[HN Gopher] There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers
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There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers
Author : mooreds
Score : 199 points
Date : 2025-09-30 03:17 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (workweave.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (workweave.dev)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I saw absolutely no compelling evidence to back up his thesis
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| While I'm deeply sympathetic to the original claim, I agree the
| evidence is lacking. All I really see is the assertion that AI
| means onboarding and coming up to speed is faster. Which feels
| a bit unproven?
|
| (Unrelated but the post has a funny rhetorical thing where it
| says nobody is hiring juniors then also says if you don't hire
| then your competition will... But you already said nobody is
| hiring them?!)
| hyperhello wrote:
| I wonder if an AI wrote this. It seems to have all the hallmarks.
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| 1. It's not just x - it's y.
| bitwize wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
| anal_reactor wrote:
| You've touched on something profound and deeply human.
| jclarkcom wrote:
| looks that way to me. However, that isn't necessarily a bad
| thing if a human reviewed and guided AI to get the article they
| want.
| ares623 wrote:
| if I wanted to read AI text I could have just prompted it
| myself.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| If I wanted to implement the next Twitter, I could have
| just vibe coded it myself.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| It also reeks of lower pay propaganda. Shallow nothing points
| with AI can make juniors almost as good as seniors.
| coliveira wrote:
| I hope this happens quickly. These companies that use only AI
| should be devastated.
| hellojimbo wrote:
| The real problem with hiring juniors is that tech does not have
| flexible pay. Realistically, hiring juniors is high risk high
| reward so they should naturally be on some kind of probational
| pay.
| hooskerdu wrote:
| As in "kick ass and we'll pay ya even better than we are now"
| probation?
| hellojimbo wrote:
| Yes
| hooskerdu wrote:
| I'm all about that.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Companies hire juniors at low rates, but then when they like
| them they don't increase the rates. Instead the juniors leave
| for another company.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| If they have to pay market for seniors anyway, why pay to
| raise them?
|
| If you had to pay market rates for cows once grown, would you
| breed cows and feed them?
|
| Thats the problem. If you have the pay market when they
| become seniors, you may as well just pay market for seniors
| today.
| tavavex wrote:
| You don't pay as much to retain an employee as you do to
| hire one. If your employee feels like they're earning 5-10%
| below market rate, it's probably far less likely that
| they'll want to find another job than if you pay them 25%+
| below market rate. There is a cost and a risk to switching
| jobs, and most established people at the company won't jump
| ship due to a discrepancy as small as this. So, the upside
| is that you get to train people and pay them at a slight
| discount, as opposed to having to put up a higher senior
| pay offer to attract someone willing to do the job.
|
| Though, as a current new grad, the desperation market is
| setting in. I am open to getting paid basically anything a
| person can survive on where I live to just gain more
| experience, and many other people are in the exact same
| situation. The junior market's demands will keep going down
| until either the benefit of employing us becomes large
| enough for companies, or until we all leave.
| hellojimbo wrote:
| Theyre higher value than actual seniors because they have
| more domain knowledge, more neuroplastic, probably willing
| to work harder, etc
| ta1243 wrote:
| Employees aren't fungible.
| laurent_du wrote:
| I have seen this happen countless times and it still baffles
| me.
| vasco wrote:
| Ok, which companies has it killed? At least one example?
| jeron wrote:
| many companies are walking corpses - see GE
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This GE?
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/marketcap/
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/earnings/
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GE/ge-
| aerospace/pr...
|
| Certainly not in the top tier, but doesn't seem like it is at
| imminent risk of failing.
| vasco wrote:
| And the sun looks yellow, but maybe back to the topic, is
| there an example of a company which was killed primarily by
| not hiring juniors?
|
| Its like I asked of examples of burn victims and you told me
| "steve has the flu".
| missedthecue wrote:
| GE today is not the GE it was 5 years ago. They have really
| paired down the company. They spun off finance, sold
| healthcare, and got out of energy & power. GE today is
| essentially just an engineering company in the aerospace
| sector, and they've paid down $100B of debt since 2018.
|
| Today they're sitting on $10B in cash and do another $10B in
| free cashflow annually. Not very corpse-like!
| itake wrote:
| I'm not sure where they're getting their data about companies not
| hiring juniors.
|
| In 2021, 104,874 CS students graduated--the highest number ever
| [0] (1.5x more than the 4 years prior). But the job postings
| 2022-2025 have certainly not maintained that trajectory.
|
| If the number of graduates keeps climbing while the total number
| of jobs shrinks, then naturally more new grads will struggle to
| find work.
|
| Playing devil's advocate: some "senior" folks may now be
| competing with juniors, since they're willing to take lower
| titles or pay just to stay employed. I'm not sure how much that
| actually shifts the market, considering companies famously don't
| hire overqualified people and tech workers face age-ism risk.
|
| [0] -
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...
| ThrownOffGame wrote:
| My final stretch of employment lasted from May 2020-March 2024.
| My company went through mergers and acquisitions and 4 rounds
| of layoffs, and I managed to tenaciously hang in there (I was
| even "terminated" 4 times but they just kept re-hiring me!)
|
| I was definitely competing with entry-level kids who had just
| graduated, even those who had just graduated from the boot
| camps we provided. And I was hired with no college degree, no
| certifications, and nothing relevant on my resume since 1999.
| So yeah, I got minimum-wage treatment.
|
| It was a fantastic, cushy WFH job. The parameters were ideal
| for my style. The supervisors were very, very patient and
| encouraging. I was a rock star, if I do say so myself, but
| there were plenty of competent colleagues who had plenty to
| contribute in the same role as me.
|
| Eventually I earned 3 certifications and a college completion
| certificate, and that made zero difference. No raises, no
| promotions, no acknowledgements of my achievements from my
| employer.
|
| So, college isn't all it's cracked up to be. Yes, seniors are
| competing with juniors and entry-levels. It's fierce. Be the
| best and do your best, and don't be reluctant to settle for a
| good employer.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Sadly, WFH is de facto dead unless you want to compete with
| Parul in Pune, Pavel in Prague, and Peter in PEI.
|
| If anyone wants to be justified getting hired in this market
| and not be offshored, they will need to be in an area with a
| large density of tech jobs in order to find the next
| opportunity to land AND go into the office a couple days a
| week.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Genuine question: What does "PEI" mean?
|
| A quick Google search is turning up "Prince Edward Island".
| Is Prince Edward Island known for being a place with a lot
| of remote tech workers? (Like, this doesn't _sound_ right,
| but I know next to nothing about Prince Edward Island :) )
| willvarfar wrote:
| Prince Edward Island sounds a _great_ place to work from
| home!
|
| Source: am WFH in remote farmhouse in Scandinavia- with
| fibre.
| BJones12 wrote:
| No, PEI does not have a lot of remote workers. AFAIK the
| main provider of tech jobs there is government in various
| forms, and they mandate several in-office days per week.
|
| It's just a place that is geographically disconnected
| from the mainland, and it rhymes.
|
| Source: I work with some people from PEI.
| ponector wrote:
| >> Parul in Pune, Pavel in Prague, and Peter in PEI
|
| Nowadays they also have a push to RTO to local offshoring
| center.
|
| Managers are managers everywhere and want to see their
| slaves sitting in order behind their desks.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Doesn't or didn't Netflix only hire seniors for a while when they
| were doing some of their most interesting technical work?
|
| And shopify seems like an odd company from the outside.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Shopify experiments with hiring practices, and that's a good
| thing.
|
| I've been following their program to recruit high potential
| high schoolers and have them work as junior SWEs while doing
| their degree part-time. I think this kind of a model is highly
| underutilized and would solve issues on both the hirer and the
| employee's end.
|
| The issue is over the past decade, universities have
| dramatically reduced the scope of CS programs and removed
| foundational courses that have traditionally been gatekeepers
| to ensure some base maturity. Think like that theory of
| computation course, your CompArch course, or your OS Dev
| course.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Shopify had me do a timed test of multiple choice brain
| teasers. That is an odd thing to do...
|
| I just checked the public school i went to and their required
| courses for CS include those that you listed
| alephnerd wrote:
| In Canada right?
|
| Canadian programs haven't been watered down to the same
| degree as American programs and we can pay y'all 20-30%
| less than Americans.
|
| If not, what program and year? The last few years of new
| grad hiring at portfolio companies left a bad taste in
| everyone's mouth so hiring shifted abroad.
|
| Depending on the university in the US we might already be
| targeting them but then the cost aspect comes to play.
| tayo42 wrote:
| SUNY binghamton
| https://www.binghamton.edu/watson/student-
| services/advising/...
| alephnerd wrote:
| Binghamton is a good program. They and the other SUNYs
| affiliated with the NY Semiconductor Initiative have
| continued to use the same curriculum industry partners
| recommended.
|
| They are a semi-target.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I mentioned why this is happening in a previous comment on HN
| [0].
|
| I can't justify spending $120k or more on base salary for a new
| grad who lacks table stake skills becuase a program like UCB or
| MIT (let alone much lower ranked programs) reduced the
| requirements for fundamental theory and OS classes, offered the
| ability to take padded classes to bypass requirements (look at
| Cal's BA CS requirements in 2015 [1] versus 2025 [2]), or offer
| the ability to take these classes pass/fail thus reducing the
| incentive to study.
|
| Sadly, Bootcamp grads also soured an entire generation of hiring
| managers away from nontraditional hiring. Screw you YC for
| enabling predatory programs like Lambda School (YC S17).
|
| That said, I think an apprenticeship style program where a
| community college new grad earning $50k and gets a paid bachelors
| degree or directly hiring a bachelor degree new grad for $70k-90k
| while working would probably solve the issue. This is assuming
| those new grads don't meet the curriculum bar of the students
| they are competing with abroad. I think Shopify tried something
| similar and it worked.
|
| I'm also not sure an "AI first" approach is the right approach
| unless you are looking for someone to manage generic CRUD type
| work (and that kind of work is a race to the bottom anyhow from a
| salary perspective). If I'm hiring a prompt engineer, then imo a
| Linguistics or Philosophy major (or any major where you are
| taught Structuralism) with a CS minor would probably be the best
| bang for your buck.
|
| There needs to be coordinated reform in CS curricula, hiring
| incentives (eg. providing tax credits comparable to those which
| CEE, Israel, and India provide to attract FDI), and ease of doing
| business in order to resolve this crisis.
|
| [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413516
|
| [1] -
| https://berkeleyguidearchive.github.io/2014-15/undergraduate...
|
| [2] - https://undergraduate.catalog.berkeley.edu/programs/A5201U
| elevation wrote:
| You get the best bang for your buck if you just hire teachable
| people and fill the gaps that matter to you.
|
| Sometimes teachability subsides over the course of your career:
| A senior I know has terrible git hygiene but is so close to
| retirement, he simply won't change. But some juniors I've
| mentored have significantly improved their ability to compose
| an atomic commit with a quality commit message, and are now
| valuable team contributors.
|
| Even the core concepts of your CS162 course are easily within
| the grasp of a CS major from a less rigorous program; you could
| assign some required reading as part of your onboarding process
| if missing these concepts would prevent them from thinking
| critically about problems in your org.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I can't justify paying a junior engineer $120k-140k base
| salary to train them in OS fundamentals over several months
| in an industry as competitive and commodified as
| cybersecurity when competitors in Israel, Czechia, Poland,
| and India are able to hire experienced engineers at a lower
| dollar amount than a number of junior engineers in the US
| expect.
|
| This is why the majority of startup activity in the space has
| shifted to Israel, the CEE, or India with a nominal American
| HQ hosting a CEO, CRO, and sales reps.
|
| And this is the issue - we live in a globalized world, and a
| large portion of junior engineers in the US do not have the
| skills commensurate to the salary provided.
|
| A business is not a charity.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| Boot camp level skills are dead now - deeper grounding in CS is a
| requirement. With the 2022 hiring boom over and AI taking on some
| of the work, the junior market has more competitive, and will
| remain so in the foreseeable future.
|
| My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find
| any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these
| roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved
| for senior-level engineers.
|
| FOSS software is any other place to build skills and value until
| you land paying roles.
| tylerflick wrote:
| > My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to
| find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for
| these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly
| reserved for senior-level engineers.
|
| This is just sound advice in general. A good professional
| analogue to recommending a junior college as a stepping stone
| to a university.
| lisbbb wrote:
| That's actually good news in a way because boot camps were so
| surface level and we didn't get a lot of actually good
| developers out of those programs, just lots of arguments by
| people defending ideas that weren't well-founded.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| No one cares about FOSS experience. You're lucky if they even
| visit your GitHub/Lab/Berg at all and even luckier if they look
| at anything past your heatmap.
|
| Fact is, if FOSS experience counted for anything, then those
| charged with hiring would also possess the capacity to
| understand that C# and Java experience are nearly 1:1. Sadly,
| it doesn't and they don't.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| As someone who is very experienced primarily as a C# dev, I
| wouldn't say Java is "nearly 1:1".
|
| At a syntax level they're practically the same and they both
| use GC, but in terms of ecosystem they're very different.
|
| It might not seem like it to people who are just starting out
| at programming, but syntax is probably the easiest part of
| it.
|
| Sure, I would probably be productive in Java if I had to
| start using it fully tomorrow, but it would take me months or
| years to get that same nuanced knowledge of its ecosystem to
| be as effective with it as I am with C#.
| smlavine wrote:
| Having been through interviews lately for mid-level CS
| internship positions, I'd say that having FOSS contributions
| on my resume that I was able to discuss extensively was
| indeed a factor in both attaining an interview and ultimately
| an internship.
| saltyoldman wrote:
| We just lost our 3 summer interns and now I had to take over one
| of the projects from one of them. The code was a bit messy, but
| holy crap did they get a LOT done in 3 weeks. Just finished
| fixing it up in 2 weeks, but if I still had him, he would have
| done all the fixes in less than 4 days. He was twice as fast as
| anyone here.
| carabiner wrote:
| Ok?
| agrnet wrote:
| Ok!
| arjvik wrote:
| Sounds like its time to make him an offer he can't refuse
| shomp wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how did you "lose" them? Was it a 3 week
| stint from the getgo?
| theOGognf wrote:
| Along the same lines of missing good junior engineers at work, we
| occasionally interview stellar engineers that've inflated their
| resume a bit to get an interview, but we end up rejecting them
| for not having all the specific experiences our manager wants
| them to have even though they're generally great and could
| clearly upskill where necessary. No wonder we can't grow the team
| when we're out here looking for unicorns
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Employers need to get back to expecting to have to train new
| employees. This used to be pretty common. My first two
| employers after college hired a lot of people with no
| programming experience into programming roles. They just looked
| for smart people who were willing to learn, and they taught
| them to program.
| hibikir wrote:
| Hiring juniors is always great if you, somehow, have a much
| better filter for finding the stars than the rest of the market.
| But if you don't, hiring bad juniors is a disaster: No different
| than outsourcing bits to a bad satellite office.
|
| So are you actually good at finding the good juniors in this very
| difficult environment? Can you change your hiring machinery to
| improve, as most traditional ways have stopped working? Because
| hiring a lot of juniors that don't work out sure can kill
| companies.
| goalieca wrote:
| Hire one junior per team. Don't overload your senior staff with
| OKRs and managerial tasks. Let mentorship and apprenticeship
| happen.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I guess what's the value of the junior there? Why is that
| superior to just having the seniors have their heads down
| coding and not being pestered by a junior?
| amrocha wrote:
| Because the junior grows into a senior in a couple of years
| and the company is better off for it
| Salgat wrote:
| That's fine if you can compensate them accordingly to
| retain them, but if you're going to pay them senior level
| in a couple of years, why not just hire a senior level to
| begin with?
