[HN Gopher] The Junior Hiring Crisis
___________________________________________________________________
The Junior Hiring Crisis
Author : mooreds
Score : 186 points
Date : 2025-12-02 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (people-work.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (people-work.io)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal"
| her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks
| will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions
| (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself).
|
| _> The most common answer from students when asked what they
| needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years
| ago, a surprising and heartening answer._
|
| Mentoring is difficult; especially in today's world, where we are
| taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone
| that we work with, as competitors.
|
| For myself, I'm happily retired from the Rodent Rally, and find
| that LLMs have been a _huge_ help, when learning new stuff.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I think I would also ad to the mix that young folk these days
| are incredibly overconfident and averse to criticism. A few
| years back they got a junior dev in here, and I was supposed to
| help him get on our stack, and ultimately mentor him.
|
| This kid would not accept seniority, would constantly and
| publicly try to divert from the stack we worked with, he would
| not take any input on his work without actively fighting the
| process and will crowd the conversation at team meetings with
| never-ending Reddit-tier takes that contributed to nothing
| other than fill his ego.
|
| In the end I managed to convince my boss to get him out, and he
| now works in Cyber, which will probably cause even more damage
| in the long run, but at least I can now say "not my problem".
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > young folk these days
|
| You should have stopped to think about why such a person was
| hired in the first place, while there are an endless supply
| of very talented, hard working, and honest young people who
| would never be given a chance at all.
|
| But if I guess right, hiring is not seen as the
| responsibility of your company. And that's the core of the
| problem.
| shinjitsu wrote:
| Sometimes people who are able to talk a lot do quite well
| in interviews - and University students need to be exposed
| to a wide variety of topics, but rarely support large
| projects for a long time, so that wouldn't be something
| that would come up in an interview.
| elric wrote:
| > especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise
| older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work
| with, as competitors
|
| What world is this? This not match my experiences at all. Is
| this a common sentiment among your peers?
| silisili wrote:
| It matches mine as well. People will pretend to be your best
| friend, but when push comes to shove, they will absolutely
| throw you under the bus. And maybe that's human nature, but I
| don't have it in me.
|
| The people who will give you credit where it's due and lift
| you in my experience are more rare than not, and almost
| always an older member, which perhaps is because they don't
| feel the need to prove themselves as much anymore.
|
| Despising older folks has been a thing a long time, made
| famous by Zuck starting out. Now that he's older, I wonder if
| he still feels the same way...
| shinjitsu wrote:
| >Despising older folks has been a thing a long time, made
| famous by Zuck starting out.
|
| and before that is was hippies with "Don't trust anyone
| over 30" which became deeply ingrained in at least American
| culture.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yup.
|
| The difference, this time, is the CEO is now a younger
| person, when they used to always be someone in at least
| their forties (more often fifties or sixties).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > where we are taught to despise older folks
|
| 9 times out of 10 it goes the other way around. Most young
| people have only had very negative interactions with their
| seniors, which has been wholly on the part of the senior. The
| current young generation is very respectful towards older
| people.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> The current young generation is very respectful towards
| older people._
|
| This has not been my experience.
|
| I worked for a company that prized seniority, and I regularly
| dealt with folks older than me, more experienced than me,
| more capable than me, and willing to help me out. I worked
| there for almost 27 years, and it was _awesome_.
|
| In my experience, I'm usually written off as an "OK Boomer,"
| before I've even had a chance to open my mouth to prove it
| (or not).
|
| My fave, is when we have a really promising text-only
| relationship, then, the minute they see me, it goes south.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| People skills are so important, I agree. Intergenerational
| people skills are _especially_ important; in most things that
| matter, the old guard are the ones keeping their eye on the
| younger hires, pattern matching what they see over months of
| observation to who they 've seen succeed before.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| The most frustrating thing about this whole junior position
| drought is how it simultaneously affects those who are passionate
| and _get it_ , not only the opportunist bootcamp alumni who were
| lured by the prospect of high earnings.
|
| If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
| ge96 wrote:
| /r/cscareerquestions the horror eg. applied to 2000 jobs got 1
| offer
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Honestly, with the AI slop of resumes, I applied to dozens of
| jobs, and only got a callback to ones I had either a
| recruiter for or direct connections to, after 20 years of
| experience. Because I didn't have a big fat "worked at google
| for 10 years" on my resume. And I'd like to think of myself
| as someone who can take a very bad situation and make it look
| smooth.
| ge96 wrote:
| Other than Indeed/Hired all my other roles were from
| recruiters, I don't have a degree so it's harder for me to
| get a job application wise, at least now I have the 6 yrs+
| experience which isn't a lot but better than 0
|
| Will say what's gotten me hired are my projects eg.
| robotics or getting published online for hardware stuff, I
| work in the web-cloud space primarily though, hardware
| would be cool but hard to make that jump
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Even _with_ 10 years of google on my resume I got
| absolutely zero non-automated responses for all the jobs I
| applied to after being laid off a few months back (I 'm
| working again). Connections from my network and recruiter
| reach-outs were the only real leads.
|
| But looking back on my 30 years of working (including in
| high school), every job I've ever had I got through
| personal referrals or recruiter reach-outs. I've gotten to
| interviews before but never actually taken a job without a
| personal connection.
