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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?

#81

Post by Aurornis »

alserio wrote: post #72
Aurornis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't doubt what you're saying, but I don't these situations where real estate investors and company investors overlap and also want to micromanage the company's operations are common.

The way this is brought up as a general explanation for RTO across the industry is getting a little silly

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

#82

Post by munk-a »

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 absolutely agree with this point. I fit in as an interdepartmental communicator for engineering and while it took time to accumulate the deficit of gossip[1] since we had a very solid understanding of the system at the beginning of the pandemic. Eventually the gap of understanding from that casual interdepartmental communication became too wide, however, so now I take active steps to have check-ins with people on different teams to make sure we've got a good comprehension of where our shortfalls actually are. Probably owing to my own negligence, I've been burned a few times now by being told by executive that X is really critical only to find out that no one outside that executive actually cares about it. There is a lot of "wasted" office time chatting and being friendly, when you go full remote you, or someone on your behalf, needs to keep some of that chatter going to make sure there's still an understanding of where the product shortfalls are.

1. Work gossip like "Gosh, it'd be great if I could make a widget on this page instead of needing to click into that modal and then toggle the "Yes I do" checkbox - I do that twenty times a day" - whether UX based or generally feature based.

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

#83

Post by xboxnolifes »

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…

> If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.

Not quite. It implies it affords the working class more power than the capital class is comfortable with.

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

#84

Post by drivebyhooting »

If people working in the office leaves less time for child care, doing laundry and house chores, thereby leading to more outsourcing, then indeed working from home reduces GDP. It’s also possible that work from home is more efficient as a societal level, but any company willing to defect gets more efficiency for themselves by externalizing the opportunity cost.

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

#85

Post by malephex »

I don't want to go back to the office, and one of the reasons is dealing with junior devs in a way where I can't pause notifications. I think the article might have a point Well eff them. This will weed out the weak, and we'll all be better off without commuting and open plan offices!

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

#86

Post by prewett »

baq wrote: post #74
Negitivefrags wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's even worse. The capital class is disconnected from employees because they have the managerial class running the business, so it's actually the managerial class that creates the employee experience. But, it turns out that "the capital class" has a large component of 401k funds, and so "the capital class" has a very large component of small shareholders, and so they don't really even have any influence whatsoever.

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

#87

Post by nickff »

munk-a wrote: post #73
nickff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

What is the benefit (to the company) of paying to train a junior, which costs their wage, along with a significant proportion of a senior’s wage, if there is no long-term savings on the junior’s wages later on? This seems like a prisoner’s dilemma where every company counts on another to do the ‘apprenticeship’ training.

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

#88

Post by Saline9515 »

nickff wrote: post #87
munk-a wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ver…

What is the benefit (to the company) of paying to train a junior, which costs their wage, along with a significant proportion of a senior’s wage, if there is no long-term savings on the junior’s wages later on? This seems like a prisoner’s dilemma where every company counts on another to do the ‘apprenticeship’ training.

In other sectors, juniors are paid a subsistence wage for a few years, so they are still profitable for the company during training. A plumber still needs a cheap pair of arms to move around a bathtub.

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

#89

Post by fmajid »

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…

There’s some research that suggests WFH is less efficient per hour worked, but people work more hours that they would have otherwise wasted commuting so it’s a wash.

That said, the motivations of managers are seldom aligned with the interests of the business. There is such a thing as ego trips. Also, mediocre or insecure managers will rely more on the crutch of face time.

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

#90

Post by h4kunamata »

They lack experience when working within real environments while being mentored, within a virtual environment where they have no skill to know what to do, just make things even more complicated.

AI is not to blame here, but their own lack of experience which does require exposure to real environments.

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