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Because highly experienced seniors are rarely on the job
| market.
|
| >The great software developers, indeed, the best people
| in every field, are quite simply never on the market.
|
| >The average great software developer will apply for,
| total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career.
|
| >The great college graduates get pulled into an
| internship by a professor with a connection to industry,
| then they get early offers from that company and never
| bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that
| company, it's often to go to a startup with a friend, or
| to follow a great boss to another company, or because
| they decided they really want to work on, say, Eclipse,
| because Eclipse is cool, so they look for an Eclipse job
| at BEA or IBM and then of course they get it because
| they're brilliant. [Replace Eclipse with $HOT_TECHNOLOGY,
| like AI agents this year.]
|
| >If you're lucky, if you're really lucky, they show up on
| the open job market once, when, say, their spouse decides
| to accept a medical internship in Anchorage and they
| actually send their resume out to what they think are the
| few places they'd like to work at in Anchorage.
|
| >But for the most part, great developers (and this is
| almost a tautology) are, uh, great, (ok, it is a
| tautology), and, usually, prospective employers recognize
| their greatness quickly, which means, basically, they get
| to work wherever they want, so they honestly don't send
| out a lot of resumes or apply for a lot of jobs.
|
| - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-
| great-deve...
|
| Most of the best programmers I know have worked 2-3 tech
| jobs. An internship or entry level job, a cushy job at a
| major company, and either retirement or a third job that
| they took because the problem was incredibly interesting
| and they got nerd sniped. I even saw the "medical
| internship" scenario happen once; a great colleague of
| mine had to move to France for his partner's career in
| medicine, so he quit his job and found something over
| there.
| Gigachad wrote:
| This might be true if you are looking for some top 0.5%
| talent to solve the cutting edge most difficult
| challenges in tech, but for the vast majority of
| companies building basic apps and saas products, there's
| a large pool of talent to pick from.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| In my experience hiring, its not just the top 0.5%, more
| like the top 30-50%.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think HN's demographic skews young and commenters here
| vastly overestimate how many of us are constantly job
| hopping every 3 years.
| amrocha wrote:
| People aren't fungible. The senior engineer you've
| trained for a couple years is way more effective than the
| one that joined yesterday.
| ponector wrote:
| But also is paid less than a new joiner.
| amrocha wrote:
| At most places yeah
| decimalenough wrote:
| What do you do when your seniors move on or retire?
|
| Also, even seniors are usually more than happy to outsource
| work they've already done a million times, but that's still
| new to the junior ("build the Terraform to stand up this
| cluster" etc).
| creakingstairs wrote:
| I mean I agree with hiring juniors. I try to push for it
| as it's how I got into this industry but it's a bit of a
| prisoners dilemma right? It's best for everyone if we all
| hired and trained up juniors but one could also defect
| and only hire seniors.
|
| Besides most companies won't last long enough to worry
| about senior talent drying up.
| Gigachad wrote:
| People only average a few years in a job these days. The
| juniors are most likely to end up as seniors somewhere
| else. So hiring juniors who provide negative value at the
| start is mostly benefiting the industry as a whole at
| your own personal loss. Which makes it a pretty easy
| thing to cut.
|
| I know in other industries they have a kind of lock in
| where they provide free training under the condition that
| you work at the same company for a number of years. Which
| sounds bad but I don't see many alternatives.
| abenga wrote:
| But you too can hire seniors in the future who were
| juniors trained "somewhere else". This is the kind of
| shortsighted selfishness that's ruining most things.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Obviously it's selfishness, but it's a prisoners dilemma
| where the you just lose if you are the only one training
| the juniors who then move on to the competitors later.
| ryandrake wrote:
| So motivate them to not move on to competitors. I don't
| think companies should cynically take it as given that
| people only last N years, and will leave for greener
| pastures once they're trained. They're leaving for a
| reason, so address that reason.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I believe the reason is often not a company problem, it's
| a variety problem that nothing can solve.
|
| It's a totally unavoidable problem with our industry.
|
| People get bored working on one domain, one product and
| one codebase.
|
| And most software shops have one domain, one product and
| one codebase.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Then operate as a manager, leader or company that people
| don't want to quit.
|
| If people are happy, paid well, with regular cost-of-
| living raises at minimum, with upward mobility, helpful
| and useful managers and interesting problems (doesn't
| have to be an interesting domain. The problems themselves
| just need a bit to chew on) and the latitude to solve
| them and grow
|
| They're not as likely to leave.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Don't vesting schedules accomplish the same thing?
| smlavine wrote:
| As a CS undergrad in my final year of study, a 5-year
| contract with guarantees with regards to employment,
| benefits, promotion etc. would appear to me and think
| would also appeal to many of my peers.
| jrockway wrote:
| There are a lot of projects that involve very little of
| high level experience and a lot of grinding things. Juniors
| can be very good at these, and there are probably enough
| micro-problems that aren't critical that their brain is
| still being used and they're gaining skills that will help
| them take on more complicated tasks.
|
| Something I last worked on with a junior engineer was our
| in-place backup system. I designed it and wrote the tricky
| part that involves DLL hell in a docker container. He wrote
| the "list backups", "delete backups", "create backup" CRUD
| API and CLI. My time was then free to put out fires or
| design something new.
|
| It's not necessarily a no-brainer to hire and mentor junior
| engineers like the article says, but it's something you
| should think about. You will be surprised how much people
| actually know at job #1, and how quickly they can take on
| more complicated work that pays back your time investment
| in their mentorship. Plus, someone probably trained you to
| get you to where you are today, so there is some fairness
| in continuing the cycle.
| komali2 wrote:
| Good juniors are cheaper and faster to find. A REALLY good
| junior will jolt your seniors awake with professional
| competitiveness as the junior starts finding ways to make a
| name for themselves - or even just a fresh pair of eyes on
| the app, new ideas, more familiarity with newer paradigms
| and technologies.
| _heimdall wrote:
| As an industry we can't just cut off the pipeline of future
| senior devs.
|
| This is the fundamental contradiction of LLMs. The promise
| today is that the tooling can largely replace juniors, and
| honestly that may be true.
|
| The hope behind that promise, though, is that the tech will
| catch up with senior devs before the pipeline dries up
| _and_ that we have found a sustainable social and economic
| model before humans truly aren 't employable at any
| meaningful numbers. That hope seems ill placed to me, but I
| guess we'll see if we develop such skilled LLM or similar
| tools at all.
| nickff wrote:
| The problem is that if everyone hops jobs every 9-18
| months, it's not worth training up juniors because the
| employer will never get to benefit. It seems that we're
| in an unfortunate, but stable equilibrium.
| kogepathic wrote:
| _> The problem is that if everyone hops jobs every 9-18
| months, it's not worth training up juniors because the
| employer will never get to benefit._
|
| It is absolutely worth hiring and training juniors. The
| quality of your onboarding process and documentation will
| improve. Not only that but a junior will ask questions
| that senior engineers take for granted, such as "why are
| we doing X this way?" which can lead to improvements that
| your existing engineers might not have considered.
|
| Finally, if junior engineers are joining your
| organisation and leaving every 9-18 months, you need to
| take a serious look at your career progression ladder and
| compensation. I have seen way too many companies that
| have an arbitrary "you cannot receive a promotion in the
| first X months" HR policy which is just asinine. You know
| who doesn't have this stupid policy? The company your
| junior just accepted an offer from.
|
| If your organisation doesn't have the tools and processes
| to up skill junior engineers into seniors, then it
| doesn't have professional development for senior
| engineers and is just a career dead end.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Junior devs are just a time suck though. They do require
| more on boarding an attention than the average
| experienced hire, but they also bring a different view to
| the project. I've been surprised over the years by
| juniors that raise a question or idea that snowballs into
| a pretty fundament and impactful change, one that could
| have been raised before but the team just didn't look at
| it that way.
|
| We also have to remember that if our juniors leave 9-18
| months later, everyone else's juniors are leaving too.
| Churn has a cost for sure, but if I can hire someone
| else's junior that they put 18 months into then I am
| still better off.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You're saying the industry, or society in general will
| suffer. That's an externality. People and organizations
| optimize for their own profits, not net social benefit.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Teams are not equivalent in the big or medium org. Some
| teams are pushing the boundaries (for the corp), some teams
| are doing grunt work, some teams are doing maintenance,
| some teams are support for all of those etc. Example - in
| our company it is often a case when a junior is hired to do
| lab support or general support, then transitions to a QA
| team for example, or a junior QA is hired to a steady
| working team and then transitions to a team doing fire
| requests and more visible stuff. In the process he acquires
| both general seniority and a lot of hands on domain
| knowledge which is complex in our case. Hiring a senior
| often means skipping only seniority growth, while he still
| needs a lot time to learn the domain and local quirks. I
| assume that averaged over years, juniors are still valuable
| par cost spent. Plus, juniors are sourced from the
| different pool of people than seniors, meaning more
| opportunities for a good hire.
| x0x0 wrote:
| It's a hiring pipeline. You're growing modestly underpriced
| internal talent that, in the upside case, has skills that
| front-run their salary by a bit. NB: I'm obviously not
| advocating for underpaying people; just noting that that
| good junior eng will grow fast and their salary will take
| time to catch up.
|
| It's stupidly expensive though if you look at the
| opportunity cost of that already-onboarded
| senior/lead/staff eng time. And this was obviously more
| compelling when it was super hard to hire senior talent.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Let mentorship and apprenticeship happen.
|
| There has never been an apprenticeship model where one
| apprentice is trained by several masters. It's always the
| other way around.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Said with such conviction, yet so wrong. Ask any "non
| mcdojo" kung-fu school if they consider training under a
| single master to be sufficient.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| In what sense do you believe that's an "apprenticeship"?
| majormajor wrote:
| > Hiring juniors is always great if you, somehow, have a much
| better filter for finding the stars than the rest of the
| market. But if you don't, hiring bad juniors is a disaster: No
| different than outsourcing bits to a bad satellite office.
|
| This isn't some absolute innate talent thing, though; it's very
| much a learnable skill.
|
| Especially because output and time-to-ROI for a new hire
| depends on the combination of all of these things: (a)
| interviewing/screening, (b) onboarding, (c) ongoing feedback.
|
| It's not a zero-sum game, it would be entirely possible for the
| industry as a whole to get better across the board at those
| things - especially since one job's "rockstar" is often another
| job's unmotivated thinks-they're-the-smartest-person-in-the-
| room burnout, and vice versa.
| adchurch wrote:
| Check out the bit about the hiring process, particularly about
| filtering for the right mindset.
| jimbokun wrote:
| We hired a recent graduate with little directly relevant
| experience, but a passion for Capture the Flag challenges.
| Showed a lot of initiative and curiosity for learning new
| things.
|
| Has been a great, self-motivated hire who has found problems to
| solve and led the effort for solving them, resulting in saving
| our company a lot of money.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You've thrown the dice one time.
|
| You don't have enough data to know if what you think matters
| in a candidate actually matters. If you repeat the same steps
| as before, you're likely to see different results.
| britch wrote:
| I was confused by why "use of AI" was a top-level requirement of
| this, but I see now that weave is AI-driven "engineering output
| measurement" company, down to the individual contributor level.
|
| I can understand why you would have better luck hiring eager new-
| grads than seasoned engineers. I'm sure some IC find the weave
| stats useful, but it also sounds like a toxic manager's dream. I
| can understand why more senior engineers would steer clear.
| zeroq wrote:
| hot take: covid killed a generation
|
| If you were a junior in 2020 and right of the bat you were forced
| to work remotely you missed a great deal of learning experience.
| Or you had really bad time getting hired, at least up to a point,
| because business was booming.
|
| Oh, and then you had that whole swarm of bootcamp graduates who
| thought they could cheat the system, get a degree in hello world
| and land a $300k job.
|
| Back in 2013 I was making fun of job offers that would require
| 5-7y of experience in JS for a senior position. 7y of what?
| JQuery?
|
| Same thing applies today. If someone started his career in 2001 I
| wouldn't even consider him if he had a job in BigCo.
