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The Junior Hiring Crisis

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Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#91

Post by koakuma-chan »

beginnings wrote: post #60

for anyone with children, dont waste their time with traditional school, that path is stone dead and is leading nowhere but the abyss of the permanent underclass apologise for inflicting this era on them and teach them to be entrepreneurial, teach them how to build, teach them rust on the backend, teach them postgres, teach them about assets maintaining value while money loses its tell them to never under any circums…

Just don't have children. All this churn (learning whatever) isn't worth it (for them).

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#92

Post by mfbx9da4 »

Isn’t it also easier than ever to learn though? The moat that seniors built around their expertise enabled a juicy buffer of mediocre devs paid mediocre rates pushing up the value of mythical 10x engineers.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#93

Post by daheza »

HaroldCindy wrote: post #47
tenacious_tuna wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well now you get to read it. Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR. I'd worry l…

We need to develop new etiquette around submitting AI-generated code for review. Using AI for code generation is one thing, but asking other people review something that you neither wrote nor read is inconsiderate of their time.

I'm getting AI generated product requirements that they haven't read themselves. It is so frustrating. Random requirements like "this service must have a response time of 5s or less" - "A retry mechanism must be present". We have a specific SLA already for response time and the designs don't have a retry mechanism built.

The bad product managers have become 10x worse because they just generate AI garbage to spray at the engineering team. We are now writing AI review process for our user stories to counter the AI generation of the product team. I'd much rather spend my time building things than having AI wars between teams.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#94

Post by snovymgodym »

Herring wrote: post #75
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…

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.

When billionaires own the media companies that influence public opinion and have legal avenues to essentially bribe elected officials, does the public have a meaningful avenue to vote anti-billionaire?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#95

Post by zcw100 »

strickjb9 wrote: post #57
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…

Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand. In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing…

I don't know what world you're living in but software development has always been a cut throat business. I've never seen true mentoring. Maybe a code review where some a-hole of a "senior" developer would come in having just read "clean code" and use some stupid stylistic preferences as a cudgel and go to town on the juniors. I'm cynical enough to believe that this, "AI is going to take your programming job!" is just a ploy to thin out the applicant pool.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#96

Post by koakuma-chan »

ah979 wrote: post #49
dkdcio wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if you’re a new grad where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on? I do think I could get a job from my network because I’ve worked in the industry for years and done good work; I’m a little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at least ignore those LinkedIn requests

Full disclosure, I'm the original author of the post. Unfortunately, if you network to get a job, you're already months behind. As I talk to college kids, I try to get them to find opportunities to network while they're in school, before they're desperate to get that first internship or job. They want to come at their search from a place of confidence, not anxiety. There are so many meetups at universities (at least…

It's not a good advice for someone who needs a job right now. It's a good advice if you already have a job and are looking for better opportunities.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#97

Post by ilc »

I think AI clouds the real issues around Junior hiring. Defective companies.

Let's say you hire your great new engineer. Ok, great! Now their value is going to escalate RAPIDLY over the next 2-3 years. And by rapidly, it could be 50-100%. Because someone else will pay that to NOT train a person fresh out of college!

What company hands out raises aggressively enough to stay ahead of that truth? None of them, maybe a MANGA or some other thing. But most don't.

So, managers figure out fresh out of college == training employees for other people, so why bother? The company may not even break even!

That is the REAL catch 22. Not AI. It is how the value of people changes early in their career.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#98

Post by mooreds »

shagie wrote: post #73
strickjb9 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand. In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing…

> 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 gro…

> there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to.

Hmmm. Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories? Because I agree, if someone is delegating all their work to an LLM or similar tool, cut out the middleman. Same as if someone just copy/pasted from Stackoverflow 5 years ago.

I think it is also important to think about incentives. What incentive does the newer developer have to understand the LLM output? There's the long term incentive, but is there a short term one?

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#99

Post by imglorp »

The first graph is interesting: it showed all groups about the same until late 2022 when they start to diverge. Around that time, we were talking about "greedflation" and "over hired during covid", and probably most important, the first year after expiration of Section 174 R&D was 2022.

Good luck with causation/correlation vs the rise of LLM.

Re: The Junior Hiring Crisis

#100

Post by mooreds »

jjk166 wrote: post #55
asdff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“automate it away” ironically still requires a human in the chain to determine what to automate, how, and to maintain that automation. Whether it be derived from an ai or a systemd script or an Antikythera mechanism. Now if you leave that to seniors you just ate a big chunk of their day playing shephard to a dozen plus “automated” pipelines while they still have stuff to do outside the weeds. Now you need more senior…

The process of setting up and maintaining automation should be less labor intensive than just doing it manually (or else why would you automate it?) and almost always requires a more advanced skillset than doing the manual task.

Required XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1205/
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