| mooreds wrote:
| > If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
|
| I feel that too. I am a self-taught dev. Got a degree, but not
| in CS. I don't know if I could get hired today.
|
| Not sure how to fix it; feels like the entire industry is
| eating the seed corn.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Want to stand out in a world where all the job applications are
| AI slop? Network. The original kind.
|
| Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human
| relationships matter.
| dkdcio wrote:
| genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if
| you're a new grad
|
| where do you network? what do you network with these other
| humans on?
|
| I do think I could get a job from my network because I've
| worked in the industry for years and done good work; I'm a
| little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at
| least ignore those LinkedIn requests
| rsaz wrote:
| - share your work online (twitter used to be the far-and-away
| best place for getting eyes, but this is a bit less clear
| now. youtube can work well, maybe also tiktok or sites like
| medium?)
|
| - go to events/conventions/join clubs related to programming
| (need to be located near a large city for this)
|
| - talk to other students/self-learners and wait for them to
| get to the next step
|
| I've been unemployed a long time and have been thinking of
| improving at networking. These are what I came up with.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If you're a junior, develop connections with a few seniors.
|
| If you're a senior, maintain relations with last year's
| graduating class (and with your placement services people).
|
| If you get an internship, keep in touch with people there.
| the_snooze wrote:
| For anyone still in school, networking is easy for students
| _who take initiative_. This doesn 't mean going to networking
| events. It means actually doing things with actual people:
| get involved in undergraduate research, sports, arts, Greek
| life, volunteering, on-campus part-time jobs, etc.
| Universities have those low-barrier low-risk things going on
| that you can just try out. Students who do this get the
| inside track on opportunities that aren't broadly advertised,
| so they face far less competition and are likely better fits
| for those opportunities due to the experience they got by
| being involved.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Stop applying for jobs and get involved in Greek life,
| sports, arts and working part time in the cafe serving
| food? You will meet so many people who are involved in your
| field and you get labelled as something other than a
| programmer.
|
| This is terrible advice. Apply, cold call, create projects,
| job fairs, get co-op opportunties and ambush are better
| ways. Hackathons, github projects or small businesses can
| help. 9/10 CEOs will ignore your cold outreach but some
| won't.
|
| Getting too busy making friends at the Greek houses will
| land you a marketing role if you are lucky. People need to
| associate you wish your craft. If they know you as a social
| guy you will get social roles. Any developer too social is
| suspect for many and ends up at best a pm.
|
| When I was coming up people went into
| hardware/certifications to bridge the gap but moving from
| hardware to software was a gap too big for many as they
| became typecast.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| The other responders have it: forego the "networking" apps
| like LinkeIn. (It's really just a graph analysis tool for
| salespeople.). Do thinks with actual face-to-face connection.
| That's what will make you stand out.
|
| If you are a new grad: go to alumni events. Go to alumni
| events! GO TO ALUMNI EVENTS.
|
| If you are still in school: talk to your alumni and career
| office; they will be able to connect you better.
|
| If you are in High School: consider a university with a co-op
| program.
|
| The value of fact-to-face connection should not be
| underestimated.
|
| Again: this may be uncomfortable for some people, but it is
| the way of the world.
| ah979 wrote:
| Full disclosure, I'm the original author of the post.
|
| Unfortunately, if you network to get a job, you're already
| months behind.
|
| As I talk to college kids, I try to get them to find
| opportunities to network while they're in school, before
| they're desperate to get that first internship or job. They
| want to come at their search from a place of confidence, not
| anxiety.
|
| There are so many meetups at universities (at least at the
| one near me) that they can mingle with the working world, and
| they stand out because they're there when it's mostly
| professionals.
|
| Student or not, networking works best in-person when possible
| (conferences, meetups, professional events) where you get to
| know people and get truly curious about them. But after that,
| it involves following up and keeping the relationships warm,
| showing that you are interested in people professionally and
| can possibly help them with their problems, and that's no
| trivial investment.
|
| If you do that enough, then you will build trust and rapport
| to create some opportunities, but it's admittedly a long
| game. It also has to be genuine or else people end up feeling
| used.
|
| I think that there is a blocker that a lot of people have
| against networking in general because it feels gross and
| insincere. We've all seen people do it poorly, and so we
| avoid it, but it can be really fulfilling if done well.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| It's not a good advice for someone who needs a job right
| now. It's a good advice if you already have a job and are
| looking for better opportunities.
| ah979 wrote:
| I agree. For people that need a job right now, attending
| events to broaden your network could work, but first try
| to connect with people already in your network that you
| have established trusting professional relationships
| with. Preferably, you've talked to them recently and you
| have a good rapport, otherwise, it may not come across
| well.
|
| I have had so many people reach out to me out of the blue
| when they're looking for job, after literally leaving me
| on read in LinkedIn DMs. And giving them the benefit of
| the doubt, I meet with them and try to help them out, and
| then I never hear from them again after they find a job.
