The Junior Hiring Crisis

IMO, the first thing to recognize with networking is that there are at least 3 tiers of people you know, with regards to their ability to help in your job hunt. Tier 1 are the people who know your technical ability, and can directly vouch for you being a good contributor in your role. These people are great to have, but new grads simply don't have them, for the most part. Most of the people able to directly vouch for their competency are their equally looking-for-work peers, or pretty distant from industry professors. Tier 2 are the people who know you well enough to assert that you're not an absolute pain to be around. They don't necessarily know whether you're a genius double-stack 12x developer or a codemonkey, but they know you're reasonably likeable. Then there's Tier 3, who don't know anything about you personally, but they know people who know you.

New grads (myself included, back then), tend to discount Tier 2, because in their head the hiring process is looking for the single applicant with the best technical skills. When in reality, it's a lot more of a "who can we get quickly, who won't have a negative impact on team output or morale". Parents, Parent's friends, friends, and friend's parents all can fall into Tier 2, and absolutely should asked about whether their workplaces are hiring, and if so, if they could provide a recommendation.

Tier 3 is mostly useful for finding out about positions that don't necessarily get publicized, but depending on mutual connection to the shared acquaintance, might be willing to offer a recommendation.

With regards to where to network, that comes down to engaging with social gatherings that bring together a spread of people that aren't exclusively your direct peers. That's the stumbling block a lot of new grads find themselves in, which is that all their social time is spent with other new grads (or worse still, nobody at all). Clubs, parties thrown by friends' parents, university alumni events, hell, join the Oddfellows (YMMV, some lodges stopped recruiting after Vietnam). Conferences, whether technical or not. Hell, a step I recommend for everyone is going to bars and talking to strangers. Not highest density networking opportunity (except some gay bars in SF), but it's a pretty good environment to practice casual communication with people you have approximately nothing in common with, with very low stakes.

> 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 group doesn't become much more than a proxy for an LLM.

New juniors can progress in software engineering - but they have to take the road of disciplined use of AI and make sure that they're learning the material rather than delegating all their work to it... and that delegating work is very tempting... especially if that's what they did in college.

What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders. Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about?

This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism. If you want raw unfiltered capitalism, vote for the billionaire. You can't vote for the billionaire and expect safety nets. That's madness.

Short term thinking and short term profit seeking are going to destroy every industry they touch. This article failed to bring up 2 important points.

Firstly, we've been here before, specifically in 2008. This was the real impact of the GFC. The junior hiring pipeline got decimated in many industries and never returned. This has created problems for an entire generation (ie the millenials) who went to college and accumulated massive amounts of debt for careers that never eventuated. Many of those careers existed before 2008.

The long-term consequences of this are still playing out. It's delaying life milestones like finding a partner, buying a house, having a family and generally just having security of any kind.

Secondly, there is a whole host of other industries this has affected that the author couldn't pointed to. The most obvious is the entertainment industry.

You may have asked "why do we need to wait 3 years between seasons of 8 episodes now when we used to put out 22 episodes a year?" It's a good question and the answer is this exact same kind of cost-cutting. Writers rooms got smaller and typically now the entire season is written and then it's produced when the writers are no longer there with the exception of the showrunner, who is the head writer.

So writers are rarely on set now. This was the training ground for future showrunners. Also, writers were employed for 9 months or more for the 22 episode run and now they're employed for maybe 3 months so need multiple jobs a year. Getting jobs in this industry is hard and time-consuming and the timing just may not work out.

Plus the real cost of streaming is how it destroyed residuals because Netflix (etc) are paying far fewer residuals (because they're showing their own origianl content) and those residuals sustained workers in the entertainment industry so they could have long-term careers and that experience wouldn't be lost. The LA entertainmen tindustry is in a dire state for these reasons and also because a lot of it is being offshored to further reduce costs.

Bear in mind that the old system produced cultural touchstones and absolute cash cows eg Seinfeld, Friends, ER.

Circling back, the entire goal of AI Is to displace workers and cut costs. That's it. It's no more compolicated than that. And yes, junior workers and less-skilled workers will suffer first and the most. But those junior engineers would otherwise be future senior engineers.

What I would like for people to understand that all of this is about short-term decisions to cut costs. It's no more complicated than that.

I'm more pessimistic. It costs too much to go back to college and retrain. The result is going to be a generation of ambitious people doing a craft they hate. The results are going to be dismal.