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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#441

Post by sevenseacat »

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…

> This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested."

And then in the next PR, you have to request the exact same changes

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#442

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #274
icedchai wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some definite signs of over reliance on AI. From emojis in comments, to updates completely unrelated to the task at hand, if you ask "why did you make this change?", you'll typically get no answer. I don't mind if AI is used as a tool, but the output needs to be vetted.

What is wrong with emojis in comments? I see no issue with it. Do I do it myself? No. Would I pushback if a young person added emojis to comments? No. I am looking at "the content, not the colour".

[deleted]

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#443

Post by johnnyanmac »

CSSer wrote: post #7

This article talks a lot about AI, but what I find odd is that in my relatively short (but long enough) ~9 yr career so far, this problem predates AI. I don't deny that it exacerbates it, but you don't kill a disease by addressing the symptoms. From the first time I was ever involved in the hiring process, senior leadership always encouraged me to hire more experienced staff, always most heavily scrutinized juniors,…

>Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team

Well that explains why AI excacerbates this. It's all they ever wished for and they don't need to make do with that facsimile of "human interaction" anymore. It's not perfect but that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.

Or you know, they just really want to be as cheap as possible in production (hence, outsourcing).

>It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.

I'll give a slight BOTD here after my disdain above and admit tha a small team probably isn't the best enviroment to train a junior. Not unless you either

a) truly believe that the skillet you need isn't out there, and you are willing to train it yourself to alleviate your workload, or

b) you are thinking long term efficiency and are willing to lose early productivity to power the future prosperity. Which, to be frank, is not how modern businesses operate.

And yes. Any teacher in any field (but especially education) will tell you that the star players make their day, week, and year. But the worst cases make you question your career. Our natural negativity bias makes the latter stick out more. Those in industry won't get star players as they are either filtered out by these stupid hoops or gobbled up for 100k above your budget by the big players. It's rough.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#444

Post by sevenseacat »

twosdai wrote: post #199
zingar wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind giving some examples of the work that annoys seniors?

Writing unit tests, manual validation work, manual testing. Automating Deployments of infrastructure, DNS work, tracking down annoying one off bugs, fixing and validating dependency issues. Basically this type of maintenance work for any sufficiently complex codebase. (Over 20k LOC) When I was an QA intern / Software Dev Intern. I did all of that junk.

I don't think I'd trust a senior that didn't do at least some of those things themselves.

I mean, they just want to write code without testing it? Or fixing the bugs that come out of it?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#445

Post by sevenseacat »

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'm pretty sure that if I was interviewing for my current job at my current company now, I wouldn't get it.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#446

Post by johnnyanmac »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #149

Ask HN: I have a friend of a friend in his mid 20s who finished a masters degree in data science focused on AI. There isnt a job for him and I think hes given up. In Letters to a Young Poet Rilke responded to a young aspiring poet who asked how a person knows whether the artistic path is truly their calling: > “There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; se…

given that quote, I'll tell you right now that your burning passion and calling in life will not be answered by being a corporate cog that is ultimately performing jira tasks for some project that is not your own. I made that mistake in my mid 20's. I wouldn't call my experience a waste either, but it did have me doing some soul searching on what my true "endgame" is.

I don't know what the disposition of your friend is, but I don't think many of us are ready to die cold on the streets scaping towards our goal. Survive first and then figure out how to climb from there. Don't see setbacks as a sign of weakness, but a part of life.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#447

Post by johnnyanmac »

dzonga wrote: post #198

I personally think - Juniors will be okay, if they stick to *fundamentals* lots of "seniors" via title inflation dont have fundamentals anyways - hence a lot of broken software in the wild & also perverse incentives like Resume driven development. A.I is built on badly written open source code. because once you have the fundamentals, built a few things - you would've battle scars which makes someone a senior not the…

you gotta go resume driven because that's what gets the job. but that distracts from proper engineering skills because the interview process isn't actually testing for engineers. It's all broken.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#448

Post by johnnyanmac »

itsjamesmurray wrote: post #200

My team wrote about this same phenomenon in marketing: https://www.behindthecmo.com/p/the-seniorification-of-market... Its a double edged sword too. I see it in my biz -- its easier to spend 40 hours training a model how to do things the way we like rather than hire someone junior and spend a month+ on onboarding. We are noticing hitting a wall to a certain point with clients still wanting to talk to a real person, b…

>. We are noticing hitting a wall to a certain point with clients still wanting to talk to a real person, but I can see that changing in the next ~5 years

I don't know. if we simply defer talks to LLM's, then companies will take out the middlemen. which means less clients. We'll have our own little filter bubbble of tech where everyone is talking to their black box to try and push out their ideas instead of within the industry.

Not exactly an industry I want to be in. But I don't think it'll get to that point.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#449

Post by austin-cheney »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #438
austin-cheney wrote: post #27

There are two problems here. 1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior. 2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume. The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.

>Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities I highly doubt throwing even a 3YOE "senior" of 2012 at a modern junior interview would turn out as well as you'd expect. the standards have gotten sky high. That doesn't mean they can't do the job, it means the industry created more hoops to jump through. I agree to an extent with title inflation (and where the hell is the…

It’s not that people from 10, 15, 20 years ago were smarter. It’s that they were expected to do more. The business goal, even then, was not higher quality output but was commoditization of hiring/firing and this has been fulfilled more efficiently over time. Title inflation is often the result of retention, which is another aspect of hiring/firing.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#450

Post by citrin_ru »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #378
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'…

> Juniors take a lot of training and time and aren't very productive, but their salaries are actually not reflective of that

In the current economic situation you can offer a junior 2x may be even 3x less and still get candidates to choose from.

Also there juniors who are ready to compensate for lack of experience by working longer hours (though that's not something you would learn during hiring).

> The first few months at your first job you're probably a net loss in productivity.

It's true for a senior too, each company is different and it takes time to learn company's specific stuff.

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