| It doesn't feel great, which is why I always suggest
| being intentional about nurturing your close professional
| relationships. It doesn't have to be anything grand; just
| being kind and courteous goes a long way.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| IMO, the first thing to recognize with networking is that
| there are at least 3 tiers of people you know, with regards
| to their ability to help in your job hunt. Tier 1 are the
| people who know your technical ability, and can directly
| vouch for you being a good contributor in your role. These
| people are great to have, but new grads simply don't have
| them, for the most part. Most of the people able to directly
| vouch for their competency are their equally looking-for-work
| peers, or pretty distant from industry professors. Tier 2 are
| the people who know _you_ well enough to assert that you 're
| not an absolute pain to be around. They don't necessarily
| know whether you're a genius double-stack 12x developer or a
| codemonkey, but they know you're reasonably likeable. Then
| there's Tier 3, who don't know anything about you personally,
| but they know people who know you.
|
| New grads (myself included, back then), tend to discount Tier
| 2, because in their head the hiring process is looking for
| the single applicant with the best technical skills. When in
| reality, it's a lot more of a "who can we get quickly, who
| won't have a negative impact on team output or morale".
| Parents, Parent's friends, friends, and friend's parents all
| can fall into Tier 2, and absolutely should asked about
| whether their workplaces are hiring, and if so, if they could
| provide a recommendation.
|
| Tier 3 is mostly useful for finding out about positions that
| don't necessarily get publicized, but depending on mutual
| connection to the shared acquaintance, might be willing to
| offer a recommendation.
|
| With regards to where to network, that comes down to engaging
| with social gatherings that bring together a spread of people
| _that aren 't exclusively your direct peers_. That's the
| stumbling block a lot of new grads find themselves in, which
| is that all their social time is spent with other new grads
| (or worse still, nobody at all). Clubs, parties thrown by
| friends' parents, university alumni events, hell, join the
| Oddfellows (YMMV, some lodges stopped recruiting after
| Vietnam). Conferences, _whether technical or not_. Hell, a
| step I recommend for everyone is going to bars and talking to
| strangers. Not highest density networking opportunity (except
| some gay bars in SF), but it 's a pretty good environment to
| practice casual communication with people you have
| approximately nothing in common with, with very low stakes.
| rmah wrote:
| your professors. your classmates who got a job. your family
| and friends of family. anyone else you know that respects
| you.
| lordnacho wrote:
| People are free to network right here on HN, and they do. I
| placed a friend I found here with another friend, so it does
| work.
|
| However, it takes time.
|
| If you need a job right now, it won't happen via ordinary
| networking, by which I mean networking with people whose job
| isn't recruitment.
|
| If you think of networking as a pleasant way to keep some
| interesting ideas flowing and making some friends,
| circulation will get you things that you never even thought
| of.
|
| (The best professional recruiters actually stir the pot for
| years and years before getting a return. Constantly keeping
| up with what various people are doing, just in case the time
| is right for someone to move on.)
|
| I'm actually a bit surprised, because as a young guy I didn't
| do any networking beyond connecting with colleagues, which
| certainly helped. But I'm finding lots of young guys will
| reach out to me for advice. It's a good habit, but one I
| suspect more than half the population doesn't practice.
| CSSer wrote:
| This article talks a lot about AI, but what I find odd is that in
| my relatively short (but long enough) ~9 yr career so far, this
| problem predates AI. I don't deny that it exacerbates it, but you
| don't kill a disease by addressing the symptoms. From the first
| time I was ever involved in the hiring process, senior leadership
| always encouraged me to hire more experienced staff, always most
| heavily scrutinized juniors, and had negotiations fall through
| with mid-level candidates the most. This was despite juniors
| passing technical screens with strong showings. This was not at a
| Fortune 500. This was a micro-cap subsidiary of a private,
| billion dollar company.
|
| And although it hasn't discouraged me, I have to admit that I've
| been burned by juniors when caught in the middle between them and
| senior leadership on output expectations or strategy because
| frankly it's much more challenging to mentor how to navigate
| company politics than it is to mentor professional coding acumen.
| I want to be humble here. I don't think that's the junior's
| fault.
|
| It feels like these problems go a lot deeper than AI. Most shops
| want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes
| that you insert rough instructions into and get working software
| as output or an outsourced team. We've all experienced this. It
| seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so
| hard to mentor or hire juniors.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Yes, AI isn't helping but the corporate world has been doing
| this for decades! Junior devs are second class citizens
| internally. I don't blame them for moving on after a few years.
| CSSer wrote:
| I guess I should clarify too: I don't believe in junior
| titles. They handicap people into the position you describe
| where they must move on to progress. When I describe "junior"
| above, I generally mean a candidate with <=1.5 years of
| experience. When I say mid I mean any amount of experience
| greater but not senior according to technical review. And
| yep, I know this is not the best heuristic because there are
| definitely people with no working experience who have mid-
| senior coding skills (although they're rare). I think that's
| sort of part of the problem too. Senior management is
| disincentived from understanding the roles and growth
| trajectories, so our heuristics for hiring are totally warped
| and stomped on.
| ah979 wrote:
| You're not wrong! I'm the original author of the post, and yes,
| I've seen this trend for years now, too, but I was using those
| two research studies that I cited as the basis of the article,
| so I started looking at it from that lens. I think the problems
| go deeper than AI, too, which is why I touched on corporate
| incentives. Ultimately, my goal was just for teams to think
| about how it could benefit them to invest in juniors and for
| college students to know that they need to prepare for a
| challenging ride if they're majoring in an AI-adopting field.
