The Junior Hiring Crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#401

Post by Glawen » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:24 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #379

johnnyanmac wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 punctual…

Not so fast. I "saved" guys from being fired by asking to be more patient with them. The last one was not in my team as I moved out to lead another team. Turned out the guy did not please an influencial team member, who then complained about him. What I saw instead was a young silent guy, given boring work and was longing for more interesting work. A tad later he took ownership of a neglected project, completed it and made a name of himself.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#402

Post by venturecruelty » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

andrewrn wrote: post #221

To try and add in some anecdotes without injecting too much baggage: I am an older gen-z and launching my career has felt nigh on impossible. At my first job, the allergy toward mentorship this article mentions was incredibly palpable. None of my several managers had management experience, and one of them openly told me they didn't want to be managing me. The one annual review I got was from someone who worked alongs…

I'm really sorry you went through that. For what it's worth, I'm a millennial, and then best shot I had at mentorship was an extremely overworked engineer who oversaw my work for like... a few weeks, maybe? And that was at the very beginning of my career about a decade ago. Then my mentor kinda disappeared to put out a bunch of fires all the time (I eventually became the "put the fires out all the time" guy.) Basically, the experience was neither long nor formal. After that, and at every job since, I basically had to fend for myself. This industry is outright allergic to training people, and it sounds like it's reached a fever pitch. I'm praying I don't get laid off, because on top of having no desire to job hunt in this economy, I don't really know if I care to work anywhere near this industry ever again. I can't wait until it collapses.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#403

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:33 AM UTC

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

Plenty of skilled work requires a master’s or PhD. CS, for those who want a safe, secure job, looks like it’s going that way.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#404

Post by venturecruelty » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:35 AM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #354

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.…

God, thank you for writing this. I agree 100%. We are rapidly losing all of our "low-background" programmers in this industry. Even ten years ago, I encountered developers who could not debug a stack trace, of the application they were hired to develop. People would send me screenshots of Python errors and ask me how to fix them. I was shocked. I was a junior myself, but surely a programmer would know how to read a compiler error. I mean, that's the entire point of the computer telling you what went wrong...

I saw the title inflation happen in real time. When the boot camp floodgates opened, that was the beginning of the end of my faith in this field. I saw people with three months of create-react-app tutorials churning out garbage, while I was called upon to put out fires and fix things when they broke. I "did devops", and rapidly became shadow developer IT, helping incapable programmers fix bugs in codebases I wasn't even familiar with, better than they could. And I am truly not that great of a programmer! I just know how to read, reason, and use grep a lot. These aren't superpowers, but finding someone who can even reason through how to debug something is impossible these days.

I would love some sort of licensure or guild or standards, but I have no idea how we even begin to change that. Part of the problem is that companies don't want to change. It's cheaper to pay a few people nothing than it is to pay a lot of people a lot, and that shows no sign of changing. Maybe more planes have to fall out of the sky, I don't know. Maybe Windows has to become so buggy and unusable that multiple hospitals shut down for months on end. We don't just need a reckoning, we need a reckoning where we all wind up better on the other side.

I am squinting at the horizon, but still, all I see is darkness.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#405

Post by venturecruelty » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:40 AM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #105

koakuma-chan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't have children. All this churn (learning whatever) isn't worth it (for them).

>Just don't have children. Despite everything, I like it that humanity exists. I want humanity to continue to exist. I reject any notion or attitude that would, taken to its logical conclusion, result in the extinction of humanity. And, even more so, that would result in the extinction of my family and lineage. For your sake, I hope that this is just edgy horseshit that you will soon grow out of.

Friendly reminder that, on a planet of eight billion (and climbing) people, many of whom live in places with too much heat and not enough food and water, not everyone has to have children. And that's okay.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#406

Post by locknitpicker » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:50 AM UTC

shagie wrote: post #73

strickjb9 wrote: post #57

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. 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…

> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested." Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. It is especially frustrating that the second gro…

> Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to.

This is not limited to junior devs. I had the displeasure of working with a guy who was hired as a senior dev who heavily delegated any work they did. He failed to even do the faintest review of what the coding agent and of course did zero testing. At one time these stunts resulted in a major incident where one of these glorious PRs pushed code that completely inverted a key business rule and resulted in paying customers being denied access to a paid product.

Sometimes people are slackers with little to no ownership or pride in their craftsmanship, and just stumbled upon a career path they are not very good at. They start at juniors but they can idle long enough to waddle their way to senior positions. This is not a LLM problem, or caused by it.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#407

Post by hershey890 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:55 AM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #175

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…

My 2 cents: they're too expensive. We had code school grads asking for $110-$130. Meanwhile, I can hire an actual senior engineer for $200 and he/she will be easily 4x as productive and useful, while also not taking a ton of mentorship time. Since even that $110 costs $140, it's tough to understand how companies aren't taking a bath on $700/day.

Good new-grads in expensive areas are going to cost $100-$130k. This is a bargain considering a few years back they could get $200-$350k.

Bear in mind these types can explain things like why word-alignment matters and train themselves into being net productive within a few weeks.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#408

Post by locknitpicker » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 6:59 AM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #264

shagie wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested." Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to. It is especially frustrating that the second gro…

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?

> 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.

Hiring well is hard, specially if compensation isn't competitive enough to attract talented individuals who have a choice. It's also hard to change institutional hiring practices. People don't get fired by buying IBM, and they also don't get fired if they follow the same hiring practices in place in 2016.

> 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?

Software development is a multidiscinary field. It involves multiple non-overlapping skill sets, bot hard skills and soft skills. Also, you need multiple people vetting a candidate to eliminate corruption and help weed out candidates who outright clash with company culture. You need to understand that hiring someone is a disruptive activity, that impacts not only what skill sets are available in your organization but also how the current team dynamics. If you read around, you'll stumble upon stories of people who switch roles in reaction to new arrivals. It's important to get this sort of stuff right.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#409

Post by hintymad » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

> That’s not to say that there aren’t people within those companies who care about employee development, but the system isn’t set up for that to be the companies’ top priority.

There has been a cultural shift too. I don't know when it got started, but at least employees in the tech companies started to get more and more obsessed with promotions. The so-called career development is nothing but a coded phrase for getting promoted. Managers use promotion as a tool to retain talent and to expand their territories. Companies adopted to this culture too. As a result, people development increasingly became a lip service.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#410

Post by hobs » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 7:03 AM UTC

shagie wrote: post #319

throwaway2037 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> culture of job-hopping When using this phrase in this context, is your sentiment positive or negative? In my experience, each time I have a job offer for more money, I go and talk to my current line manager. I explain the new job offer, and ask if they would like to counteroffer. 100% ( simultaneously emotionally hurt ("oh, he's disloyal for leaving") and unsupportive of matching compensation. In almost all cases,…

I'm unsure about how long your career has been. At Taos, there was a monthly training session / tech talk on some subject. At Network Appliance ('98-'09), there was a moderate push to go to trainings and they paid for the devs on the team I was on to go to the perl conference (when it was just down the road one year everyone - even the tech writers - went). At a retail company that I worked at ('10-'14), they'd occas…

Then it sounds like you need to train them and also pay them better. Most people just want to stay at one company and not do the grind, but the lack of raises, poor treatment, and much better pay other places is blaming juniors for your companies problems.