| lisbbb wrote:
| Not sure why you're getting the hate. What you said is fairly
| accurate--there was a time period in which a lot of poorly
| skilled people were getting hired and that caused a lot of
| disruption inside of companies because you ended up getting all
| these ego-driven, writing checks their skills can't cash type
| of people. It was annoying as hell. I remember having a problem
| that was a slam dunk for using a state machine and this one guy
| argued against it because he didn't even know what a state
| machine was, but of course could not admit that to anyone.
| Anyways, he lost that argument, but why did we have to have it
| in the first place? Ooooh right--someone got hired as a Sr. Dev
| who wasn't really Senior anything.
| zeroq wrote:
| Unsolicited advise, that's one thing I've learned about far
| too late in my life.
|
| You know, if you have a brother or someone really, really
| close, and you're preparing for a wedding or a funeral, and
| they have a shirt that look absolutely ridiculous and you
| tell them that, they look at you, you match your eyes, and
| they trust you with their life. Well that doesn't happen in
| normal life.
|
| Normally, what happens in ordinary life is you have a
| colleague that looks, smells or did something stinky, you
| want to be the good guy, you let him know and he's like "omg,
| he hates me, all hands to battle stations, that guy, aim that
| guy, he tried to wrong me!". And if he's slightly less on the
| spectrum than you - you're toasted. You're under fire, and
| there's no getting out.
|
| And this happens every time you try to swim up the river in
| this current.
| pyb wrote:
| Not mentioned in the article : interns/juniors are too expensive
| these days ; seniors offer better value per dollar of comp.
| nick__m wrote:
| Why not just pay them significantly less than seniors? if there
| is a surplus of juniors shouldn't the invisible hand of the
| market adjust the salaries accordingly?
| ares623 wrote:
| The invisible hand of the market is saying to hire offshore
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Depends on what you think the cause is. They can't work for
| $20 a month legally in most cases.
| t-writescode wrote:
| The invisible hand of the market is playing games with
| promises of AI allowing one senior to do the work of a senior
| and 4 juniors.
|
| Whether or not it works will be something we find out long
| past the early-experience tenure of those junior engineers.
| pyb wrote:
| Anectodally, I've seen that some newly graduated engineers
| prefer to forgo the job search altogether, rather than lower
| their comp demands to get a foot in the door.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Is Shopify a great company?
|
| Stock below peak in a market giving extremely rich tech
| valuations. Canadian engineers hardly aspire to work there.
| Politics of the founders also seem to come up a lot.
|
| This isn't meant to be an attack but more an observation that it
| seems to be one of the companies getting killed.
|
| To address the article itself, the argument isn't juniors ca
| seniors, but juniors vs AI. Why is a junior worth paying 10,000x
| more than Claude? And it's perfectly loyal, perfectly energetic,
| and can add its learnings to a contributions.md doc.
| gen220 wrote:
| What makes a company great?
|
| I think by most rational business metrics (top line revenue
| growth, gross margins, operating margins, cash flow, balance
| sheet), Shopify in 2025 is a fantastic business that seems to
| only be getting better?
|
| This is notably different from an analysis of whatever the
| market price for its equity is or has been. I think that market
| price is ~40% overvalued today and it's been much more
| overvalued than that in the past... but the fundamentals of the
| business have never been stronger.
|
| In what way is it getting killed?
|
| To force a comparison within the sector, is Amazon not a great
| company? Market price point aside, it's arguably more
| politically charged and less aspirational engineering culture-
| wise. But I think I'd still call it a great company, same as
| Shopify.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they
| likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to
| see how they think about things. The problem has become that a
| lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than
| memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've
| also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by
| (ie. less computer nerds).
|
| Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no
| special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going
| to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually
| takes about year to get them to the point that they can
| contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also
| mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.
| dottjt wrote:
| I feel like it's at two ends of the extreme. Either the junior
| is literally better than everyone else on the team, or they
| know nothing.
| MountDoom wrote:
| > The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of
| college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems
| and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less
| passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer
| nerds).
|
| Why is this a problem, though? Imagine hiring doctors or
| architects with that expectation. "The problem is that no one
| is truly passionate about dissecting cadavers anymore".
|
| I think our industry got hooked on being able to hire self-
| taught geniuses in the early days of tech. But the profession
| has gotten a lot more commoditized, and we just can't continue
| like that. Gotta hire "normal" people and teach them what they
| need to know. And yeah, "normal" means people who decided to
| learn programming because it pays well, not because they want
| to design compilers in their spare time.
| imgyuri wrote:
| because there are multiple abstractions in software that one
| is bound to come across once the software becomes complicated
| enough, and from that point on "passion" and "fundamentals"
| determine how effective they are at navigating that path
| csomar wrote:
| What people (managers?) don't realize (or don't want to
| realize) is that building software is much more complex than
| most other professions. Some software is easy and has been
| done n+1th time (like a simple crud app with a db
| connection). But some software is really hard and could fall
| more in the R&D category.
|
| Which brings me to the following point: Earlier in my career,
| I was a medical student. All superiors were doctors, and
| though there were managers, no manager intervened in an
| operation. Also doctors selected their hardware and methods.
| No manager will ever come to a doctor and suggest that they
| do their work differently.
|
| Now when it comes to software, everyone wants to chime in.
| whatever1 wrote:
| If the medical doctor screws up they go to jail. When was
| the last time a software engineer went to jail because of
| malpractice?
|
| Software talk is free. So everyone can chime in. Your
| experience holds no weight. Heck an LLM can do it too.
| whakim wrote:
| No offense, but this software engineering elitism does no
| favors to perceptions of the field. In reality, most other
| fields are complex and the phenomenon of believing
| something is simple because you don't understand it is
| widespread across fields. Dan Luu expounded on this at much
| greater length/with greater eloquence:
| https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
| tayo42 wrote:
| The doctors i know are definitely passionate about it. There
| is continuous learning, conferences, picking your specialty,
| and its such a time commitment the profession is part of your
| identity.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| I completely understand people that are just doing it for the
| paycheck and that's totally fine.
|
| However, I do feel that our team needs both types of people
| to be effective. People that have passion will try new things
| and explore possibilities more frequently. The "just a
| paycheck" folks tend to be a good moderating force to the
| "passion" people. They will generally bring focus and keep
| the end goal in perspective.
|
| My goal is to avoid having too many of either. Too many
| "passion" people and you end up slowing progress because
| they're getting bogged down with everything they want to do.
| Too many "paycheck" people and the team/system starts to
| calcify (and usually accrues a ton of tech debt).
| komali2 wrote:
| I noticed I had an immediate bias against candidates that
| showed up to interviews using Windows (except for one person
| who was in WSL and seemed very comfortable in bash), or, not
| having their SSH key set up for cloning the github repo we used
| for our interview, or fumbling back and forth with their mouse
| between vscode and the browser, not using all their screen real
| estate, or not knowing even the most basic of keyboard
| shortcuts (I nearly cut an interview short once when I saw
| someone right click copy right click paste in vscode but I
| wanted to give them a fair shake so gritted my teeth and went
| through with the rest of the interview. They did poorly.). I
| never used it as a for/against factor but for me lack of
| interest in computers, and a lack of familiarity with the tools
| of our trade, is a red flag.
|
| On the flip side, immediate green flags for me were: using
| linux, using keyboard shortcuts to manipulate windows / within
| the IDE, using an IDE other than vscode (vim/nvim or emacs are
| huge green flags), having custom scripts, having custom themes,
| or, the biggest one, self-hosting some applications. And Lo,
| these candidates also seem to perform the best in my
| experience.
| rwoerz wrote:
| > right click copy right click paste
|
| Remembers me of a fellow student who refused to maximize his
| editor window. It turned out that he moved the text cursor to
| the next line with the right indentation by using just a lot
| of spaces.
| gyulai wrote:
| That seems pretty opinionated, and by building a monoculture,
| persons with high openness to experience likely won't be
| drawn to your workplace, and you're also leaving on the table
| the potential that comes from diversity (a loaded term these
| days, but substantively still a valid point).
|
| Depending on the kind of work you do and your customers, this
| may not matter to you, but in a lot of industries, you need
| the diversity to be able to properly represent and empathise
| with your customer base, who might be from a very different
| social cohort than your developers. And Linux desktops, which
| your customers almost certainly won't be using, may also make
| that difficult.
|
| People who spend a ton of time ricing their Linux desktops
| may be bad at setting priorities. If you expect them to
| continue their ricing, but not do it "on the clock", you're
| implicitly age-discriminating and discriminating against
| people with families and/or hobbies and/or "a life".
|
| Also keep in mind that your company is likely only one of a
| dozen or so workplaces that these people apply to in a given
| month, sometimes for many months before they land a job, and
| they probably haven't set up their computer specifically to
| impress you, but rather to fit the lowest common denominator
| among the requirements they face from all their application
| processes and educational activities, and some of that will
| require Windows.
| dchftcs wrote:
| Yeah, seems I'd be doomed for doing interviews on my
| Windows laptop for the webcam and the compatibility with my
| bluetooth headset rather than my linux desktop. Tunnel
| vision and a lack of empathy are negative signals, so you
| could say I'd have dodged a bullet, but unfortunately in
| these situations I'd need the job more than the job would
| need me.
| jalk wrote:
| Some points in parent comment are absolutely valid IMO.
| Would you hire a carpenter who walks back and forth to his
| toolbox to pickup at single nail at a time and then use the
| hammer with both hands near the head. And when cutting a
| 4x4 beam will use 1-inch strokes with the handsaw (again
| with two hands).
| brenainn wrote:
| I had my own reply, but using your analogy if I may: if I
| asked an apprentice carpenter to measure up and build
| some sort of structure in front of me with the tools
| provided, and they stumbled and made some awkward choices
| but the result was otherwise sound and they had other
| good qualities, yeah I'd consider hiring them. I think
| the scenario you describe though would be more equivalent
| to someone who flat out doesn't know how to even use a
| computer, which is a different case (I wouldn't hire that
| person).
| jalk wrote:
| I was thinking about basic tool use. I expect a junior
| engineer candidate to wield a computer way better than my
| mom. They are applying for a junior engineer position not
| and apprenticeship starting with close to zero training.
| I have no problem with candidates who stumble and make
| awkward choices during the interview, as juniors by
| definition lack experience and the interview process is a
| stressed situation.
| danaris wrote:
| I think we need to stop seeing "can program" as being
| equivalent to "is an expert computer user", because those
| are genuinely two different, if related and overlapping,
| skillsets.
|
| There is no particular reason that an expert C++
| programmer also needs to know every keyboard shortcut or
| be an expert at the Linux command line, if those things
| are not actually relevant to the job you're trying to
| hire them for. Just because it's been common among
| millennial and older programmers (like most of us) to
| combine the two doesn't mean we should discriminate
| against programmers who don't fit that mold, as long as
| they're actually _good programmers_.
| komali2 wrote:
| Then, among 200 resumes, how do you find the good
| programmer? If you have budget to hire one of them.
| danaris wrote:
| Well, first of all, most likely dozens of them, at least,
| are good programmers.
|
| In fact, most likely dozens of them will be perfectly
| good hires for the position.
|
| The idea that you _must_ hire only the _single best
| possible_ candidate can lead to some pretty dehumanizing
| treatment of applicants, when the truth is that a) there
| almost certainly is no "single best possible candidate",
| there are many people who would do a roughly equally good
| job there, and b) your processes are almost certainly not
| optimized to actually find the true single best candidate
| for the job, but rather the person who is best at
| applying and interviewing for jobs among the candidates.
|
| All that said, for "how do you actually design a better
| process"...I sure as hell don't know. I'm a programmer,
| not an HR person or hiring manager; that's outside my
| skillset. But that doesn't mean I can't accurately
| identify glaring flaws in the current system based on my
| understanding of human nature.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > I'm a programmer, not an HR person or hiring manager;
| that's outside my skillset. But that doesn't mean I can't
| accurately identify glaring flaws in the current system
| based on my understanding of human nature.
|
| No, it pretty much does mean that.
|
| Until you can come up with concrete improvements and
| understand the potential flaws in those proposals as
| well, you can't usefully critique the existing system.
| danaris wrote:
| Can only a master chef tell you that your chicken is
| undercooked?
|
| Can only a trained programmer tell you that it's a bug
| when you press the "OK" button, but your program does the
| "cancel" action?
|
| Can only someone who knows exactly how to build and fix a
| system tell you that a specific aspect of the system is
| flawed?
| Jensson wrote:
| Using SSH to get the project files is not a good example
| of a hard to learn skill they need for the job, they
| should just have provided a zip on a web page or so or
| sent it directly to the user.
|
| So to me it seems most of the test was just "have you
| done these trivial things before" rather than test if
| they can program web apps.
|
| It would be like the carpenter being forced to buy nails
| and docking them points for now knowing where the closest
| shop to buy nails in are and taking time to look that up.
| Of course it is better if some look it up quicker, but
| its not a core part of the job. Then when they drove
| there, you gave them a manual stick car, so the ones who
| were used to automatic fumbled around in the car, also
| bad look! So now you see carpenters who drove manual were
| much better, as your biases told you! That is not really
| the skill you should care about, it is very quick to tell
| him where it is.
| komali2 wrote:
| > sometimes for many months before they land a job, and
| they probably haven't set up their computer specifically to
| impress you
|
| I wouldn't expect them to. I would expect them to have
| their computer set up to program. If it's not set up for
| programming, then, that's ok, they just won't fit in in an
| environment of people who really, really enjoy programming,
| and most likely aren't able to program at the level we
| expect. This theory worked out - about 10% of candidates
| were the kind that program regularly, for fun, or at least
| to build their portfolio, and of that 10% the one we ended
| up hiring turned out to be phenomenal.
|
| Like I said, the people who got furthest in the interview
| (solved the most problems) were the ones who had computers
| set up to program and were comfortable in their
| environment. Everyone got the same email, everyone knew
| they'd need to clone a repo and run node, and everyone who
| got the email had already passed the initial screening so
| I'd expect them to actually start reading our emails and
| taking this stage of the interview process seriously,
| considering it was the final stage (and the only stage
| involving actual programming).