| CSSer wrote:
| We may have some things in common. I'm not a mom, but I am a
| woman. And I don't want to assume the same is true for you,
| but breaking into this industry was difficult for me, so even
| without children, I'm really invested in the ability for
| juniors to succeed too. I wish I had responded more directly
| to your article rather than my general ennui. I really admire
| your willingness to write this. I hope it gets broad
| engagement, because I think these problems seem obvious to us
| but based on private conversations I've had with some
| industry peers in very senior director roles the drying of
| junior opportunities for growth is not readily obvious to
| them. I'm going to have to think more about the corporate
| incentives you mentioned, because reading that in the
| article, it feels deeper to me, and I think that's what I was
| trying to get at by sharing my past company details.
|
| I think you succeeded overall at your goal! Thanks for
| replying. You encouraged me to go back and read your article
| more closely.
| ah979 wrote:
| I appreciate the positive feedback. :) And yes, I was a
| career changer, so it was difficult for me to break into
| tech, too, so it feels a bit personal for that reason, as
| well.
| skatanski wrote:
| I agree. I wonder if it's a mix of fully remote work being
| popular some time ago and the amount of tech one has to know
| now increasing (DBs, backend, frontend, cloud, observability,
| security, etc.). When hiring remotely, people naturally try to
| find candidates who are very communicative, have a high level
| of ownership, and can work with or without clear requirements
| and without oversight. That latter set of traits is often
| associated with senior developers rather than juniors.
| Herring wrote:
| We're still in the early days. It's gonna get a lot worse, if the
| LLM scaling laws are to be believed.
|
| https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
| avidiax wrote:
| This isn't the first time that the industry has foot-gunned
| itself.
|
| The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of
| those developers comes to mind.
|
| Even before LLMs, there were periods recently where multiple
| companies had "senior only" hiring policies. That just inflated
| what "senior" was until it was basically 5 years of experience.
|
| This time seems a bit different, however. There are both supply
| and demand side problems. The supply of students it tainted with
| AI "learning" now. Colleges haven't realized that they absolutely
| have to effectively crack down on AI, or the signal of their
| degrees will wither to nothing. The demand side is also low, of
| course, since the candidates aren't good, and AI seems to be a
| good substitute for a newly graduated hire, especially if that
| hire is just going to use the AI badly.
| viraptor wrote:
| > The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack
| of those developers comes to mind.
|
| So the irony here is that LLMs are actually going to be decent
| at COBOL by default. And other uncommon/esoteric codebases. For
| example I vibe-ported some Apple ii assembly to modern C/SDL
| and... it works. It's stuff that I just wouldn't even attempt
| at manual development speed. It may be actually an easier path
| than training someone to do things, as long as you have a large
| enough test suite or detailed enough requirements.
| hex4def6 wrote:
| > We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now
| AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I
| referenced above cited the same thing - AI is getting good at
| automating junior work while only augmenting senior work. So the
| evidence doesn't show that AI is going to replace everyone; it's
| just removing the apprenticeship ladder.
|
| Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we came
| to the same conclusion. You used to be able to make yourself
| useful by doing the easy / annoying tasks that had to be done,
| but more senior people didn't want to waste time dealing with. In
| exchange you got on-the-job experience, until you were able to
| handle more complex tasks and grow your skill set. AI means that
| those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less
| immediate value in hiring a new grad.
|
| I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt
| (5 years?); mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a
| hole behind that can't be filled internally. It's almost like the
| aftermath of a war killing off 18-30 year olds leaving a
| demographic hole, or the effect of covid on education for certain
| age ranges.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be
| felt (5 years?);
|
| Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see
| what happens. I think the role of software development will
| change so much those years of technical experience as a senior
| won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel
| like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of
| the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good,
| plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough.
| Well now you get to read it. ;)
|
| While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend
| drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or
| God forbid weeks, solved in minutes usually, sometimes maybe
| an hour if its obscure enough. You just have to feed the
| model enough context, full stack trace, every time.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| > Well now you get to read it.
|
| Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on
| a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put
| effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I
| just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh,
| cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before
| they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test
| suite he just sends the PR.
|
| I'd worry less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the
| preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the
| tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the
| logic issues.
| HaroldCindy wrote:
| We need to develop new etiquette around submitting AI-
| generated code for review. Using AI for code generation
| is one thing, but asking other people review something
| that you neither wrote nor read is inconsiderate of their
| time.
| daheza wrote:
| I'm getting AI generated product requirements that they
| haven't read themselves. It is so frustrating. Random
| requirements like "this service must have a response time
| of 5s or less" - "A retry mechanism must be present". We
| have a specific SLA already for response time and the
| designs don't have a retry mechanism built.
|
| The bad product managers have become 10x worse because
| they just generate AI garbage to spray at the engineering
| team. We are now writing AI review process for our user
| stories to counter the AI generation of the product team.
| I'd much rather spend my time building things than having
| AI wars between teams.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and
| testers of the output
|
| which means either devs will take over architectural roles
| (which already exist and are filled) or architects will
| take over dev roles. same goes for testing/QA - these are
| already positions within the industry in addition to being
| hats that we sometimes put on out of necessity or personal
| interest.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I've seen Product Manager / Technical Program Manager
| types leaning into using AI to research what's involved
| in a solution, or even fix small bugs themselves. Many of
| these people have significant software experience
| already.
