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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#411

Post by acheron »

zcw100 wrote: post #95
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…

I don't know what world you're living in but software development has always been a cut throat business. I've never seen true mentoring. Maybe a code review where some a-hole of a "senior" developer would come in having just read "clean code" and use some stupid stylistic preferences as a cudgel and go to town on the juniors. I'm cynical enough to believe that this, "AI is going to take your programming job!" is just…

Seriously. I guess I wouldn’t describe it as a “cut throat” thing, but absolutely nobody in 20 years of working has ever given a shit. The idea of being “mentored” is ridiculous. It doesn’t happen.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#412

Post by johnnyanmac »

locknitpicker wrote: post #408
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?

> 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 th…

>It's important to get this sort of stuff right.

Well I'm still waiting. Your second paragraph seems to contradict the first. Which perfectly encapsulates the issue with hiring. Too afraid to try new things, so instead add beuracracy to leases accountability.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#413

Post by locknitpicker »

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…

> I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people.

"Bad" is vague, subjective moralist judgement. It's also easily manipulated and distorted to justify firing competent people who did no wrong.

> It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months.

I feel your opinion is rather simplistic and ungrounded. Only the most egregious cases are rendered apparent in a few weeks worth of work. In software engineering positions, you don't have the chance to let your talents shine through in the span of a few weeks. The cases where incompetence is rendered obvious in the span of a few weeks actually spells gross failures in the whole hiring process, which failed to verify that the candidate failed to even meet the hiring bar.

> (...) might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.

This is a colossal mistake, and one which disrupts a company's operations and the candidates' lives. Moreover, it has a chilling effect on the whole workforce because no one wants to work for a company ran by sociopaths that toy with people's lives and livelihood as if it was nothing.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#414

Post by koakuma-chan »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #248
koakuma-chan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chances are he smokes or gets drunk or beats his wife or any combination thereof, or other similar activities. This can be said about any person who works as a plumber, construction worker, or similar, their whole life. And I am not blaming them, this appears to be the sad reality and the nature of our society.

Uh, really no. That is some hard stereotyping being generalised on a platform with worldwide reach. You may wish to rethink what led you to that statement. Although, with that statement and others from you recently I'm guessing you have "lost your fucks and don't have any more to give" IE burnt out on it all. Good luck, I hope you get to a place where you can not rely rely on shortcuts like stereotypes so much and ha…

Yes, stereotyping. And? I said "chances are." What led me to that statement is my personal experience. Every time I go outside, I can smell somebody smoking weed on their porch. And it's not like it's the same person or the same porch. I can travel multiple kilometers and encounter multiple people doing that. So much for trying to get fresh air. Even without looking at any statistics, I am convinced that a very high percentage of people has some kind of addiction—drugs, alcohol, porn, gambling, god knows what. I had so many people proudly tell me how much they love alcohol, with no shame whatsoever. It's the same everywhere I have been.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#415

Post by squirrellous »

furyofantares wrote: post #66
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 hope juniors will figure out how to use AI to do larger tasks that are still annoying for seniors to do, while seniors take on larger tasks still. I think it's just seniors are learning this stuff faster at the moment and adapting it faster to current work, but as all that changes I would guess juniors reclaim some value back. That said, you hit on something I've been feeling, the thing these models are best at by…

Some juniors do figure it out, but my experience has been that the bar for such juniors is a lot higher than pre-AI junior positions, so there is less opportunity for junior engineers overall.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#416

Post by locknitpicker »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #412
locknitpicker wrote: post #408

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. 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 th…

>It's important to get this sort of stuff right. Well I'm still waiting. Your second paragraph seems to contradict the first. Which perfectly encapsulates the issue with hiring. Too afraid to try new things, so instead add beuracracy to leases accountability.

> Well I'm still waiting. Your second paragraph seems to contradict the first. Which perfectly encapsulates the issue with hiring. Too afraid to try new things, so instead add beuracracy to leases accountability.