|
| > you're also leaving on the table the potential that comes
| from diversity (a loaded term these days, but substantively
| still a valid point).
|
| Diversity comes in many forms. Someone not great at
| programming, or not that interested in it, I'm happy to
| select against. Do you have a reason I shouldn't filter
| these folks out? We're paying someone to code at the end of
| the day so I'm pretty confused at all this pushback to my
| bias towards "interest in computers."
|
| The other diversity markers I don't think were selected
| against - I have no idea what "high openness to experience"
| means but we had people with all sorts of different
| personalities and interests that we interviewed, all sorts
| of backgrounds, and sure all sorts of different gender
| expressions, national backgrounds, refugee status, race, so
| on.
|
| > People who spend a ton of time ricing their Linux
| desktops may be bad at setting priorities. If you expect
| them to continue their ricing, but not do it "on the
| clock", you're implicitly age-discriminating and
| discriminating against people with families and/or hobbies
| and/or "a life".
|
| Sure, and every hiring manager that puts people through a
| coding interview is implicitly engaging in ableism -
| someone with severe mental disabilities won't be able to
| pass the interview. Capitalism is ableist. I agree. They
| also had to have right to work - something I personally
| don't give a shit about but the State does. What am I
| supposed to do about it?
|
| Anyway interest in computing and "having a life" or hobbies
| or a family aren't mutually exclusive. At all the companies
| I've worked in, I've been surrounded by super nerds with
| families and other hobbies, alongside interest in
| computing. I've known a mom that went sailing every weekend
| and programmed circles around me, a married individual
| running a pokemon selling business and a lasercutting etsy
| store on the side all while having the healthiest marriage
| I've ever seen and personally aspire to, folks that brew
| beer or garden or make cheese, a hella greybeard that runs
| DND (and ran a campaign for the office alongside two others
| he was running)... all of these people I mentioned far
| better programmers than me, far more advanced knowledge of
| computers than me, and I don't do even close to that much
| outside of computer stuff.
|
| So, I don't know what to say other than I guess the last
| few companies where I worked and ran interviews at at just
| had really energetic people and wanted to hire more
| energetic people? That's something to criticize?
| gyulai wrote:
| You mention IDEs besides VS Code, Linux, and ricing as
| "green flags". Those are not proxies for "being a good
| programmer" and they are not proxies for "being
| enthusiastic about programming". They're just selecting
| for programmers who share your subjective preferences on
| matters that are the equivalent of "vi vs. emacs".
|
| The only workplaces that realistically allow people to
| use Linux desktops are academia and top-5%-sexiness-
| factor startups. The other 95% of us have to use what our
| boss tells us to use (and he got told by the insurance
| company that scammed him into cybersecurity insurance).
| Those of us who have families, don't spend our leisure
| time staring into yet another desktop computer that isn't
| our work machine, so how, on earth, would we be using
| Linux desktops?
|
| Conversely: Imagine someone has spent an 8-hour-workday
| setting up their tiling window manager, so they can
| "improve their productivity" because now they don't need
| to spend 2 minutes painting all their windows into the
| right positions in the morning. That's an investment of
| time that takes (8*60)/2 = 240 days, so roughly one work-
| year, to amortize. What does that tell you about the time
| management skills of that person?
|
| I don't say that to knock tiling window managers: If
| you're into it, be my guest. It's perfectly fine for
| reasonable people to reasonably disagree on those kinds
| of subjective preferences. That's what subjectivity is
| all about. And that's why it's valuable to hire a diverse
| range of people who have different viewpoints on these
| kinds of things.
|
| EDIT: ...and that's what I mean by "diversity": To
| include both family-people and people without families.
| Young and old. People with an academic background and
| people without one. Vi-people and emacs-people. Please
| don't strawman me by bringing up disabled people and work
| permits and whatnot.
| komali2 wrote:
| > To include both family-people and people without
| families. Young and old. People with an academic
| background and people without one. Vi-people and emacs-
| people.
|
| Well, I don't know what to tell you, you've just
| described my entire team, same as my previous company
| that had a bunch of linux/unix dweebs, so the fact that
| we're all really into computers hasn't hindered us from
| this diversity.
|
| All my jobs have let me choose my OS, all my jobs were
| full of people exactly as you describe, they just all
| happened to be really into computers. How the family
| folks found time for it is a question I still ask myself
| to this day when I compare my knowledge to theirs, but
| regardless, it wasn't a hindrance.
|
| So I maintain my confusion around selecting for this.
| It's just not my experience that it prevents me working
| with family folks, or old folks, bootcamp kids and phD ML
| people.
|
| So, ok, we've come this far: How do you run interviews?
| What's the alternative to the way I've seen?
| yeputons wrote:
| > cloning the github repo we used for our interview
|
| Unless it's a very well-known big tech, I'm not sure I'd feel
| comfortable running any externally provided code during the
| interview. For all I know, it's RCE with potential to steal
| cookies and/or crypto.
| jq-r wrote:
| Cloning a repo and running things from it are two very
| different things.
| komali2 wrote:
| It's a FOSS repo on github... you can just look at the code
| yourself. If we RCE you you can easily sue us lol.
|
| So for you, how should a company determine from 200
| applicants, which one will be able to do the job best? Or
| at least some approximation to get down to the 5 most
| likely to do the job best?
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| I don't see why using vi mode in vscode isn't a green flag.
| komali2 wrote:
| That would be a green flag for me.
| brenainn wrote:
| I think going by that, for juniors anyway, isn't great.
| Remotely coding during an interview isn't a great environment
| to start with, and you're probably seeing a lot of people
| unable to achieve any sort of flow because their mental
| capacity is devoted to the interview. Some people also won't
| pick up more advanced tooling until they have to start coding
| day after day for a living, and until they have other people
| to learn from. That was my situation anyway.
| rkomorn wrote:
| > And Lo, these candidates also seem to perform the best in
| my experience.
|
| You mean the people you're not prejudiced against for their
| choice of laptop OS tend to perform better in your eyes?
| Interesting.
| komali2 wrote:
| The interview has various portions, given in sequence. The
| ones who got the furthest (or ran out our interview to
| where we had to invent "new fun bits" on the fly) were the
| ones who I mean when I say "performed best."
|
| The interview was implementing in live coding a prepared
| frontend stack. The email sent out indicated explicitly the
| task, that they'd be expected to share their screen and
| clone a repo off github, run `npm` commands, and then pair
| program. So those that weren't prepared for this, fussing
| around with ssh keys not set up or node not installed, or
| not knowing how to use bash or git, yeah it counted against
| them.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| Some of these yes, some of these no. In general being a
| clicker is a completely fine way to weed people out. If you
| don't code like time is on the line without being asked to, I
| will not take the risk of needing to ask you.
|
| I'm less passionate about windows and have met some absolute
| wizards who use it, but in general it's a negative indicator.
| schnebbau wrote:
| Copying and pasting with the context menu, sure. But using vs
| code _or Windows entirely_? That seems a little extreme.
| komali2 wrote:
| Using vscode wasn't a red flag, using a different IDE was
| just a green flag. Everyone uses vscode, I wouldn't hold it
| against anyone for doing so, especially not a junior. But
| picking a different tool exhibits a unique level of
| interest in the job and our tools, and a different mindset.
| Those are pluses for me.
|
| Nobody was rejected _because_ they used windows. It just so
| happens that none of the windows folks got past problem 1
| of 3 (as in, they ran out of time without solving).
|
| Edit: I'm remembering now, one of the windows folks did get
| to the end of the interview, and they were the first person
| I recommended actually, so it's not like it was a deciding
| factor, just something that I'd see and go "hm" about.
| schnebbau wrote:
| Understood, thanks for clarifying.
| Balinares wrote:
| For 20-ish years I used vim with a custom configuration
| made of piles of plugins painstakingly tailored over many
| hours to my exact taste.
|
| Now I use VSCode because it's there, and it works. (With
| vim bindings, though. I'm not going back on _that_.)
| watwut wrote:
| That just means you insist on people like you are reject
| those who are a little different. Probably in a lot more
| areas then you are even realizing.
| komali2 wrote:
| If I handed you 200 resumes and said "hire from this set
| our next junior frontend engineer," how would you do it?
| Assume: generic b2b SASS, post-seed, 5 person engineering
| team making first junior hire.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Interesting - I see the appeal of this approach. Equally, I do
| the opposite - I give easy problems which can be solved
| quickly. I find people either can do them pretty quickly, or
| not at all.
|
| I used to ask harder problems, like you, but found two failure
| modes: either smart people who panic and can't think straight
| in an interview, or people who can do high level thinking but
| then can't swap two variables in actual code.
|
| That said, thinking back on my recent hires, I'm not sure this
| method has yielded any improvements.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > That said, thinking back on my recent hires, I'm not sure
| this method has yielded any improvements.
|
| I've been involved in hiring panels across several companies
| with very different interview strategies. Before going into
| this I leaned heavily toward your style: Easy questions that
| act as a simple filter for people who can't program.
|
| Looking back, I have to admit the simple question approach
| wasn't as good as I thought it would be. The companies who
| gave more difficult questions and pushed candidates toward
| harder and harder interview problems with the expectation
| that they would hit a wall at some point really did sort
| candidates better. I know there's a widespread belief that
| difficult interview questions are prone to too many false
| negatives due to anxiety in interviews and people who freeze
| up. However, when we tried interview do-overs or alternate
| take-home problems as a fallback for these candidates we
| didn't really see any improvement. I can think of a few
| candidates who we talked ourselves into giving a pass because
| we assumed interview anxiety was obscuring some real skill,
| but we got it wrong in both cases.
|
| I still don't know the correct answer, but these days I'm
| leaning more toward the interview formats where the questions
| get hard enough that the candidate is really challenged as
| opposed to the simple ones like FizzBuzz where it's just a
| quick filter. Note that I've worked in domains where
| algorithmic problem solving is something we actually do, so
| finding interview problems that match problems we've actually
| solved in production is possible, not just rote LeetCode
| stuff.
| omgmajk wrote:
| > simple ones like FizzBuzz where it's just a quick filter
|
| I stumbled across a thread in r/cscareerquestions or maybe
| r/cscareers a while ago where several people argued that
| fizzbuzz was too hard because: "no-one is using the modulus
| operator in day to day work, so it's not something one
| should be expected to remember."
|
| I found it very funny and draining at the same time.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The company that used FizzBuzz had a rule that we'd give
| the candidate an explanation of the modulus operator if
| they weren't familiar or didn't remember.
|
| It didn't change anything.
| jorl17 wrote:
| What a refreshing level of honesty! Admitting that perhaps
| your new method also doesn't work. Thanks for sharing that!
| It's often lacking from online discourse.
|
| (I also prefer easy-to-solve challenges. And usually bring up
| more complex topics during problem solving to assess
| candidates)
| eru wrote:
| You might like https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-
| hiring-post/
| jemmyw wrote:
| The technical question I have start easy and get
| progressively harder as we go deeper. I think thats a good
| strategy - everyone I interview should be able to get
| started, even if they're feeling anxious, and if they cannot
| then we can both save time.
|
| Then as it gets harder the interviewee is familiar with it,
| and I find that often people with less CS experience are
| still able to work through it even though they don't know the
| terminology. And we have a grading based on how much hinting
| we needed to give, which is very helpful guidance to me as an
| interviewer.
|
| The problem I usually pose is a slimmed down version of one I
| actually tackled, so it doesn't feel like an arbitrary test
| that has no real application. Which again, very helpful for
| when I need to write a rejection email, as I can say where
| the candidate didn't meet expectations, which often seems
| appreciated. We're encouraged to reject during the interview
| if it's obviously not going well, which I've done but I do
| find very hard.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| I get where you're coming from. I've have experienced the
| "smart person who panics".
|
| I usually tell them upfront that I'm not looking for the
| correct answer and that I just want to see how they break the
| problem down. I also try to reiterate that it's okay to fail
| (at least at my employer) and that's the point of having a
| team.
|
| Usually, that calms them down enough to get the interview
| going. If they don't calm down, I'll try to simplify the
| problem or give them small ideas.
|
| We've also resorted to having a follow up interview with the
| candidate if we get the sense that they were overly nervous.
| I have a couple teammates that are very good at getting
| people to relax and we've had a good amount of success with
| letting them lead the follow up (instead of myself since I
| know I can come across fairly cold).
