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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#521

Post by thaneross »

m_rpn wrote: post #457
koolba wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's really not obvious to calculate the output of any employee even with years of data, way harder for a software engineer or any other job with that many facets. If you've found a proven and reliable way evaluate someone in the first 2 weeks you just solved one of the biggest HR problems ever.

What if, and hear me out, we asked the people a new employee has been onboarding with? I know, trusting people to make a fair judgment lacks the ass-covering desired by most legal departments but actually listening to the people who have to work with a new hire is an idea so crazy it might just work.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#522

Post by throwaway2037 »

ryandrake wrote: post #312
throwaway2037 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice Hot take: This reads like an old person looking down upon young people. Can you explain why it isn't? Else, this reads like: "When I was young, we worked hard and listened to our elders. These days, young people ignore our advice." Every t…

> Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT. The answer to this (throughout the ages) should be the same: read the authoritative source of information. The official API docs, the official language specification,…

I like your sentiment about "first principles" of documents -- go to the root source. But for most young technologists (myself included, long long ago), the official docs (man pages for POSIX, MSDN for Win32 etc.) are way too complex. For years, when I was in university, I tried to grasp GUI programming by writing C and using the Win32 API. It was insane, and I did little more than type in code from a "big book of Win32 programming". Only when I finally tried Qt with C++ did the door of understanding finally open. Why? It was the number of simple examples that Qt docs provided they really helped me understand GUI (event-driven) programming. Another 10 years went by when I knew enough about Win32 that I was able to write small, but useful GUIs in pure C using the Win32 API. The very reason that StackOverflow was so popular: People read the official docs and still don't understand... so they ask a question. The best questions include a snip of code and ask about it.

To this day, I normally search on Google first, then try an LLM... the last place that I look is the official docs if my question is about POSIX or Win32. They are just too complex and require too much base knowledge about the ecosystem. As an interesting aside, when I first learned Python, Java, and C#, I thought their docs were as approachable as Qt. It was very easy to get started with "console" programming and later expand to GUI programming.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#523

Post by johnnyanmac »

Jensson wrote: post #508
johnnyanmac wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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. The current hiring practices are a result of acknowledging what they did before didn't work. The current ones work well enough that people don't wanna change it, the only ones who wanna change it are engineers not the companies.

Nit (not directed at you) : I don't appreciate being flagged for pointing out the exact issue of the article and someone just dismissing it as "well companies are making money, clearly it's not a crisis"

This goes beyond destructive thinking. Again, I hope the companies reap what they sow.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#524

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…

>What dumpster fire?

If you're not going to even acknowledge the issue in the article, there's no point in discussing the issue in a forum. Good day.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#525

Post by _aavaa_ »

amarant wrote: post #230
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 hottest take on this is that it might be healthy for the business. During the recent boom everyone and their grandmother's dog got a job as software engineers, and some aren't really fit for it. AI provides a bar. You need to be at least better than AI at coding to become a professional. It'll take genuine interest in the technology to surpass AI and clear that bar. The next generation of software professionals wi…

The only problem is that people need to earn a living while they’re trying to get better than that bar.

Is there bar is set at a competent mid level engineer, people entering the industry need a path from algorithms 101 to above that bar which involves getting paid.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#526

Post by Herring »

alvah wrote: post #517
Herring wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just tired of re-litigating this issue. Discuss with your favorite frontier model. Roughly, productivity has been outpacing pay since the mid 1970s, and I wrote about this in another comment here. There's just so much confusion here. Some people like you don't get why a world where a handful of billionaires own everything is a bad idea. Madness. I think nothing less than another depression will get through to mos…

I don't care if you are tired or not, it's not something you can just assert and move on. Also, you know nothing at all of my opinion on whether "a handful of billionaires own everything" is a bad idea or not. All you know about me is I don't agree with you that rising inequality AUTOMATICALLY means some people haven't been rewarded as much as they "should", whatever that means. Reading comprehension, combined with n…

Dude go figure it out yourself, it's not that hard. I remember discussing inequality with friends in 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street (2011). Or earlier. At this point if you still don't get it, with a billionaire in office, surely it's on you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

I got what I needed from here, I'm out.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#527

Post by zingar »

twosdai wrote: post #500
sevenseacat wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Writing automated tests is not the same thing as testing it. Senior engineers write a lot of code, write some tests, do some manual validation. But its usually far from complete. Other roles in a software team can handle making a complete test suite for a project, and making sure that it covers all of the required end user functionality. In some shops they will push all of these together into a "fullstack" kind of ro…

I think I know what you mean in that the most experienced person often writes proof of concept code that others take over. But I can’t imagine a situation where someone is expected to specialize in everything but the PoC.

Also in my part of the Ruby community most folks love tests and are that their code gets better when they write tests. I’d be sad the day I’m writing code and someone else writes the tests.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#528

Post by ch4s3 »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #520
ch4s3 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're just judgemental, and should take an inventory of your self. Frankly you seem like a miserable person.

Yes, I am judgemental. Is that bad?

Yes, its kind of a shitty way to approach life. Assuming that a plumber beats his wife is a really extreme form of classism and you sound like kind of a miserable piece of shit.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#529

Post by ch4s3 »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #519
ch4s3 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chances are he smokes or gets drunk or beats his wife or any combination thereof He is literally the nicest man I know, and smiles ear to ear when he talks about his kids. This says a lot more about you than my pipes guy.

That's great. The point is that you shouldn't disregard the probability of someone seeming "nice" while having issues in private. I don't think that is uncommon. Also, I don't like how everybody assumes that being "nice" is a good thing. I prefer reasonable and logical people, because when talking to them, I can see that they understand what I am saying, whereas when talking to "nice" people, they have that dreamy au…

You have no basis for your assertion, it's just classism. You seem like some sort of cartoonish basement-dwelling weeb. You're not mr. fucking spock, get over yourself.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#530

Post by koakuma-chan »

ch4s3 wrote: post #528
koakuma-chan wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am judgemental. Is that bad?

Yes, its kind of a shitty way to approach life. Assuming that a plumber beats his wife is a really extreme form of classism and you sound like kind of a miserable piece of shit.

I didn't say that he beats his wife. Basically, I was arguing that people who do physical work, or just some hard work that anyone would hate, must be miserable, regardless of whether they admit to being miserable or not, and even regardless of whether you consider them miserable or not, because I don't trust your, or anyone else's judgement on that, because, from my experience, people only point out bad things about others when it is socially advantageous to them. I don't trust your claim that your plumber is 100% nice and happy, because it sounds like you are friends with him, and people tend to not criticize their friends and ignore their friends' faults, even when the faults are extremely obvious to a neutral third party. And people who are miserable tend to do bad things, such as, but not necessarily, beating wives.
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