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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#471

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

> networking is absolutely essential for post-graduation job-placement success

Looking back, this has absolutely been the case for me personally. My first job out of school was at a startup spun off from a lab where a friend from my CS classes had been working while at school. I just referred somebody who was eventually hired that I've worked with at two other employers in the past.

Maybe chatting with a LLM with access to the codebase is equally effective as pair programming with a human. I don't have enough experience doing that yet to know. I still see it as another tool.

I've found it helps to have various levels of experience on a team. I think one reason for this is people with less experience (hopefully) ask a lot of questions to fill knowledge gaps. These conversations can lead to revisiting designs, practices, etc. and a better outcome overall.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#472

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

venturecruelty wrote: post #405
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

[flagged]

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#473

Post by eudamoniac »

knollimar wrote: post #267
izacus wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game theory here says that such a company will be outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend money+time on retention and training but instead invests that money in poaching. What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using that saved money to poach your best employees.

What's the solution? Locking juniors in with contracts? Vesting cliffs?

Compete for talent. You can never compete with big tech salaries, and often you can't compete with their benefits either. But you can still compete in creative ways. The most obvious way that no one does is to promote people into lower hours worked; instead of a pay raise you give them every Friday off, for example. There are a lot of types of people out there motivated by a lot of different things than money.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#474

Post by jasondigitized »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #56

> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees. Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process…

"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome" - Charlie Munger

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#475

Post by Octoth0rpe »

venturecruelty wrote: post #294
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us familiar with the Dilbert comic strip of the '90s-'00s are having a good chuckle at the idea that there was ever a social contract. What you think of as a social contract was a fiction enabled only by the explosive growth of the software industry during the Internet and mobile web of the last twenty years. It's easy to be generous to employees when the profits just keep growing on their own. It's easy to…

The last social contract between companies and employees was during the New Deal era. It's been downhill ever since.

> It's been downhill ever since.

I agree, but to say that it's 'downhill' implies (correctly IMO) that since that period and until today there still _is_ some notion of a social contract that has been decaying, not that the day that the new deal period ended that the social contract went away instantly. We now appear to be entering some kind of terminal phase.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#476

Post by eudamoniac »

The biggest question that isn't being asked, "why is a university incapable of training a competent programmer in four years?"

I'm quite sure I could take my cousin who has never heard the word HTML and get her to be a better programmer than the average CS graduate within 4 years of tutelage. Why is this the case? Four years is a very long time, and the universities are wasting that time. I'm certain any driven individual would end up a mid-level candidate if they skipped college and instead trained themselves for that time, especially if they hire a senior tutor for far less than the cost of the college tuition.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#477

Post by QuercusMax »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #432
QuercusMax wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually got a major raise after 6m, and then another major raise 1y into my career, because my boss recognized my value. Sadly this is not as common as it should be - but I've also mentored folks at FAANGs who got promoted after 1y at the new-hire level because they were so clearly excelling. The first promotion is usually not very hard to attain if you're in the top quartile.

>not very hard to attain if you're in the top quartile. No biggie, just be the best in the interview stage and continue to be the best for years after that. It's that simple.

I used to sit on a Google / Alphabet promo committee (more than half a decade ago, so things have changed a bit). The bar for L3 (newgrad) to L4 promotions is not high. It's certainly not a rubber stamp, but we were looking for:

  - Gets things done fast enough with high quality 
  - Works mostly independently 
  - Has recommendations from more senior peers who can speak to what they've done
  - Is starting to show several of the expected marks of a Senior (L5)
I had at least one, maybe two new grads who I mentored get promoted to L4 within a year of starting full time; they had both done internships at Google so they didn't have as much ramp up time.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#478

Post by mancerayder »

eudamoniac wrote: post #476

The biggest question that isn't being asked, "why is a university incapable of training a competent programmer in four years?" I'm quite sure I could take my cousin who has never heard the word HTML and get her to be a better programmer than the average CS graduate within 4 years of tutelage. Why is this the case? Four years is a very long time, and the universities are wasting that time. I'm certain any driven indiv…

It's been a while, but one of the reasons I avoided getting a CS degree a few decades ago was because it was basically mathematics. To this day, interviews are the only thing this would have benefited thanks to Leetcode.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#479

Post by Bombthecat »

As said before, we are not hiring juniors anymore. Or last hire was last year.

As far as I hear from all projects from out customers (finance, insurances, government etc) are neither hiring juniors anymore.

In one of the meetings someone asked: when I go or retire, we won't have anyone to replace me, cause we don't hire juniors, management replied: that is not our problem to discuss.

Aka a problem for future and someone else

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#480

Post by skizm »

eudamoniac wrote: post #476

The biggest question that isn't being asked, "why is a university incapable of training a competent programmer in four years?" I'm quite sure I could take my cousin who has never heard the word HTML and get her to be a better programmer than the average CS graduate within 4 years of tutelage. Why is this the case? Four years is a very long time, and the universities are wasting that time. I'm certain any driven indiv…

I think the simple answer is you can't do this with most people. Bootcamps have tried for a while and mostly failed.
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