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of
| college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems
| and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less
| passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer
| nerds).
|
| I started browsing spaces like /r/cscareerquestions and joined
| a few Discords to get a sense for what young devs are being
| exposed to these days. It's all very toxic and cynical.
|
| I've noticed an inverse correlation between how much someone is
| immersed in Reddit, Twitter, and Discords and how well they
| function in a business environment. The Reddit toxicity seems
| to taint young people into thinking that their employer is
| their enemy and that they have to approach the workplace like
| they're going into battle with evil managers. I've had some
| success getting people to chill out and drop the Reddit vibes,
| but some young people are so hopelessly immersed in the
| alternate reality that they see in social media that it's hard
| to shake them free.
| rtpg wrote:
| 10 years ago I'd pretty consistently run into 4chan-types as
| well (I was browsing 4chan as well, so I'm not immune to
| this).
|
| There's definitely an aversion to treating real life and "the
| internet" separately in a certain cohort of people. But the
| kinda edge-y meanness gets really weird when it's applied to
| coworkers and the like.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > I've had some success getting people to chill out and drop
| the Reddit vibes
|
| How did these issues manifest? And what approach worked for
| tackling them?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > The Reddit toxicity seems to taint young people into
| thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they
| have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle
| with evil managers
|
| What you're saying is very true unfortunately and is going to
| be a real problem. It not only affects how you view your
| employers and companies but also your peers. If you're
| exposed to extreme views even before you start your first
| job, what happens when you eventually start your first job?
| LtWorf wrote:
| > If you're exposed to extreme views even before you start
| your first job, what happens when you eventually start your
| first job?
|
| You are less likely to be taken advantage of?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| The more likely outcome is going to be that these people
| will be left behind. If you came in with extreme views
| like say for things like DEI, would you be able to work
| that well with a female manager or a black coworker? If
| you came in with extreme views about lofty wage
| expectations or not working extra as a salaried employee,
| how likely are you to be hired or be put up for
| promotion? Keep in mind, we are not talking about
| reasonable takes, we are talking about extreme views that
| are formed solely through online spaces and not personal
| experiences.
| krackers wrote:
| >seems to taint young people into thinking that their
| employer is their enemy
|
| Is this not true to a first approximation though? I mean you
| do have to "hide your power level" in some way, but the fact
| that the employer isn't your friend or family is a good
| working model to keep in the back of your mind. It's a
| prisoner's dilemma type situation, and defect/defect seems to
| be the equilibrium we've converged at.
| zachthewf wrote:
| It's not that simple. Even if you take the cynical view
| that the company is your adversary, the other people who
| work at the company (including founders, investors and
| execs) are actually playing a career-long collaborative
| game rather than a one-off prisoners dilemma.
| michael1999 wrote:
| That's only true for the young. As they get older, or the
| exit grows large enough, some people smell that last
| iteration and defect hard.
| aspect0545 wrote:
| There's a big difference between somebody not being your
| friend and somebody being your enemy. I've had a similar
| experience with a sub par employee, who at some point
| admitted that he wasn't doing his best at work because he
| was "only there to exchange his time for money, not make
| any meaningful contributions".
|
| That guy was absolutely immersed in internet culture,
| making him less self-aware and very unpleasant to work
| with.
| lloeki wrote:
| This mindset existed well before reddit; hell, it existed
| well before the Internet.
|
| Some people simply show up at work solely to put food on
| the table, doing the minimum amount of work so as not to
| get fired.
| rectang wrote:
| The mindset exists because historically commercial
| entities have often been horrendously abusive to their
| workers. Dickens, anyone?
|
| The flip side is the terror of an entrepreneur seeing
| their enterprise struggle.
| mythrwy wrote:
| That is the antidote the toxic attitude.
|
| Go into business yourself for a bit and see the world
| from an entirely different angle. If you don't make it
| and come back to employment (most likely) you will be a
| much humbled and more enlightened person.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| In some sense this is the standard gambit of wage labor.
| If you want people to act like they have skin in the
| game, then they must have that. Tech is notable as a
| field for incentivizing overperformance and mission-
| driven-ness.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only in places with SV like culture.
|
| In many countries being a developer is a plain office job
| just like everything else, and everyone that doesn't want
| to move into management after reaching seniority is seen
| as a failure.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Showing up to work and actually doing their job, even if
| it's the minimum, would be an upgrade over the Reddit
| toxic mindset I was describing about.
|
| The problematic juniors show up to their jobs determined
| to be uncooperative, sow discontent among coworkers,
| stonewall progress in meetings, and think they're just
| going to job-hop to the next company before the
| performance management catches up to them. They see the
| jobs or even the concept of working to live in general as
| a scam and feel like they're winning some deep cultural
| war if they collect paychecks while making life difficult
| for their manager.
| pydry wrote:
| Who would've thought that decades of wage repression that
| fell especially badly on the young would lead to a surly
| and uncooperative workforce.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Programmers are incredibly well paid.
| rangestransform wrote:
| Just the existence of the Bay Area tech antitrust suit
| and the pittance of a settlement should tell you
| otherwise. Who knows how sky high developer salaries
| would be if those companies hadn't conspired to lower
| salaries during such a strong and low-interest-rate
| economy.
| lovich wrote:
| A subset are paid incredibly well. For arbitrary lines im
| going to put that at 250k+/year in comp by year 2-3 of
| your career.
|
| Another large cohort is paid pretty well with salaries
| from 110k-150k by that same point who have effectively no
| negotiation power and are given "take it or leave it"
| deals with the only leverage being to find another job
|
| And even for the incredibly well paid ones, as the other
| commentator noted, there's documented proof of organized
| wage suppression by the corporations
| lovich wrote:
| Have companies given any of these young people a reason
| to think differently?
|
| "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further"
| has been the majority of my career and my peers. Very few
| people(as a percentage of population) actually have had
| enough leverage at any point to not have to eat shit if
| their company says so.
| jdlshore wrote:
| This is the type of toxic, cynical attitude GP is talking
| about. It doesn't have to be this way, and you
| approaching it with this expectation is possibly creating
| a self-fulfilling prophecy.
| lovich wrote:
| I didn't really approach it that way. The companies did
| to me. My experience with companies has been entirely
| that unless the money is already in my pocket, I should
| expect them to renege on the deal.
|
| At this point it's in the corporations court. If you have
| managed to generate a relationship with your labor force
| where they are no longer lying flat, but actively trying
| to cause sabotage like you described then I think you(the
| companies in question, not you in particular) share some
| of the onus on how we got here
|
| Edit: and to be clear I've been working in tech for over
| a decade, this is not a perspective from a new grad with
| only the internet as their source of information. The
| younger generation has seen their older siblings and
| cousins getting fucked over more and more each year and
| we're reaching the point of societal unrest where a large
| group of people no longer think the "deal" society is
| offering them is worth it
| zwnow wrote:
| This mindset is completely sane. Sorry but if you work
| 40+ hours a week and barely can afford a vacation there
| is no reason for me to work hard. Especially not if I see
| managers with new cars every year.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Sorry but if you work 40+ hours a week and barely can
| afford a vacation
|
| Software developers are relatively highly paid. When they
| start acting like they're minimum wage workers flipping
| burgers at a dead-end job, they're missing the big
| picture. That's the problem I'm trying to communicate.
| zwnow wrote:
| This is a generalization. Salary in Europe is different
| to salary in the USA for example. I earn median wage
| currently. Also lots of non degree having devs out there
| that aren't 6 figure earners.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's the tradeoff you're making for universal health
| care and generous public benefits.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't know why you come up with an ideological
| statement like that.
|
| The management culture, anti software/nerd mindset among
| the population and eastern European competition in the
| offshoring market have a much bigger impact.
|
| E.g. even though Germany is practicing mercantilist
| beggar thy neighbour export surplus policies, the country
| has failed to become an exporter of software or be known
| for quality software. Anyone who wants to work in the
| software industry is better off leaving the Eurozone and
| going to Switzerland where they get paid more in addition
| to the things you claim are the cause.
| jjav wrote:
| > "only there to exchange his time for money, not make
| any meaningful contributions"
|
| I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting
| these roles, instead of the up or out model.
|
| There is in many teams a lot of busywork that for various
| reasons can't be automated (or new incoming busywork that
| takes over when the older one gets automated).
|
| If an employee is content with just handling this kind of
| lower level busywork and go home at 4:30pm in exchange of
| not pursuing raises and promotions, there's nothing wrong
| with that. That work still needs to get done, so rather
| than getting a never ending stream of junior new hires
| constantly having to get trained, I'd be fine with having
| someone who is happy to stay at that level and take it
| easy.
| jrozner wrote:
| Up or out generally stops once someone reaches engineer
| or sr engineer. Most of the time a jr engineer is going
| to need substantial mentoring and support. Them never
| moving beyond that point likely results in a net negative
| gain if you need another person always available to
| provide that for their entire time there if it goes
| beyond 1-2 years.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| How do candidates express that in interviews?
| Jensson wrote:
| > I sometimes wish companies were more open to accepting
| these roles, instead of the up or out model.
|
| But companies live or die by talent / passion density. If
| you try to only hire talented / passionate people, then
| many of them will still just be fit for grunt work so
| grunt work still gets done. If you on the other hand hire
| for grunt work you wont find much talent at all so
| company fails after a while.
| II2II wrote:
| Companies require different attributes in various roles.
| Those attributes extend far beyond passion and talent.
| The trouble with hiring based on those two attributes
| alone is that you're setting up a culture where the
| people who do the necessary grunt work are failed hires
| and where the employee themself feels held back. In
| otherwords, you are setting up a toxic workplace.
| Jensson wrote:
| I never saw a company hire grunt programmers separately
| though, and when you suggest that they should people also
| get angry at you here. So what do you want really? Do you
| want to have to pass the same tests as these roles, or do
| you want to pass grunt tests and have a different role?
| You can only have one of those.
| convolvatron wrote:
| Yes. if the work is installing software and being on
| pager duty then we can really stop pretending that
| identifying O(nlog(n))is relevant. And if the job is to
| write a compiler optimizer, it's pretty important you
| know the basics of CS (like decidability).
|
| smashing these two together and pretending they are the
| same has been a huge source of cognitive dissonance in
| the industry and serves no one.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I've had the same experience -- employees who do the
| minimum and then whine when (one case) asked for a raise
| or he'd quit and I said sgtm; and (a different person) I
| chose to mentor and promote other people on the team.
| Some people can't wrap their minds around the idea that
| our interests aren't always aligned, but sometimes they
| are and also why would I invest in someone who doesn't
| invest here. Mentoring and promoting people is one of the
| best pieces of my job, but my time is finite and I want
| to also spend it productively :shrug:
| rectang wrote:
| It's true for many companies, but to be successful it helps
| to act as though it isn't.
|
| Senior leadership sincerely believes that they are a force
| for good even when they are doing things to harm their
| workers, their customers, or society at large. It's human
| nature to feel that way, and to contradict that is to
| offend them and risk getting labeled as "hopelessly
| immersed in Reddit toxicity".
|
| And the easiest way to keep up the act is to fool yourself,
| because most of us aren't good at faking it. Find the best
| in senior leadership and emphasize it to yourself; find
| win-win opportunities (or make them!). Maybe it's even true
| that the company is a force for good! (I genuinely believe
| this about all my past employers in varying amounts, but
| I've been choosy and have made sacrifices.)
|
| But be stern about never putting yourself in a position
| where you can be taken advantage of, because senior
| leadership, being weak humans like all of us, will succumb
| to temptation.
| BoarMarket wrote:
| To add clarity, that's caused by social programming not
| human nature.
| rectang wrote:
| I disagree. The tendency towards self justification is a
| universal human trait. Even if some may overcome that
| tendency, it is still qualifies as "human nature".
|
| This is germane because while labor and capital may
| perceive each other as the "enemy" and may in fact act
| counter to each other's interests, nearly everyone
| perceives their own actions as justified.
|
| To the extent that there is "social programming" involved
| which could conceivably change (unlike "human nature"),
| it has to do with the acts themselves, not the strong
| impulse to believe that your own acts are justified.
| jjav wrote:
| > >seems to taint young people into thinking that their
| employer is their enemy
|
| > Is this not true to a first approximation though?
|
| No, not at all. The company wants the employee to do well
| so that the team does well and the company overall does
| well. If the company was "the enemy", they company would be
| wishing for the employee to fail, which is not why they
| spent a lot of time and money to hire you in the first
| place.
|
| Now, of course the company isn't your friend (or family)
| either. The employer doesn't exist in the friend-enemy
| axis, they're just an employer which is a different type of
| relationship.
|
| Also, who is "the company"? People in upper management and
| HR, i.e. those who see you as a number on a spreadsheet but
| don't ever interact with you personally.
|
| But most of your interaction is with your first and second
| level managers who are specific people. One would certainly
| be well advised to cultivate a professional friendship with
| them. Not only will you do better, but work will be a lot
| more pleasant.
| rectang wrote:
| > _The company wants the employee to do well_
|
| > _Also, who is "the company"?_
|
| The company doesn't "want" anything other than to become
| a bigger pile of money -- it's an amoral abstract
| construction, lacking human wetware and all its messy
| idiosyncrasies. I think I'd express similar sentiments in
| a slightly different way: the company benefits when it
| gets maximum value for minimum outlay over the lifetime
| of the employment relationship.
|
| That model allows for companies which act in ways wildly
| counter to the interests of their workers. For example,
| the private equity firms asset-stripping Toys 'r' Us and
| KMart mostly "cared" that the workers at a given retail
| facility not quit before they could be let go.
| mcv wrote:
| Sometimes it is, sometimes not.
|
| In 2009 I worked for a really chill company with small but
| nice management. The owner/CEO wanted to turn it into a
| worker-owned co-op.
|
| But one of my coworkers was so stuck in the "management is
| evil" mindset that he became hard to work with. (Although
| he also radicalized politically; I think he went from SNP
| to UKIP.)
| Aurornis wrote:
| The way I explain it is that your company is not your
| _friend_ , but that doesn't make them your _enemy_.
|
| The trap is when they see everything as a false dichotomy
| between friend and enemy. Enemies are something you avoid
| or even work against. When someone starts seeing their
| employer as the enemy and they don't want to do things that
| help out their enemy, they trick themselves into poor
| performance out of spite.
|
| Which leads to performance management and eventually firing
| if they don't get a handle on it. This makes them even
| angrier, confirming their belief that their company is out
| to get them, leading to deeper spiraling into spite and
| poor performance.
|
| Breaking someone out of that mentality is hard but everyone
| is so much happier once you've cracked them out of the
| "friend or enemy" dichotomous thinking.
| rectang wrote:
| In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?
|
| Something like the analogue to the "Reddit-infused
| worker" archetype, where leadership is inappropriately
| cynical about their workers and see them as "the enemy"?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?
|
| Of course. If you don't see that, you're missing the
| point.
|
| In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employee?
| Or do you assume all employees are inherently good and do
| appropriate work for their pay and don't need constant
| performance management to simply do their job?
|
| In my posts I'm not talking about all juniors. I'm
| talking about a problematic subset. You seem to be
| assuming I'm generalizing to all of them. I am not. This
| is a phenomenon specific to a subset of juniors that is
| unfortunately a repeated pattern where they all share
| some very common and obvious characteristics. I've spent
| a lot of time trying to break them out of that mindset
| and have them join their much happier peers, but to be
| honest once someone is that deep into the cynical mindset
| it's hard to wake them out of it.