I think you haven't spend much time thinking about the issue. Changing hiring practices does not mean they are improve. It only means they changed. You are still faced with the task of hiring adequate talent, but if you change processes them now you don't have baselines and past experiences to guide you. You keep those baselines if you keep your hiring practices then you stick with something that is proven to work albeit with debatable optimality, and mitigate risks because your experience with the process helps you be aware of some red flags. The worst case scenario is that you repeat old errors, but those will be systematic errors which are downplayed by the fact that your whole organization is proof that your hiring practices are effective.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#417

Post by johnnyanmac »

locknitpicker wrote: post #416
johnnyanmac wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's important to get this sort of stuff right. Well I'm still waiting. Your second paragraph seems to contradict the first. Which perfectly encapsulates the issue with hiring. Too afraid to try new things, so instead add beuracracy to leases accountability.

> Well I'm still waiting. Your second paragraph seems to contradict the first. Which perfectly encapsulates the issue with hiring. Too afraid to try new things, so instead add beuracracy to leases accountability. I think you haven't spend much time thinking about the issue. Changing hiring practices does not mean they are improve. It only means they changed. You are still faced with the task of hiring adequate talent…

>Changing hiring practices does not mean they are improve.

No, but I'd like to at least see conversation on how to improve the process. We aren't even at that point. We're just barely past acknowledging that it's even an issue.

>but if you change processes them now you don't have baselines and past experiences to guide you.

I argue we're already at this point. The reason we got past the above point of "acknowledging problem" (a decade too late, arguably) is that the baselines are failing to new technology, which is increasing false positives.

You have a point, but why does tech pick this point to finally decide not to "move fast and break things"? Not when it comes to law and ethics, but for aquiring new talent (which meanwhile is already disrupting heir teams with this AI slop?)

>those will be systematic errors which are downplayed by the fact that your whole organization is proof that your hiring practices are effective.

okay, so back to step zero then. Do we have a hiring problem? The thesis of this article says yes.

"it worked before" seems to be the antipattern the tech industry tried to fight back against for decades.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#418

Post by svilen_dobrev »

rozap wrote: post #109
roadside_picnic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us. It's worth considering how aggressively open the door has been for the last decade. Each new generation of engineers increasingly disappointed me with how much more motivated they were by a big pay check than they were for anything remotely related…

This is what I see. Less of door slamming completely shut, more like, the door was enormous and maybe a little too open. We forget, the 6 month coding bootcamp to 6 figure salary pipeline was a real thing for a while at the ZIRP apex. There are still junior engineers out there who have experiments on their githubs, who build weird little things because they can. Those people were the best engineers anyway. The last d…

heh. i am making software for 40 years more-or-less.

Last re-engineering project was mostly done when they fired me as the probational period was almost over, and seems they did not want me further - too expensive? - and anyone can finish it right? Well...

So i am finishing it for them, one more month, without a contract, for my own sake. Maybe they pay, maybe they don't - this is reality. But I want to see this thing working live.. i have been through maybe 20-30 projects/products of such size and bigger, and only 3-4 had flown. The rest did not - and never for technical reasons.

Then/now i'll be back to the job-search. Ah. Long lists of crypto-or-adtech-or-ai-dreams, mostly..

Mentoring, juniors? i have not seen anything even faintly smelling of that, for decade..

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#419

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where people have to already know the job before they get their first job

That'd be fine... meanwhile, the new loop we come into:

- okay, so what does your company need and do

Company: "that's under NDA/trade secrets, we can't tell you"

- okay. we can't see what you want to you'll have to train them

Company: "we don't want to train people, they just need to hit the ground running"

- okay. we'll just let colleges train the fundamentals and have others figure it out

Company: "no one's training anyone anymore. Where did the juniors go?"

Even doctors have apprenticeship programs. An industry where no one wants to train the next generation is a doomed one. If the US doesn't do it, some other country will gladly take it up.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#420

Post by johnnyanmac »

supportengineer wrote: post #153
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…

I feel like only the biggest companies can afford to put up all these roadblocks to employment. A smaller size company, perhaps in a lower COL city, might have a more "human" side to them, simply because they can't afford all the nonsense.

Sadly, tarriffs are making those companies scared at best and defunct at worst, so they also aren't hiring.
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