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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#381

Post by loeg »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #340
loeg wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Good in that developers are exposed to outside skills and ideas they wouldn't be by spending 10 years doing the same thing.

I don't think it's good or bad per se. Depends o ntje company needs and the individual desite. But as someone who originally wanted to be a specialist (or at the very leastT-shaped), I see a lot more problem in fostering specialists than generalists under this model. Sometimes you do just need that one guru who breathes C++ to come in and dig deep into your stack. Not always, but the value is irreplaceable.

Yeah, definitely some drawbacks as well. I think you can develop some specialization despite hopping around relatively often, though it’s not the path I’ve chosen (average tenure of 6-7 years per employer).

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#382

Post by bitwize »

semiquaver wrote: post #182
Zarathruster wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I keep hearing this and find it utterly perplexing. As a junior, desperate to prove that I could hang in this world, I'd comb over my PRs obsessively. I viewed each one as a showcase of my abilities. If a senior had ever pointed at a line of code and ask…

> embarrassed to check in a pile of slop Part of being a true junior, especially nowadays, is not being able to recognize the differences between a pile of slop from useful and elegant code.

Senior level. Still can't sometimes. Just the other day I looked over some code I wrote and realized what a pile of slop it was. I kept wondering "What was I thinking when I wrote this? And why couldn't I see how bad it is till now?" My impostor syndrome is triggered hard now.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#383

Post by root_axis »

nradov wrote: post #358
johnnyanmac wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Every style of interview will cause anxiety, that's just a common denominator for interviews.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#384

Post by dhussoe »

gishh wrote: post #293
semiquaver wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> embarrassed to check in a pile of slop Part of being a true junior, especially nowadays, is not being able to recognize the differences between a pile of slop from useful and elegant code.

More to the point, I think part of being a senior is being able to dig up code you wrote a few years ago and say “how awful”

I do think that there's a meaningful difference between writing code that was bad (which I definitely did and do) and writing code where I didn't know what each line did.

early on when I was doing iOS development I learned that "m34" was the magic trick to make flipping a view around have a nice perspective effect, and I didn't know what "m34" actually meant but I definitely knew what the effect of the line of code that mutated it was...

Googling on it now seems like a common experience for early iOS developers :)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14261180/need-better-and...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3881446/meaning-of-m34-o...

https://khanlou.com/2012/09/catransform3d-and-perspectives/

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#385

Post by JSR_FDED »

chinaexpert1 wrote: post #317
throwaway2037 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice Hot take: This reads like an old person looking down upon young people. Can you explain why it isn't? Else, this reads like: "When I was young, we worked hard and listened to our elders. These days, young people ignore our advice." Every t…

Yeah Ive got to agree with this hot take. Put yourself in the junior's shoes: if s/he wasn't there you'd be pulling it out of Claude Code yourself, until your satisfied with what comes out enough to start adding your "senior" touches. The fact is the way code is written has changed fundamentally, especially for kids straight out of college, and the answer is to embrace that everyone is using it, not all this shaming.…

This isn’t a question of the senior teaching the junior how to use the LLM correctly.

Once you’re a senior you can exercise judgement on when/how to use LLMs.

When you’re a junior you haven’t developed that judgement yet. That judgement comes from consulting documentation, actually writing code by hand, seeing how you can write a small program just fine, but noticing that some things need to change when the code gets a lot bigger.

A junior without judgement isn’t very valuable unless he/she is working hard to develop that judgement. Passing assignments through to the LLM does not build judgement, so it’s not a winning strategy.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#386

Post by dhussoe »

ike2792 wrote: post #174
andrewmutz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation. It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have them leave as soon as they…

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.

fwiw at big tech companies I haven't found this to be true, bonus and refresher multipliers for the higher performance review ratings are significant

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#387

Post by nradov »

throwup238 wrote: post #377
nradov wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You seem to be confused. The AMA doesn't control physician licensing. That's done by state medical boards.

But are you suggesting we have separate licenses for every different type of developer? We have new types coming up every few years.

The whole idea of guilds for developers is just stupid and impractical. It could never work on any long term or large scale basis.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#388

Post by checker659 »

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…

I think the current grads are going to be shafted either way. In 5 years, there might be more opening for "fresh" young grads and the companies will prefer them over the young people who're just graduating.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#389

Post by dhussoe »

ricardobeat wrote: post #208

> “I’m an IC not a manager,” became an acceptable argument to avoid this work Has anyone ever seen a manager mentoring ICs? I haven't. This is a senior/staff/principal responsibility.

all the time? not on technical issues, unless it's a TLM or the IC is entry level and it's pretty basic stuff they need help with, but absolutely on navigating organization, communicating, prioritization, and so on...

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#390

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

ryandrake wrote: post #312
throwaway2037 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice Hot take: This reads like an old person looking down upon young people. Can you explain why it isn't? Else, this reads like: "When I was young, we worked hard and listened to our elders. These days, young people ignore our advice." Every t…

> Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT. The answer to this (throughout the ages) should be the same: read the authoritative source of information. The official API docs, the official language specification,…

No. Just no.

If I have a problem with a USB datastream, the last place I'm going to look is the official USB spec. I'll be buried for weeks. The information may be there, but it will take me so long to find it that it might as well not.

The first place to look is a high quality source that has digested the official spec and regurgitated it into something more comprehensible.

[shudder] the amount of life that I've wasted discussing the meaning of some random phrase in IEC-62304 is time I will never get back!

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