| rectang wrote:
| > _In your world, is there such a thing as a bad
| employee?_
|
| Of course -- I implied as much via the "inappropriately
| cynical" characterization.
|
| The tension between capital and labor is inescapable and
| ancient.
|
| I didn't think you were generalizing to all juniors.
| Rather, what caught my interest was that before this last
| message I perceived the perspective of capital in your
| words.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > the fact that the employer isn't your friend or family is
| a good working model to keep in the back of your mind.
|
| That's completely different than being your enemy.
|
| What you want to avoid are work environments where most
| workers are focused on gaming internal politics to get
| ahead. Those environments are soul destroying.
|
| But that's not all work environments. And most work
| environments are some mix of internal politics and wanting
| to actually create good and useful products.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Outrage yields clicks/revenue. So there is a financial
| incentive for media and influencers to fuel extreme
| narratives.
|
| With that said, there are truths and lessons to be learned on
| the internet. I think it's possible to take that benefit
| without developing an overly negative outlook on everything.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's not media and influencers doing this, though. It's
| Reddit comments and chronically online peers in their
| Discords.
|
| Weirdly enough, streamers like Primeagen are actually
| disabusing juniors of some of these notions.
|
| It's the grassroots commentary sowing the seeds of
| discontent.
| zwnow wrote:
| The employer might not be the enemy but the employer
| certainly is not a friend either. Also its expected of young
| people to spend their time off with these things as well. All
| this plus the constant fear of being laid off results in
| people simply not caring too much. Which is reasonable. Maybe
| the bar is simply too high for what you get?
| rectang wrote:
| Companies are amoral profit-seeking automata. Individuals,
| even those in senior leadership, have only limited capacity
| to act in opposition to the company's nature.
|
| Workers can definitely forge mutually beneficial
| relationships with such entities but anthropomorphizing
| them leads to sorrow.
| zwnow wrote:
| Corporations are the reason for lobbyism and wealth
| accumulation which actively damage my personal quality of
| life. Its only fair for me to not view them in a positive
| manner. They view me as an asset, I view them as
| necessary evil to afford housing and food. I should not
| anthropomorphize them, yes, but I can anthropomorphize
| the management and stakeholders. And if they are greedy
| and behave as such, its my good right to be repulsed by
| them.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone approaching 50 years old, "workplace like they're
| going into battle with evil managers", not sure where you are
| located, but in southern europe countries it has always been
| like this, regardless of the job.
|
| That is why many countries still have a strong union culture,
| everyone gets exploited to the bones and they should be happy
| to have a job if at all.
|
| It is quite depressing sadly, but that is what happens when
| many managers lack business education and see employees as
| replacable cogs without rights.
| tsumnia wrote:
| Thanks for fighting the good fight. I know I left Reddit for
| Digg (btw Digg's back) because of all that negativity.
| danaris wrote:
| > thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they
| have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle
| with evil managers.
|
| Given how many managers are strongly steeped in the mindset
| that every IC is an innately lazy bastard out to scam the
| company out of as much money as possible for doing as little
| work as possible, and explicitly design their policies that
| way (not to mention structuring their personal conduct that
| way), this is probably wise.
|
| Hopefully it can galvanize more of them to form or join
| unions! Labor power is a vital tool in the current age to
| take back some of what we have lost over the past few decades
| to burgeoning corporate power.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of Reddit seems to be people wallowing in their
| own unhappiness.
|
| As far as the attitude toward employers, I kinda get it. A
| lot of these kids were sold the idea that college will mean a
| solid, lasting career and, pre-pandemic, a lot of companies
| were trying to sell themselves as a "family" and throwing
| cheap benefits around (ie. free food, beer, etc) only to yank
| most of that back during/after the pandemic.
|
| It also doesn't help that, inside US, it sometimes just feels
| like we're trying to scam each other constantly. All of this
| is breeding a ton of cynicism.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > lot of companies were trying to sell themselves as a
| "family"
|
| Has your company actually done this?
|
| When I was doing mentoring I heard this complaint all the
| time, but literally no one (juniors on first jobs in this
| case) could point to an instance of their employer saying
| it. They had all picked it up from Reddit as something the
| archetypical company did, and they felt obligated to punish
| their company for it.
|
| Similar problem happens with take-homes: About 90% of the
| take-home interview problems people shared in the
| #interviewing channel were entirely reasonable, short, and
| clearly not real work. Yet many had picked up this idea
| that take-home problems were unfair because they were "a
| week of unpaid labor" or that companies were using them as
| a tool to extract free work from candidates. So they tried
| protest the concept of take-homes and stated they would
| refuse to do them in protest. Of course, when they actually
| received one for a job they wanted they would abandon that
| mentality and do the problem, and in many cases they
| preferred that to doing in-person interviews. Yet the
| mentality remained that take-homes were evil exploitation
| and they must rally against it because they read so many
| Reddit comments about it being "unpaid labor".
| pydry wrote:
| >Has your company actually done this?
|
| Ive worked for plenty of companies that pretended that
| they cared about the human resources and not one that has
| _ever_ been upfront about the fact that they will lay you
| off for a bump in the stock price without blinking.
|
| >Similar problem happens with take-homes: About 90% of
| the take-home interview problems people shared in the
| #interviewing channel were entirely reasonable, short,
| and clearly not real work. Yet many had picked up this
| idea that take-home problems were unfair because they
| were "a week of unpaid labor"
|
| It's largely been my experience that a lot of companies
| think an 8 hour take home is actually 2.
|
| They tend to be badly constructed and full of ambiguities
| that require you to read the mind of the test setter.
|
| Of course the people who set them dont know this and they
| _never_ test their tests. My experience on the other side
| of the hiring desk is that rank amateur shit is the norm.
|
| The "unpaid labor" thing happened to me once, I think. It
| was a company that wanted somebody to build an X. Take
| home was "build an X". Not common, doesnt happen to
| juniors, but it happens.
|
| Corporate America could clean up its act or Gen Z could
| force itself to grin and bear it with a smile it like you
| seem to want. I wont hold my breath for either to happen.
| LtWorf wrote:
| They had me sit down and pair program for a bit during my
| interview. On their real code.
| qwert-e wrote:
| >It's all very toxic and cynical
|
| You're commenting on a blog post by a B2B SaaS company that
| sells AI engineer stack ranking with a cute ball of yarn
| mascot and you're wondering why they're cynical?
| Varelion wrote:
| The need to search for what they are being exposed to
| already outs them as being out of touch. Them coming to the
| wrong conclusion only cements their misunderstanding for
| both the industry's status-quo and the experiences lived by
| up-and-commers.
| halayli wrote:
| > I've noticed an inverse correlation between how much
| someone is immersed in Reddit, Twitter, and Discords and how
| well they function in a business environment.
|
| That's probably due to the sample bias.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| There are also people marketing things on Reddit to young
| people: alt coins, option trading, sports gambling that have
| an incentive to say working is for suckers, your only hope is
| to get rich quick. I think most young people are smart enough
| (or cynical enough) to reject the get rich quick schemes. But
| the same cynicism allows them to accept the messages that
| tell them that things are hopeless for their generation, work
| is unrewarding and you are way behind.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| > some young people are so hopelessly immersed in the
| alternate reality that they see in social media that it's
| hard to shake them free.
|
| One of my favorite staff/principal engineers always begins
| Monday's by asking people what they did on the weekend. He
| always talks about the things he did - farmers market, local
| parade, etc.
|
| It's shocking to many of the junior engineers. They generally
| do "nothing".
| LtWorf wrote:
| They just don't want to tell you because they don't think
| it's your business.
| znpy wrote:
| > The Reddit toxicity seems to taint young people into
| thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they
| have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle
| with evil managers.
|
| They aren't that wrong however. Over the last two-three years
| alone we've seen waves of layoffs. Layoffs from FAANGs hit
| the headlines, but so many more happened without hitting the
| news.
|
| And the thing is young people... They adapt.
|
| They usually don't have the cultural baggage we older people
| have, so they often see things for what they truly are
| without any rose-tinted-glasses from past better times.
|
| Their grandparents were able to get a fairly stable job at a
| company, stay there until retirement and grow a family. Their
| grandparents were able to switch jobs _IF_ they wanted to. On
| the other hand, kids nowadays know they will likely be fired
| at some point, irrespective of their performance, and that
| they need to play the game for what it is.
|
| Can you really blame them?
| AngryData wrote:
| To be fair in most jobs that is the relationship approach you
| need to not get screwed a lot of the time. Cs work has been
| one of the few exceptions because it was flush with money and
| in need of workers for so long.
| rtpg wrote:
| I don't think computer nerds are needed (I've worked with
| plenty of very good people who don't write a single line of
| code out of work), but I have noticed a huge uptick in people
| who are in the space for the money. Nothing wrong with treating
| work as a place for money, but the hustler mindset combined
| with being an annoying 22-year-old twerp is exhausting.
|
| Please go back to fighting over finance and consulting jobs,
| people. Please. I know my salary is inflated thanks to the
| dynamics that also bring in these people, but I really would
| like to avoid working for people whose choice matrix is
| "finance or startups".
| protocolture wrote:
| I find that the ability of people to understand hypotheticals
| is extremely diminished.
|
| "How would you troubleshoot x"
|
| "I havent done that before"
|
| "Ok, but how would you approach the problem"
|
| "I dont know sorry"
| krackers wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-breakfast-question
| protocolture wrote:
| Yep 100%
| hackable_sand wrote:
| It's disturbing that you went from hiring to execution
| that quickly.
| tdeck wrote:
| Wow that got dark fast.
| a96 wrote:
| Par for course for greentext.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| "bro trust me bro I saw it on 4chan bro people can't just
| make shit up on 4chan, it's like impossible bro cmon bro
| just trust me"
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I've seen this once. I was talking to two guys that I met
| randomly, and I said something like "Rich people see you
| the way you see homeless people". One of them instantly
| understood what I meant, while the other one got stuck on
| "but I am not homeless" and even his friend couldn't
| explain the idea to him.
| mcv wrote:
| That other one about anachronisms feels a bit too familiar.
| Something about George Washington taking airfields.
| qcnguy wrote:
| How is that not understanding a hypothetical? Seems they
| understand it just fine, what they're saying is they don't
| have the needed knowledge/confidence to answer the question.
|
| Not understanding a hypothetical would go like this:
|
| "How would you troubleshoot X?"
|
| "Why, is X broken?"
|
| "No, but imagine it was broken."
|
| "If it's not broken why are you asking me that"
| eru wrote:
| > I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the
| years go by (ie. less computer nerds).
|
| Well, if we assume that the share of the population of nerds is
| roughly constant-ish, then an expansion of the total number of
| developers would lead to nerds making up a smaller and smaller
| share.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The idea that people have different aptitudes and
| proclivities has become a radical concept to some these days.
| davidCraigFergu wrote:
| As an EE working on energy based models[1]; good.
|
| No one should be required to acquire a special literacy or hire
| an expert in a specialized literacy to use a well understood
| computing technique (Von Neumann and Turing).
|
| IMO software first engineers are not much different than rent
| seekers. Using lexical tools based on understanding from the
| 1960s is hardly high tech.
|
| For all their high minded rhetoric, SWEs are just self
| selecting biology driven by "FU got mine" philosophy like so
| many others. After 30 years in tech, it's become quite clear
| the majority are not much different than an ICE agent;
| willfully ignorant because their personal compensation banging
|
| [1] figuring out how to store/recompute the geometry of an
| oscilloscope to keep it brief; too much syntax sugar involved
| as-is
| finaard wrote:
| > Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no
| special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's
| going to take a good while for them to on-board.
|
| That's one reason why I prefer "fresh out of college" for
| juniors - if they seem bright enough that way they only have to
| learn, not also forget whatever nonsense they learned somewhere
| else.
| jonasft wrote:
| Yeah, we lost a lot of nerds with the higher status of Computer
| Science, or rather we got a lot of non nerds/geeks into the
| mix. Every year as the criteria went up at the University, I
| saw less of the type that had always been there.
| commandersaki wrote:
| _The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of
| college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems
| and outsourced classwork to AI_
|
| I'm pretty senior and I memorise a bank of leetcode solutions
| if I'm going for an interview that is definitely leet code. It
| has served me well for some interviews, and will remain my top
| strategy. I can still solve problems on the spot when needed,
| and much prefer challenging non leetcode programming problems,
| but that is far and few between.
| fredphilo wrote:
| This is similar to what my advisor told me my PhD thesis
| defense would be; your committee would probe you until you got
| to the limit of your knowledge (generally in your domain but
| not specific to your exact topic) and only then could they test
| how well your reasoning abilities. I think this is a great
| evaluation technique but it was common practice in my PhD
| program that, as you started getting close-ish to your defense,
| you'd organize some practice sessions with your peers where you
| could recreate that kind of environment because being able to
| step beyond your knowledge, especially in front of a group of
| gatekeepers (your thesis committee or potential employer),
| while maintaining a professional level of composure is
| difficult! And most of us couldn't quite handle it well when we
| would practice with each other but after a few sessions we'd
| feel comfortable in that state, at which point the pass/fail
| is, in our opinion, much more reflective of your actual
| reasoning abilities. As an interview tactic, especially for
| juniors, it's an interesting idea and I'd be curious to know
| how well you think it works, but I think it would take most
| 90th percentile candidates 2 tries to really demonstrate the
| kind of critical thinking and reasoning skills that you're
| looking for.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the
| years go by (ie. less computer nerds).
|
| I have such strong but mixed feelings about this.
|
| There were major downsides to the days when programmers were
| all computer nerds. Specifically, it made the career very off-
| putting to anybody who _didn 't_ fit that stereotype. Any time
| you do that, you miss out on a lot of potential talent.
