another undervalued ski…

I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people. It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months.

Given how much these orgs pay, both direct to head hunters and indirect in interview time, might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.

That also lets you evaluate longer term habits like punctuality, irritability, and overall not-being-a-jerkness.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#380

Post by NatTheBat »

lordnacho wrote: post #134

I suspect this junior hiring crisis thing is linked to the ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days. When I was starting, you were checked for potential as a trainee. In my case, options trading. They checked over that you could do some mental arithmetic, and that you had a superficial idea of what trading was about. Along with a degree from a fancy university, that was all that was needed. I d…

Some hiring managers prioritize technical skill but its only one part of whether the interviewers "like" a candidate. There are infinite reasons someone can get turned down and only some of them are skill related.
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