|
| This is _mostly_ a good thing provided you have a clear
| separation between solution exploration and actually
| shipping software - as the extra work put into
| productionizing a solution may not be obvious or familiar
| to someone who can use AI to identify a bugfix candidate,
| but might not know how we go about doing pre-release
| verification.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and
| testers of the output
|
| Which stands to reason you'll need less of them. I'm really
| hoping this somehow leads to an explosion of new companies
| being built and hiring workers , otherwise - not good for
| us.
| phantasmish wrote:
| > Which stands to reason you'll need less of them.
|
| Depends on how much demand there would be for somewhat-
| cheaper software. Human hours taken could well remain the
| same.
|
| Also depends on whether this approach leads to a whole
| lot of badly-fucked projects that companies can't do
| without and have to hire human teams to fix...
| jackschultz wrote:
| This is what I'm doing, Opus 4.5 for personal projects and
| to learn the flow and what's needed. Only thing I'll
| disagree with is how the work takes similar amount of time
| because I'm finding it unbelievably faster. It's crazy how
| with smart planning and documentation that we can do with
| the agents, getting markdown files etc, they can write the
| code better and faster than I can as a senior dev. No
| question.
|
| I've found Opus 4.5 as a big upgrade compared to any of the
| other models. Big step up and the minor issues that were
| annoying and I needed to watch out for with Sonnet and
| GPT5.1.
|
| It's to the point where I'm on the side of, if the models
| are offline or I run out of tokens for the 5 hour window or
| the week (with what I'm paying now), there's kind of no use
| of doing work. I can use other models to do planning or
| some review, but then wait until I'm back with Opus 4.5 to
| do the code.
|
| It still absolutely requires review from me and planning
| before writing the code, and this is why there can be some
| slop that goes by, but it's the same as if you have a
| junior and they put in weak PRs. Difference is much quicker
| planning which the models help with, better implementation
| with basic conventions compared to juniors, and much easier
| to tell a model to make changes compared to a human.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > This is what I'm doing, Opus 4.5 for personal projects
| and to learn the flow and what's needed. Only thing I'll
| disagree with is how the work takes similar amount of
| time because I'm finding it unbelievably faster.
|
| I guess it depends on the project type, in some cases
| like you're saying way faster. I definitely recognize
| I've shaved weeks off a project, and I get really nuanced
| and Claude just updates and adjusts.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Can you post a repo so we can see what it's generating?
| devin-2030 wrote:
| We might need a lot of young adults for war in the near future,
| according to some.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| Larger scale war happens when the lives of young people are
| more valuable as fodder for the war machine than in a field
| or behind a desk.
| asdff wrote:
| "automate it away" ironically still requires a human in the
| chain to determine what to automate, how, and to maintain that
| automation. Whether it be derived from an ai or a systemd
| script or an Antikythera mechanism. Now if you leave that to
| seniors you just ate a big chunk of their day playing shephard
| to a dozen plus "automated" pipelines while they still have
| stuff to do outside the weeds. Now you need more seniors and
| pretty soon they want triple what you could pay a junior and I
| don't think they are 3x more prolific if the junior is managed
| efficiently quite frankly.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The process of setting up and maintaining automation should
| be less labor intensive than just doing it manually (or else
| why would you automate it?) and almost always requires a more
| advanced skillset than doing the manual task.
| mooreds wrote:
| Required XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1205/
| xhrpost wrote:
| > AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so
| there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.
|
| Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it
| still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not
| only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but
| someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks.
| Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to
| instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get
| more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the
| senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.
| gausswho wrote:
| Anyone reccomend an analysis, article or book or video, of this
| effect on the blue collar industry decades ago?
| darkstarsys wrote:
| It's happening again _now_ with robotics, self-driving
| vehicles and RL. Factory workers, truck drivers, construction
| work, order fulfillment, machinists, farm work, medical
| technicians and more are all very much at risk (same thing as
| OP: mostly junior roles getting automated). Some info at
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137
| strickjb9 wrote:
| Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is
| gone--it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out
| AI code they don't really understand.
|
| In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with
| them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my
| feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking
| more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole
| mentorship thing breaks down when you're basically
| collaborating with a model through a proxy.
|
| I think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are
| still valuable. But it's hard to get past "why bother mentoring
| when I could just use AI directly?"
|
| I don't have answers here. Just thinking maybe we're not seeing
| the end of software engineering for those of us already in it--
| but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up
| behind us.
| ah979 wrote:
| I get that. I think that getting to know juniors outside of
| work, at a recurring meetup or event, in a setting where you
| can suss out their motivation level and teachability level,
| is _a_ way of going about it. That way, if your team is
| hiring juniors, you have people you have already vetted at
| the ready.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| IMO teachability/curiosity is ultimately orthogonal to the
| more base question of money-motivation.