|
| Still, though. There were upsides. The passion level seemed
| higher. The climbing salaries attracted people solely attracted
| to... the climbing salaries.
|
| I'm tired of being treated like a fucking Martian because I
| understand basic data structures and why sometimes you might
| want to use a tree or some other computer science 101 shit.
| When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I
| know they likely won't be able to solve in the
| interview because I want to see how they think about
| things.
|
| Are you explicit about this when you pose the problems?
|
| I can see an upside to _not_ telling them. If they try to
| bullshit their way through an answer because they think a
| definitive answer is expected, I guess that could be a useful
| data point. But it feels mean and unethical.
|
| When I've done this as interviewer I've been pretty explicit.
| Like, "Hey, this is something we've been working our way
| through for months and we don't expect you to figure it out in
| ten minutes. But how might you approach this?"
|
| I have fairly limited experience as an interviewer so I'm
| curious how others have approached this.
| deanCommie wrote:
| You said it. Such mixed feelings.
|
| The reality is there was a sweet spot - when the industry got
| less toxic and started attracting visible minorities, and you
| started getting some diversity of thought AND passion.
|
| Then the money got too good and it started attracting the
| personalities that 10 years earlier would've become finance
| bros and caused the 2008 crash. And they fucked it all up.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Specifically, it made the career very off-putting to
| anybody who didn't fit that stereotype.
|
| That wasn't it. It's just that the position wasn't so highly
| paid back in the day and there was way less demand, so hardly
| anyone was even interested.
|
| The moment it became remotely attractive, the tech bros
| arrived.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Not buying this.
|
| People with good software skills had paths to making a lot
| of money from the day computers became widely available.
|
| Look at Woz in the 70s or Microsoft or the Macintosh team.
| From the birth of the PC revolution there was a path to
| getting rich from computer skills if you were in the right
| place at the right time.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Those were entrepreneurs, not regular engineers.
|
| My aunt's career as an IT engineer started in the 80s.
| She went into this field because it was a new niche to
| explore and hardly anyone knew their way around it.
|
| Her role was to take part in digitalisation of the bank
| she was working in and by "digitalisation" I mean first
| putting the equipment together.
| whstl wrote:
| I think it's way worse now with barely any upside but salary,
| compared to 10, 15 or 20 years ago.
|
| It's 100x worse with the tech bro chest thumping and the
| competitive toxic behaviors inside teams.
|
| And autonomy/ownership is now rock bottom with
| multidisciplinary teams. Even things made supposedly to
| empower devs like Agile/Scrum became tools of a managerial
| class that wants to decide where each pixel goes.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| > I try to give them problems
|
| What does it look like in a span of an hour?
| Cornbilly wrote:
| It usually amounts to asking only 2 or 3 questions and a lot
| of discussion. I honestly wouldn't mind if we only get
| through one question if it leads to good insight on the
| candidate.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| When I used to interview developers, I was more interested in
| how they approached problem solving and working collaboratively
| than attaining any correct answers.
|
| So I'd split the interview in two parts. The first bit I'd give
| them a set of requirements and ask them to come up with a
| design for it on their own. They had internet access and
| technical references available. It wasn't a memory test, and
| I'd leave the room (this probably wouldn't work well now given
| LLMs).
|
| In the second part, I'd ask them to talk me through their
| design, and then explain we were going to change the
| requirements and work together on altering it to accommodate
| them.
|
| The second bit was the most useful part of the interview; it's
| what we needed to do in the actual job, and pretty much
| everyone we hired in that process was good.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| The second part sounds like it would be good protection
| against LLM abuse -- if they don't actually understand their
| design, they'd be hard pressed to explain and adapt it with
| any fluency.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more
| than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI
|
| Even before AI, there were issues with super-polished leetcode
| grinders. Their entire skillset was passing FAANG interviews
| via memorization of correct solutions and scripted answers.
|
| An effective technique for identifying these cases leverages
| the fact that you can only have a "correct" answer memorized if
| optimal solutions exist. Fortunately, there are many common and
| relatively simple problems in computer science and software
| design that require reasoning from first principles because
| globally optimal solutions can't exist even in theory. Small
| changes to the problem constraints lead to wildly divergent
| design outcomes that are effectively not enumerable. The
| possible solution space is so large that you can't
| realistically memorize it even if the problem is relatively
| concise and well-understood. The pure leetcode grinders never
| seem to have studied problems without tidy answers.
|
| The answers don't even matter that much, I am always more
| interested in the demonstrated ability to recognize and reason
| through the implications of constraint changes when there are
| no correct answers. People with solid computer science skills
| can usually muddle their way through it, whereas many people
| with immaculate leetcode skills fail the most basic versions of
| this.
|
| The most important skill of juniors was demonstrating that they
| could effectively reason about and were motivated to dive into
| problems they had never seen before. These were always the
| juniors that could be rapidly developed into strong senior
| engineers, which is more or less the objective when you hire
| juniors.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| > The answers don't even matter that much, I am always more
| interested in the demonstrated ability to recognize and
| reason through the implications of constraint changes when
| there are no correct answers. People with solid computer
| science skills can usually muddle their way through it,
| whereas many people with immaculate leetcode skills fail the
| most basic versions of this.
|
| > The most important skill of juniors was demonstrating that
| they could effectively reason about and were motivated to
| dive into problems they had never seen before. These were
| always the juniors that could be rapidly developed into
| strong senior engineers, which is more or less the objective
| when you hire juniors.
|
| I agree 100%.
| adchurch wrote:
| Great idea re: giving hard problems. Same motivation behind why
| we ask people about past projects and keep diving deeper and
| deeper. The point is to figure out if they're curious & capable
| of engaging on a deeper level, vs. just following a tutorial
| they found somewhere.
| Balgair wrote:
| > I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the
| years go by (ie. less computer nerds).
|
| Ahh yes, the 'pre-med'ification of CS.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Well, the lacking passion could be explained because the most
| known tech companies aren't very attractive. They intentionally
| obfuscate any technology, restrict access and disallow
| experimentation.
|
| If you want to leech on the crowd that likes tinkering, you
| shouldn't give them some shitty iOS/Android environment and
| call it a day. For the industry, tinkering has become a
| security problem, scary warning boxes about unverified code
| being run on a piece of metal. How horrible! It is old and
| stagnant and just not that interesting.
|
| There are some alternative venues instead, but they have a
| focus elsewhere.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| That's a fair assessment. We're a fairly small company so
| there are less walls everywhere.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| They're already outsourcing it all to AI?
| znpy wrote:
| > I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the
| years go by (ie. less computer nerds).
|
| Ah, yes, the passion thing. I'm not being sarcastic, i see this
| as well.
|
| I saw the shift happening in the 2010s, and I attribute this to
| essentially two things:
|
| - social media and the glamourification of computer programming
| (and related things)
|
| - the startup craze of the early 2010s (everybody and their
| dogs wanted to develop an app or start up a company, and money
| was flowing left and right from more-or-less clueless
| investors).
|
| In a way, I'm happy that money is tight right now, deep down I
| hope the computer programming/science scene goes back to people
| driven by passion and money rather than just money.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The gap between juniors and seniors today is really not that big.
| I know a lot of people with senior in their title that are closer
| to a junior. Have them actually read the docs for a month
| straight, and a junior would know _more_ than a senior.
|
| Also, if you really want to hire a senior, and you can't compete
| on pay, maybe compete by going remote? Almost all the job
| listings I see are for hybrid roles. Do they realize they're just
| throwing away all the candidates in other cities? Are hiring
| managers/CEOs masochists?
| willvarfar wrote:
| Yeah see this all the time :(
|
| Senior is often about time in industry not competence. A lot of
| 'senior' engineers are completely ineffective and seemingly
| unable to ever become effective. They just joined the industry
| a while ago and are treading water and tricking the next hiring
| manager that they were called 'senior' at their last job so of
| course they are a 'senior' now. If they aren't applying for
| 'staff' level jobs.
|
| The correlation between being smart, getting things done,
| speeding everyone up, being trusted etc and 'seniority' is not
| causal :)
| carabiner wrote:
| The output of even junior mechanical engineers today would be
| considered mindblowing to the mechE's of 100 years ago, for
| similar reasons: computational tools have allowed an exponential
| increase in productivity.
| meow_mix wrote:
| As someone who has been hiring juniors recently. I disagree with
| pretty much all these points:
|
| Great juniors learn fast and search for feedback. It's easier to
| manage them. They want to improve and know what you think about
| their work.
|
| --> Very skeptical of this comment. It's harder to manage someone
| that needs managed so directly, period.
|
| Loyalty. engineers who you train from the beginning tend to stay
| longer. They understand your systems deeply and can mentor the
| next generation of junior engineers.
|
| --> They really don't. They're looking for a foot in the door.
|
| Higher ceiling. A motivated junior engineer often has more
| upside. You're getting someone at the beginning of their growth
| curve rather than the middle or end.
|
| --> Maybe? Tough to tell. They often leave.
|
| Juniors bring fresh energy to the team - they want to learn, and
| they have a drive to prove themselves and succeed. Their
| motivation can be contagious! The existing seniors in your team
| will enjoy working with smart and motivated developers.
|
| --> Not always. Most just want a job and are easily discouraged.
| Some are like this though.
|
| Juniors are not restricted by what they know. They haven't been
| trained to think "that's just how we do things." They'll not try
| to reuse the same technologies from previous companies, or
| recreate those 'amazing' design patterns that were useful only in
| a specific context. It's not just being AI-native, it's about
| having less resistance to change.
|
| --> This one I sort of agree with
| t-writescode wrote:
| > Maybe? Tough to tell. They often leave.
|
| In my experience working with juniors, the ones that look to
| leave are the ones that don't have their compensation
| appropriately adjusted as they rank up.
|
| Pay everyone well, treat them with respect. Challenge them, and
| give them raises and rank-ups as they gain tenure and skill
| (not when it's "in the budget, and oh sorry, we can only uprank
| one this year, but we hired a person at the higher level, so
| really we can't afford it. Try again later!"), and you'll have
| people that stay a long time
| Salgat wrote:
| If you're going to end up having to pay these people high
| salaries, why not hire a more senior person to begin with?
| t-writescode wrote:
| Because over 10 years, you'll have attrition in your
| seniors as they retire and you'll have juniors that have
| climbed the ranks and have built half the systems that are
| now juniors replacing them.
|
| And treating employees with respect the whole time builds
| an *incredible* amount of loyalty. You also get
| opportunities for your existing seniors to help grow new
| team-members, which some of them seek out, and so on.
| blindriver wrote:
| The point on loyalty made me laugh out loud. Loyalty has been
| dead both ways for over 10 years now. Millenials and Gen Z
| openly shared salary to help each other get more money. An
| average tenure at a company went from 2 years to 1 year as
| well.
|
| The idea that juniors are somehow more loyal is a pipe dream
| and a bald faced lie. Not that I blame them, employers have
| gotten much worse in the last 10 years as well, especially
| since the pull back in 2022 and most especially since AI. So
| neither employer nor employee is loyal anymore it's completely
| a free for all now.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I guess I'm lucky in having had a chance to work for several
| fantastic companies that treated me wonderfully for years and
| years.
|
| And we also raised up juniors, and paid them well. And our
| company had flat salaries, so everyone could easily figure
| everyone else's salary (and people didn't hide it, in fact we
| talked about it all the time).
|
| Again, treat your employees well, and they'll stay. Places
| *do* do this. And people *do* stay loyal and even come to
| companies because they hear how well they treat their
| workers.
| a96 wrote:
| I count myself lucky as well. I've been in a few great
| places. Also stuck in tolerable places for 5-10 year
| stretches because it's a paycheck.
|
| Sometimes people leave (for money or variety) but come
| back, because they realize other places were worse (despite
| the money). Sometimes they don't because they're afraid or
| tired. It varies. But yes, people often walk away from
| places that either treat them badly as a company or because
| they have coworkers that treat them badly. The reputation
| tends to stick, too, even though it doesn't often spread
| very far.
| alakep wrote:
| We love hiring junior engineers at https://yuzu.health/careers.
|
| Please apply or reach out to me over email: russell@yuzu.health.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Isn't your pay kind of low to be an in office job in NYC?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Not OP but that is market rate for a junior at a startup at
| their stage in NYC.
|
| Salary expectations are ridiculously out of whack among
| junior engineers.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Oh hey I work for an (old fashioned) TPA. I need to get some
| sleep but I might check this out tomorrow.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The pool is large, resumes don't differentiate => I have to talk
| to them to find the guy. I don't know how to do this efficiently.
| If you've got that skill, go right ahead. For my part, the rise
| in compensation has resulted in a lot of people who don't have
| any interest in the subject except as a tool to make dollars and
| they always run into dumb stuff like wrong documentation making
| them unable to act.
|
| Yeah the kernel docs say one thing but the kernel behaves
| differently. Just look at the source. It's open source, man.
| Won't do it without being told.
|
| If they don't care but will be persistent, fine. But if you can't
| work some basics, it's not worth it. And the correlation is near
| 1.0 because at least passion guy has something driving him to dig
| to next layer.
|
| Inevitably some sucker will hire him, give him some on the job
| experience and then I can pay more.
| jorl17 wrote:
| My comment will focus only on a subset of the article: the part
| regarding AI.
|
| While I agree with the sentiment that AI has changed the practice
| forever, and therefore it is pretty silly to forbid AI during
| interviews (much like it was always silly to me to forbid a
| candidate from googling something during an interview), I haven't
| really seen evidence that juniors with AI have faster onboarding
| times.
|
| Onboarding, to me, is about having the new team member adopt the
| existing team's practices, such as learning preferred code
| patterns, communication channels, established frameworks, and
| overall just getting to truly be a part of the team (tech and
| non-tech team).
|
| In that sense, AI has done very little to help. If, on one hand,
| AI can help us produce better documentation that will help with
| this process and studying existing libraries and practices
| better, on the other hand, AI also enables a new team member to
| seek others less early on (a point the article itself makes),
| which I believe makes the onboarding process (according to my
| definition) slower -- i.e. less communication = slower
| onboarding.
