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What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

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Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#71

Post by marcosdumay »

exabrial wrote: post #6

AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time. Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on th…

Apparently there has been some AI-caused firing on companies that spent so much on AI that needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break. From the way people are talking, Facebook seems to be in that category.

There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github.

I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#72

Post by alserio »

Aurornis wrote: post #66
antoinealb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO. I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.

This is a weird conspiracy theory. You'd have to believe that real estate investors were pulling the strings in companies to get them to spend more money with no upside. Like they're just milking these companies for rent and the companies are doing it because they want to give money to the real estate investors? Even in the rare case where real estate investors are also investors in the startup, my experience is that…

Not a startup, but real estate investors have a good chunk of shares of the company where I work and they can influence the decision makers just fine

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#73

Post by munk-a »

nickff wrote: post #45
kxrm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires. I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentorin…

People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing…

If your junior employees frequently job hop as soon as they have been trained up then your company is mismanaged. There are always personal reasons (I ended up immigrating to another country as I was coming into Senior-hood because my partner couldn't affordably immigrate into the US) but if it's a pattern then that pattern is owed to undercompensation and other failures of management.

In the 2000s it was seen as very fashionable to job hop frequently, but it was a biased impression that was assumed to be nationwide while it was only really common in SV with the hugely lucrative signing contracts folks like Google, Meta et. all were handing out.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#74

Post by baq »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #16
mattdeboard wrote: post #5

The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag. It simultaneously and conveniently: 1. takes the heat off AI blowback 2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing) On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis. Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually d…

> The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag. If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient. This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in…

The interests of the capital class are not necessarily aligned with efficient allocation of capital. Note this is far from saying they want employees to suffer, but they install inefficient policies over them.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#75

Post by jemmyw »

uxhacker wrote: post #4

I have found working with remote first natives that the narrowness of their knowledge is also very high. When you work in an office there is a some knowledge transfer happening having lunch with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team. This non structured learning is missed in remote work.

I call bullshit on these social interactions having any meaningful impact on work. I've been in very social offices of a large company where we all lunched together, spent a lot of time at the coffee machine, went out together during and after work. Lots of fun. I didn't once see, hear or participate in cross team discoveries as a result that improved work. And in smaller orgs that were also social, the social part is extremely inefficient at moving work information.

My current remote employer does as good a job at building trust between employees with 6 monthly on-sites. But they also do things that expose cross team productivity issue: rotate people in leadership roles between all the different company meetings, so the CEO might be in the planning meeting this week. Get different people in different roles to join customer calls. Not just anecdote at the coffee machine, actually see what's happening across the company.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#77

Post by munk-a »

exabrial wrote: post #6

AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time. Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on th…

AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#78

Post by kxrm »

nickff wrote: post #45
kxrm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires. I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentorin…

People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing…

I would argue that job hopping was a symptom of companies under compensating for the market. This is a common problem even above Junior level. It's been easier to get a raise by leaving to another company that will pay more, then by just asking your employer for more money.

Again, the company has the control to avoid this.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#79

Post by kxrm »

SilverElfin wrote: post #41
kxrm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires. I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentorin…

What do you mean by investing though? I think these days junior people have to just invest in themselves and learn by working right? It’s also hard for companies or managers to spend more on them when they can leave at any time, which means all that effort training them will just benefit some other employee. I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal, probably in response to abusive and exploita…

> a lot less loyal

So have companies.

This goes both ways and labor is just reacting to the "it's just business" excuse companies have been using for over 30 years.

Re: What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

#80

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

nickff wrote: post #45
kxrm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires. I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentorin…

People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing…

> The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay).

Critically: While this is the common perception, it is generally un-true.

Just look at how often you get it as reply when you tell people complaining about how it's "impossible to find staff" to hire juniors.

Even in the situations where it is true, the effect of hiring seniors and refusing to hire juniors (thus pushing them into other fields) creates the shortage of seniors that makes it un-true again.

There's just a trend of employers having hard numbers on their staffing expenses, but barely if at all accounting for hiring costs and opportunity costs.

Many simply get it in their head that a senior costs $X/year, and therefore utterly refuse to pay a junior $X/year when they had to spend a flat amount $Y on training them up. Even when the real cost per hire for the senior is vastly bigger than $Y.

Before the post-covid/AI layoffs, tech firms throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars and years chasing seniors instead of just training up a junior was a common thing. So much so that it's a notable contributor to the overworking and burnout problems.

And it's still everywhere in the blue-collar world.

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