|
| In a previous role I was a principal IC trying to mentor
| someone who had somehow been promoted up to senior but was
| still regularly turning in code for review that I wouldn't
| have expected from an intern-- it was an exhausting, mind-
| numbing process trying to develop some sense of engineering
| taste in this person, and all of this was before LLMs. This
| person was definitely not just there for the money; they
| really looked up to the top-level engineers at our org and
| _aspired_ to be be there, but everything just came across
| as extremely shallow, like engineering cosplay: every
| design review or bit of feedback was soundbites from a how-
| to-code TED talk or something. Lots of regurgitated phrases
| about writing code to be "maintainable" or "elegant" but
| no in-the-bones feeling about what any of that actually
| meant.
|
| Anyway, I think a person like this is probably maximally
| susceptible to the fawning ego-strokes that an AI companion
| delivers alongside its suggestions; I think I ultimately
| fear that combination more than I fear a straight up
| mercenary for whom it's a clear transaction of money ->
| code.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I had one fairly-junior teammate at Google (had been
| promoted once) who was a competent engineer but just
| refused to make any choices about what to work on. I was
| his TL and I gave him a choice of 3 different parts of
| the system to work on, and I was planning to be building
| the other two. He got his work done adequately, but his
| lack of interest / curiosity meant that he never really
| got to know how the rest of the system operated, and got
| frustrated when he didn't advance further in his career.
|
| Very odd. It was like he only had ever worked on school
| projects assigned to him, and had no actual interest in
| exploring the problems we were working on.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| In my experience, curiosity is the #1 predictor of the
| kind of passionate, high-level engineer that I'm most
| interested in working with. And it's generally not _that_
| hard to evaluate this in a free-form interview context
| where you listen to how a person talks about their past
| projects, how they learn a new system or advocated
| /onboarded a tool at their company.
|
| But it can be tricky to evaluate this in the kind of
| structured, disciplined way that big-company HR
| departments like to see, where all interviewees get a
| consistent set of questions and are "scored" on their
| responses according to a fixed rubric.
| watwut wrote:
| That does not even sounds like a problem? Like when
| people are that picky about what exact personality the
| junior musr have that good work is not enough ... then
| there is something wrong with us.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I don't think it's beyond the call of duty to expect
| someone to acquire context beyond their immediate
| assignments, especially if they have ambitions to
| advance. It's kind of a key prerequisite to the kind of
| bigger-picture thinking that says "hey I noticed my
| component is duplicating some functionality that's over
| there, maybe there's an opportunity to harmonize these,
| etc"
| QuercusMax wrote:
| When presenting the three projects, I gave pros and cons
| about each one, like "you'll get to learn this new piece
| of technology" or "a lot of people will be happy if we
| can get this working". Absolutely no reaction, just "I
| don't care, pick one".
|
| This guy claimed to want to get promoted to Senior, but
| didn't do anything Senior-shaped. If you're going to own
| a component of a system, I should be able to ask you
| intelligent questions about how you might evolve it, and
| you should be able to tell me why someone cares about it.
| watwut wrote:
| I am honestly totally fine with person like that. Sounds
| like someone easy to work with. I dunno, not having
| preference between working on three parts of the system
| is not abnormal. Most people choose randomly anyway.
|
| Just pick the two you like the most.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| > Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software
| engineering for those of us already in it--but the door might
| be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.
|
| It's worth considering how _aggressively_ open the door has
| been for the last decade. Each new generation of engineers
| increasingly disappointed me with how much more motivated
| they were by a big pay check than they were for anything
| remotely related to engineering. There 's nothing wrong with
| choosing a career for money, but there's also nothing wrong
| about missing a time when most people chose it because they
| were interested in it.
|
| However I have noticed a shift: while half the juniors I work
| with are just churning out AI slop, the other half are
| _really_ interested in the craft of software engineering and
| understanding computer science better.
|
| We'll _need_ new senior engineers in a few years, and I
| suspect they will come from a smaller pool of truly engaged
| juniors today.
| rozap wrote:
| This is what I see. Less of door slamming completely shut,
| more like, the door was enormous and maybe a little too
| open. We forget, the 6 month coding bootcamp to 6 figure
| salary pipeline was a real thing for a while at the ZIRP
| apex.
|
| There are still junior engineers out there who have
| experiments on their githubs, who build weird little things
| because they can. Those people were the best engineers
| anyway. The last decade of "money falls from the sky and
| anyone can learn to code" brought in a bunch of people who
| were interested in it for the money, and those people were
| hard to work with anyway. I'd lump the sidehustle "ship 30
| projects in 30 days" crowd in here too. I think AI will
| effectively eliminate junior engineers in the second camp,
| but absolutely will not those in the first camp. It will
| certainly make it harder for those junior engineers at the
| margins between those two extremes.
|
| There's nothing more discouraging than trying to guide a
| junior engineer who is just typing what you say into
| cursor. Like clearly you don't want to absorb this, and I
| can also type stuff into an AI, so why are you here?
|
| The best engineers I've worked with build things because
| they are truly interested in them, not because they're
| trying to get rich. This is true of literally all creative
| pursuits.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I love building software because it's extremely
| gratifying to a) solve puzzles and b) see things actually
| working when I've built them from literally nothing. I've
| never been great at coming up with projects to work on,
| but I _love_ working on solving problems that other
| people are passionate about.
|
| If software were "just" a job without any of the
| gratifying aspects, I wouldn't do nearly as good a job.