|
| As I mentioned, we can also relate onboarding to getting to know
| the codebase, in which case AI definitely helps (and as more code
| is written with proper AI engineering practices, it will help
| more), but I really feel that this is a small part of the
| equation.
|
| Similarly, I think getting to know the actual domain of a project
| (the users, the requirements, the 'language', the problems, etc.)
| is an important part of onboarding and, again, AI helps here, but
| not a whole lot. It's about people, not bits.
|
| Sure, if you hire a junior to get him to work straight away on a
| new project, the new hire will be "productive" faster (therefore
| seeming to have been "onboarded" faster) than before, because the
| AI does make them "go faster" than before, but I wouldn't say
| they were _really_ onboarded.
|
| Perhaps it's just a case of a different culture, a too-rigid
| definition of "quality", or just a different set of workplaces,
| but this has not been my experience at all. Most junior hires
| take at least 6-8 months to produce code with our standards of
| quality without a decent chunk of supervision. Even a junior with
| a very solid capability to think the system as a whole has a
| tendency to over-engineer or place code in the wrong places due
| to inexperience, which definitely affects their productivity.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| Orthogonal comment here but "onboarding" has always struck me
| as weird. I've only had 3 tech jobs in 15 years and may not
| need to get another one, but at every one I just showed up on
| day one and started doing things that people asked me to. Clone
| the repo, run it locally, deploy a change to dev, poke around
| at it, read some docs, do a little refactor or comment on other
| people's PR's. There is much to do. I don't get these people
| who show up and like.. don't do anything. Even if you do
| something dumb and have your PR ready for review EOD it's all
| good. I have never seen the effort that goes into these
| mountains of onboarding docs that some of my coworkers have pay
| off, I just pair with the new people and we solve things and
| they learn.
| blindriver wrote:
| Another "here are the 5 easy steps to hiring a great engineer"
| post, said confidently but with zero empirical evidence that his
| techniques actually work.
|
| There is nothing more useless than posts that purport how to hire
| effectively but offer no data.
| rurban wrote:
| We don't hire juniors, just seniors. For juniors we do have AI.
| They have crazy ideas, like shooting sparrows with cannons. Eg
| using terraform for a setting up a static repo hosting website.
| Or kubernetes for a GNU parallel job.
|
| Very ambitious, yes. Overly ambitious. It's called massive
| overengineering
| nextworddev wrote:
| The real pro tip: hire someone with 2-3 years of experience
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| This article feels a little suspect. They beat the AI drum a bit
| hard. So I go to https://workweave.dev and of course their
| business model is tied up with LLMs.
| yeputons wrote:
| > We focus on system design, architectural decisions, and
| reasoning through trade-offs.
|
| Are we still talking about hiring juniors? I hope I misunderstood
| and it's not about "design messaging app" type of questions.
| Otherwise we're firmly back in the Leetcode land.
| pmg101 wrote:
| Remember Joel Spolsky' guide to hiring [0]? 1.
| Smart 2. Gets things done
|
| Personally I think the junior/senior distinction is overstated.
| Yes, experience does count for something. But it comes a distant
| third on the list to the two Joel mentions.
|
| [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-
| guid...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Hiring too many _junior_ engineers is killing companies...
|
| ...although this is a fault of management, not the juniors. I 've
| seen the following at two companies:
|
| - Large, complex codebases
|
| - Management hires a bunch of juniors because they're cheaper
|
| - The juniors "move fast and break things" and write a lot of
| extremely high tech debt code
|
| - Management, lacking the ability or will to understand tech
| debt, think these juniors are productive because they see short-
| term productivity but cannot understand the medium- and long-term
| ramifications
|
| - The juniors, not knowing better, don't realize the damage
| they're causing (again, not their fault)
|
| - At some point the juniors outnumber the seniors and the
| lunatics are running the asylum. (More politically crafty seniors
| utilize this to their advantage and cultivate fiefdoms of
| juniors)
|
| I am of course speaking in generalities. There are amazing
| juniors and terrible seniors. I have been in this career long
| enough to see the same things over and over, so I stand by my
| generalizations. However... I have also seen enough exceptions to
| know that you can't judge pre-judge any _particular individual_
| by "years of experience" or any other metric.
| porker wrote:
| When companies hire more senior engineers is the quality of
| software produced increasing and delivery time decreasing?
|
| It's a good time to see if bodies or experience matters more.
| neilv wrote:
| > _" [...] it'll take juniors too long to ramp up"_
|
| I think unsaid about a version of that belief is "... and, after
| expensive ramp-up including mentoring, they'll probably job-hop
| for a better salary, or better company, before the company sees
| payoff."
|
| It's not just latency on payoff, but risk of any payoff at all.
|
| > _"...interns bring [...] "_
|
| "...a relatively low-cost way to evaluate a candidate hire, and
| then, if they show promise, you have their attention to make them
| an offer for a real job."
|
| Given how hard tech companies find vetting candidates (e.g., many
| still cling to Leetcode and what school someone went to), and the
| demands of post-ZIRP on effectiveness, interns (and expecting to
| spend more on mentoring than the interns produce in value) are
| one solution for finding good future junior hires.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| It takes 1 to 3 years to train new generic skilled grads on
| average.
|
| A company initially typically loses $35k to $140k in resources to
| train a Junior to be minimally useful. Thus, most ponder if a
| hire is going to have a career long enough on a team to offset
| that liability.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
|
| In general, entry level gigs have a narrow scope of skills for
| many reasons, as managers know people plan to jump ship sooner or
| later. Staffing agencies have a feed queue for these roles in a
| large firm, and simply maintain the churn.
|
| Good luck, =3
| yaur wrote:
| The thing is its much harder to higher a good junior dev. With a
| senior dev i can ask about the [hardest/most interesting/thing
| you would like to talk about] bug and talk through how they
| solved it to understand how their brain works.
|
| With a Jr you basically need to spend an hour pair programming to
| sus out the great ones and no one has yet put in the time to
| filter out the bottom X0%.
| flustercan wrote:
| Junior engineers should spend half their time doing customer
| support.
|
| It allows them to provide meaningful value to the company without
| needing to code, it shows them a customer first approach to the
| product, it teaches them empathy for users and the CS team. It
| also teaches them repro/debugging skills.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Look for passion and curiosity. You want the ones who light up
| when talking about their projects. They should show real
| excitement about the problems they 've solved. These
| conversations should be energizing for both of you!_
|
| Interview prep tells candidates to fake "passion" and (now)
| "curiosity".
|
| (The prep materials don't say to fake it, but they will phrase it
| implying that that's the truth, and that it's something that
| interviewers look for. The prep might give examples of when to be
| sure to "convey your passion", such as when discussing a project
| you worked on.)
|
| The net result is that interview prep materials, and companies
| that select for that, end up selecting for people who will go
| through the motions of appearances. Which is OK if you are a
| stodgy huge company sitting on its laurels, that wants everyone
| to be a compliant worker drone, more than they want excellence.
| Not OK if you're a startup that really needs to execute with more
| than worker-drone capabilities.
|
| Maybe an interviewer seeking _genuine_ "passion" and "curiosity"
| would be better off giving points to someone who seems to have
| skills but _didn 't_ seem to have done interview prep, since they
| must have gotten that far by being genuine and non-drone?
| adchurch wrote:
| If you keep asking questions eventually you hit something they
| don't actually know. How long it takes to get there + what they
| say when they get there is what makes this interesting imo!
| zkmon wrote:
| Not very long ago, the real reason smart managers, in consulting
| firms, hired juniors by boat loads, though they are not very
| skilled, is because the young staff has other compensating
| qualities.
|
| The work these companies had was quite irregular, unstructured
| and unexpected as well. This demands a workforce that is very
| flexible, work over nights, can learn fast, can switch to any
| work easily (they are not stuck to a single kind of work role).
| Juniors wore many hats easily as situation demanded (faking
| included). They are also very mobile, can travel to a client site
| in any country. Most of them are singles. Feed them, do team
| outings, reward them and give gadgets (my team got first version
| of iPods free). They would give 50 hour weeks plus weekends. They
| hardly have any life outside of office. Sometimes they slept at
| office.
|
| Also, the young workforce has a high team-bonding nature
| (romances included, intentionally). This makes them very good
| team players. What a manager means by "team player" is, they work
| for team goals, with poorly defined roles and tasks, without
| complaining.
|
| There were a few seniors who review and guide the work, but the
| bulk of work was done by very mediocre, hard-working junior
| staff. When things go wrong, managers are ready to do crisis
| management and shuffle their young worker crowd across teams.
|
| In other industries they are called MSGs: multi-skilled-gangs.
| These are very fluid work force. They don't know what kind of
| work will assigned to them on a certain day. It can be anything,
| from taking a support call, arranging lunch or pub party for the
| team, writing some html, testing some UI, giving a presentation
| to clients.
|
| Undefined work requires undefined roles and employees that aren't
| yet married to certain work role, life style, or other person.
| adchurch wrote:
| Author here, great to see all the conversation & thoughts you all
| have shared so far!
|
| One thing I've seen a lot of people saying: hiring juniors isn't
| worth it because they'll just leave for more money in a couple
| years.
|
| I got hired with 0 experience for my first job and stayed for 3.5
| years (I left when I decided to start my own company). I was
| otherwise never tempted to leave because I got all the support
| and growth opportunities I could have hoped for, and I always
| felt fairly compensated.
|
| So based on my own experience, it's possible for a company to
| treat people well enough that they won't just leave. I do think
| software companies tend to be bad at this specific thing though -
| I'd imagine many have had an experience unlike my own.
| 0rdinal wrote:
| From my experience, junior's tend to churn out after around
| three years. There are often factors that go beyond whether
| they felt they were treated well. Looking at it holistically,
| younger people tend to want to move around more. It is no
| surprise to me that the average tenure of a junior employee is
| about the same length as a degree - separating life stages in
| to 1-3 year periods is a mindset embedded into young people
| throughout their education.
|
| I would wager that perception plays heavily into this too. It
| can be difficult to shake a perception of "being a junior",
| especially when the path to seniority is unclear or poorly
| defined. Plus, the "two years and disappear" ethos of job
| hopping for quicker compensation capitalises on companies'
| conservative promotion criteria (and more liberal hiring
| criteria). Loyalty is rarely rewarded in these cases.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Also, as the unemployment rate for CS grads goes up, they are
| probably less likely to leave than in the past.
| EZ-E wrote:
| This has been driving me crazy, at my mid sized company, higher
| management insists pretty hard in only hiring senior/staff. But
| to be honest we are far from solving novel, challenging technical
| problems. Inevitably we hire (expensive) super senior people who
| end up having responsibilities that do not match their level in
| tech and also in product. The good ones that want a challenge
| leave after ~1y. Junior or mid level would be a better fit in
| many cases. When I look at the job descriptions I find them
| ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what
| actually happens in the company. In the past when we hired
| junior, mid level engineers they ramped up pretty well, their
| salaries went up and they are still with us.
| wiether wrote:
| > When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously
| inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually
| happens in the company.
|
| At every company at work to, each time there was openings for
| the team I worked in, I read the job descriptions and I was
| like: "I would never apply for this position, I'm not
| qualified".
|
| So I asked HR to lower the expectations, otherwise we would
| never find candidates. They told me that it was to avoid
| inexperienced people to apply. And then 99% of the candidates
| they pushed and I interviewed lied on their XP.
|
| Good stuff!
| domq wrote:
| The technical term is "recession"
| a96 wrote:
| _In small startups - "we are a very small team and we don't have
| time to mentor juniors, we need engineers who will be very
| productive from day 1 "_
|
| _In medium-sized companies - "we are going to grow very fast, we
| need engineers who can handle scale and have faced such
| challenges before "_
|
| _In big companies - "our infrastructure is super complex, it'll
| take juniors too long to ramp up "._
|
| Seeing things like this, I pretty much always hear "We don't know
| what we're doing and want to find someone who does and will make
| us make money fast".
| fatih-erikli-cg wrote:
| My experience, real work is what a junior dev does, without an
| exception. Senior developer creates over-engineered version of
| what junior dev made.
|
| Senior devs gibber about database systems, sql, nosql,
| clustering, etc. The real work storing the input in text file,
| querying with a simple loop.
|
| Plus there is an additional huge misconception in industry, if
| something is realtime, it is a senior dev thing. It is something
| like a plague.
| slekker wrote:
| TCO and YOE?
| fatih-erikli-cg wrote:
| I don't understand these acronyms.
| slekker wrote:
| Sorry, Total compensation (salary + equity) and years of
| experience
| poshmosh wrote:
| I have 14 YOE and its the opposite. Really brilliant jrs don't
| have the experience to know the consequences of their designs,
| they build fast under pressure. They reinvent things that
| already exist (they don't know because they a Junior).
|
| Seniors have PTSD and push back.
| alphazard wrote:
| The biggest hiring hack for junior engineers is to hire the ones
| that have already been programming for a decade, and are called
| "junior" because they recently graduated university.
|
| The junior/senior language is corporate-speak to equate
| everyone's value to "years of service" in industry or at a
| company. Obviously that's not how competency works, and if you
| are serious about hiring competent people, you should mostly
| ignore it. It's useful for listings, it is common terminology
| after all, but it's not semantically or descriptively useful.
| runeblaze wrote:
| Yea experience is very useful (it is very hard to exert
| influence without power and be the tech lead of a team unless
| you have some corporate experience) but at some point one needs
| to realize that if someone was writing Haskell at the age of 12
| and they got decent scores at USACO they would make quite a
| decent engineer...
| Axol wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons. People will prioritize selfish, short-
| term gains by taking from a finite pool of resources at the
| expense of long-term sustainability for everyone.
| zygentoma wrote:
| Completely off-topic: How cool is that the headline text gets
| outlined when selected!
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