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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#41

Post by asdff »

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…

“automate it away” ironically still requires a human in the chain to determine what to automate, how, and to maintain that automation. Whether it be derived from an ai or a systemd script or an Antikythera mechanism. Now if you leave that to seniors you just ate a big chunk of their day playing shephard to a dozen plus “automated” pipelines while they still have stuff to do outside the weeds. Now you need more seniors and pretty soon they want triple what you could pay a junior and I don’t think they are 3x more prolific if the junior is managed efficiently quite frankly.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#43

Post by xhrpost »

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…

> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.

Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks. Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#44

Post by jmclnx »

> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings

I started in tech in the late 70s. I can say this break happened during the Reagan Years with a bit of help from the Nixon Years.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#45

Post by buellerbueller »

dkdcio wrote: post #13
buellerbueller wrote: post #4

Want to stand out in a world where all the job applications are AI slop? Network. The original kind. Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human relationships matter.

genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if you’re a new grad where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on? I do think I could get a job from my network because I’ve worked in the industry for years and done good work; I’m a little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at least ignore those LinkedIn requests

The other responders have it: forego the "networking" apps like LinkeIn. (It's really just a graph analysis tool for salespeople.). Do thinks with actual face-to-face connection. That's what will make you stand out.

If you are a new grad: go to alumni events. Go to alumni events! GO TO ALUMNI EVENTS.

If you are still in school: talk to your alumni and career office; they will be able to connect you better.

If you are in High School: consider a university with a co-op program.

The value of fact-to-face connection should not be underestimated.

Again: this may be uncomfortable for some people, but it is the way of the world.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#46

Post by bradlys »

I upvoted the article for the purpose of discussion. I disagree with it. The core tenant of the article is that AI is the reason why companies aren't hiring juniors. That's just not it. Do people just blindly believe whatever some CEO or company says in their press briefings? This was all happening before the AI boom. Interest rates went up, hiring went way down, and then AI launched. Before interest rates, interviewing was getting harder and harder every year. That's usually an indication that you have more supply than demand. The bar for getting into any American tech company was getting much harder - not just FAANG. Leetcode had gone from having practiced 50-100 questions to there being a bank of over 3000+ with many people having regularly studied hundreds. It went from easy/medium to being typical in interviews to medium/hard being typical with many original hard questions now being reclassified as mediums.

Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago. The joke of senior FAANG engineers making $400k has been a meme for over 5 years. Yet, inflation has done over 20% in 5 years? Look at new offers for people joining the majority of positions available at public tech companies. You're not seeing $500k offers regularly. Maybe at Jane Street or Anthropic or some other companies that are barely hiring - all of which barely employ anyone compared to FAANG. You're mostly seeing the same $350-400k/yr meme.

The reason we're not employing new grads is the same reason as the standards getting much more aggressive. Oversupply and senior talent has always been valued more.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#47

Post by HaroldCindy »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #40
giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;) While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in…

> Well now you get to read it. Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR. I'd worry l…

We need to develop new etiquette around submitting AI-generated code for review. Using AI for code generation is one thing, but asking other people review something that you neither wrote nor read is inconsiderate of their time.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#49

Post by ah979 »

dkdcio wrote: post #13
buellerbueller wrote: post #4

Want to stand out in a world where all the job applications are AI slop? Network. The original kind. Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human relationships matter.

genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if you’re a new grad where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on? I do think I could get a job from my network because I’ve worked in the industry for years and done good work; I’m a little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at least ignore those LinkedIn requests

Full disclosure, I'm the original author of the post.

Unfortunately, if you network to get a job, you're already months behind.

As I talk to college kids, I try to get them to find opportunities to network while they're in school, before they're desperate to get that first internship or job. They want to come at their search from a place of confidence, not anxiety.

There are so many meetups at universities (at least at the one near me) that they can mingle with the working world, and they stand out because they're there when it's mostly professionals.

Student or not, networking works best in-person when possible (conferences, meetups, professional events) where you get to know people and get truly curious about them. But after that, it involves following up and keeping the relationships warm, showing that you are interested in people professionally and can possibly help them with their problems, and that's no trivial investment.

If you do that enough, then you will build trust and rapport to create some opportunities, but it's admittedly a long game. It also has to be genuine or else people end up feeling used.

I think that there is a blocker that a lot of people have against networking in general because it feels gross and insincere. We've all seen people do it poorly, and so we avoid it, but it can be really fulfilling if done well.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#50

Post by gausswho »

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…

Anyone reccomend an analysis, article or book or video, of this effect on the blue collar industry decades ago?
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