| shagie wrote:
| > Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it
| right back to the LLM.
|
| This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a
| PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you
| suggested."
|
| Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is
| there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who
| use it to delegate all of their work to.
|
| It is especially frustrating that the second group doesn't
| become much more than a proxy for an LLM.
|
| New juniors can progress in software engineering - but they
| have to take the road of disciplined use of AI and make sure
| that they're learning the material rather than delegating all
| their work to it... and that delegating work is _very_
| tempting... especially if that 's what they did in college.
| mooreds wrote:
| > there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some
| who use it to delegate all of their work to.
|
| Hmmm. Is there any way to distinguish between these two
| categories? Because I agree, if someone is delegating all
| their work to an LLM or similar tool, cut out the
| middleman. Same as if someone just copy/pasted from
| Stackoverflow 5 years ago.
|
| I think it is also important to think about incentives.
| What incentive does the newer developer have to understand
| the LLM output? There's the long term incentive, but is
| there a short term one?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Dealing with an intern at work who I suspect is doing
| exactly this, I discussed this with a colleague. One way
| seems to be to organize a face to face meeting where you
| test their problem solving skills without AI use, the
| other may be to question them about their thought process
| as you review a PR.
|
| Unfortunately, the use of LLMs has brought about a lot of
| mistrust in the workplace. Earlier you'd simply assume
| that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a
| junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior
| may not be willing to take your advice as they see it as
| sermonizing when an "easy" process to get "acceptable"
| results exists.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > Is there any way to distinguish between these two
| categories?
|
| Yes, it should be obvious. At least at the current state
| of LLMs.
|
| > There's the long term incentive, but is there a short
| term one?
|
| The short term incentive is keeping their job.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Just like anything, anyone who did the work themself
| should be able to speak intelligently about the work and
| the decisions behind its idiosyncrasies.
|
| For software, I can imagine a process where junior
| developers create a PR and then run through it with
| another engineer side by side. The short-term incentive
| would be that they can do it, else they'd get exposed.
| icedchai wrote:
| There are some definite signs of over reliance on AI.
| From emojis in comments, to updates completely unrelated
| to the task at hand, if you ask "why did you make this
| change?", you'll typically get no answer.
|
| I don't mind if AI is used as a tool, but the output
| needs to be vetted.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| having dealt with a few people who just copy/pasted
| Stackoverflow I really feel that using an LLM is an
| improvement.
|
| That is at least for the people who don't understand what
| they're doing, the LLM tends to come out with something I
| can at least turn into something useful.
|
| It might be reversed though for people who know what
| they're doing. IF they know what they're doing they might
| theoretically be able to put together some stackoverflow
| results that make sense, and build something up from that
| better than what gets generated from LLM (I am not
| asserting this would happen, and thinking it might be the
| case)
|
| However I don't know as I've never known anyone who knew
| what they were doing who also just copy/pasted some
| stackoverflow or delegated to LLM significantly.
| water-data-dude wrote:
| Is/was copy/pasting from Stackoverflow considered
| harmful? You have a problem, you do a web search and you
| find someone who asked the same question on SO, and
| there's often a solution.
|
| You might be specifically talking about people who
| copy/paste without understanding, but I think it's still
| OK-ish to do that, since you can't make an entire
| [whatever you're coding up] by copy/pasting snippets from
| SO like you're cutting words out of a magazine for a
| ransom note. There's still thought involved, so it's more
| like training wheels that you eventually outgrow as you
| get more understanding.
| vkou wrote:
| > Is/was copy/pasting from Stackoverflow considered
| harmful?
|
| It at least forces you to tinker with whatever you copied
| over.
| gunsch wrote:
| Pair programming! Get hands-on with your junior engineers
| and their development process. Push them to think through
| things and not just ask the LLM everything.
| zcw100 wrote:
| I don't know what world you're living in but software
| development has always been a cut throat business. I've never
| seen true mentoring. Maybe a code review where some a-hole of
| a "senior" developer would come in having just read "clean
| code" and use some stupid stylistic preferences as a cudgel
| and go to town on the juniors. I'm cynical enough to believe
| that this, "AI is going to take your programming job!" is
| just a ploy to thin out the applicant pool.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Wow, you must have worked in some REALLY toxic places. I
| had one toxic senior teammate when I first started out - he
| mocked me when I was having trouble with some of the dev
| environment he had created - but he got fired shortly
| thereafter for being bad at his job.
|
| Everybody else through my 21-year career has almost
| universally either been helpful or neutral (mostly just
| busy). If you think code reviews are just for bikeshedding
| about style minutia, then you're really missing out. I
| personally have found it extremely rewarding to invest in
| junior SWEs and see them progress in their careers.
| zcw100 wrote:
| Sure have. Finance, research labs, government
| contracting. Can't wait for people to chime in with their
| horror stories. I've seen some of the most dysfunctional
| crap you can imagine.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Sorry you've worked for such nightmare places, but it's
| far from universal. There are LOTS of good companies and
| teams out there.
| izacus wrote:
| You seem to have chosen the most toxic (and famous for it
| workplaces) and now you're misleadingly claiming that's
| the whole industry.
|
| It is not.
| tartoran wrote:
| Toxicity is spread out and touching most of the industry.
| Is it fully toxic? Absolutely not. But I found some level
| of toxicity everywhere I worked for the past 20+ years in
| this industry.
| Zarathruster wrote:
| > Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship
| ladder is gone--it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors
| who spit out AI code they don't really understand.
|
| I keep hearing this and find it utterly perplexing.
|
| As a junior, desperate to prove that I could hang in this
| world, I'd comb over my PRs obsessively. I viewed each one as
| a showcase of my abilities. If a senior had ever pointed at a
| line of code and asked "what does this do?" If I'd ever
| answered "I don't know," I would've been mortified.
|
| I don't want to shake my fist at a cloud, but I have to ask
| genuinely (not rhetorically): do these kids not have any
| shame at all? Are they not the slightest bit embarrassed to
| check in a pile of slop? I just want to understand.
| semiquaver wrote:
| > embarrassed to check in a pile of slop
|
| Part of being a true junior, especially nowadays, is not
| being able to recognize the differences between a pile of
| slop from useful and elegant code.
| jghn wrote:
| > If I'd ever answered "I don't know," I would've been
| mortified.
|
| I'm approaching 30 years of professional work and still
| feel this way. I've found some people are like this, and
| others aren't. Those who aren't tend to not progress as
| far.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I hope juniors will figure out how to use AI to do larger tasks
| that are still annoying for seniors to do, while seniors take
| on larger tasks still. I think it's just seniors are learning
| this stuff faster at the moment and adapting it faster to
| current work, but as all that changes I would guess juniors
| reclaim some value back.
|
| That said, you hit on something I've been feeling, the thing
| these models are best at by far is stuff that wasn't worth
| doing before.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I've been making use of copilot in VSCode to make changes in
| a codebase that's new to me, in a language that I can read if
| not necessarily write unaided - it's a dialect of SQL, so I
| can certainly understand what's happening, but generating new
| queries is very time-consuming (half of which is just stupid
| formatting stuff). Copilot seems to understand the style of
| the code in my project and so I don't have to do much work to
| make it conform, compared to my hand-written versions.
|
| I've also written a lot of python 2 in my career, and writing
| python 3 still isn't quite native-level for me - and the AI
| tools let me make up for my lack of knowledge of modern
| Python.
| geoffmanning wrote:
| This assumes there will still be a demand for software
| developers in 5 years. I believe we'll be out of jobs much
| sooner than that.
| RogerL wrote:
| I grew up in the 70s. The hand wringing then was calculators.
| No one was going to be able to do math anymore! And then wrist
| watches with calculators came out. Everyone is going to cheat
| on exams, oh no!
|
| Everything turned out fine. Turns out you don't really need to
| be able to perform long division by hand. Sure, you should
| still understand the algorithm at some level, esp. if you work
| in STEM, but otherwise, not so much.
|
| There _were_ losses. I recall my AP physics professors was one
| of the old school types (retired from industry to teach). He
| could find the answer to essentially any problem to about 1-2
| digits of precision in his head nearly instantly. Sometimes he
| 'd have to reach for his slide rule for harder things or to get
| a few more digits. Ain't no one that can do that now (for
| reasonable values of "no one"). And, it is a loss, in that he
| could catch errors nearly instantly. Good skill to have. A
| better skill is to be able to set up a problem for finite
| element analysis, write kernels for operations, find an
| analytic solution using Mathematica (we don't need to do
| integrals by hand anymore for the mot part), unleash R to
| validate your statistics, and so on. The latter are _more_
| valuable than the former, and so we willingly pay the cost. Our
| ability to crank out integrals isn 't what it was, but our
| ability to crank out better jet engines, efficient cars,
| computer vision models has exploded. Worth the trade off.
|
| Recently watched an Alan Guth interview, and he made a
| throwaway comment, paraphrased: "I proved X in this book, well,
| Mathematica proved...". The point being that the proof was
| multiple pages per step, and while he _could_ keep track of all
| the sub /superscripts and perform the Einstein sums on all the
| tensors correctly, why??? I'd rather he use his brain to think
| up new solutions to problems, not manipulate GR equations by
| hand.
|
| I'm ignoring AGI/singularity type events, just opining about
| the current tooling.
|
| Yah, the transition will be bumpy. But we will learn the skills
| we need for the new tools, and the old skills just won't matter
| as much. When they do, yah, it'll be a bit more painful, but so
| what, we gained so much efficiency we can afford the losses.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-
| hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at
| tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop
| to increase compensation.
|
| It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad
| incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money
| in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have
| them leave as soon as they can get a better offer?
| kulahan wrote:
| One would assume the solution is to simply offer a good
| package and retain employees with that. I returned to an old
| company after a few years of floating around because I
| realized they had the perfect mix of culture and benefits for
| me, even if the pay isn't massive.
|
| You're falling for the exact same fallacy experienced by
| failed salesmen. "Why would I bother investing time in this
| customer when they're just going to take my offer to another
| dealership for a better deal?"
|
| Answer: you offer a good deal and work with people honestly,
| because if you don't, you'll _never_ get a customer.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you
| train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could
| just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire
| the people who've got experience.
| izacus wrote:
| The game theory here says that such a company will be
| outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend
| money+time on retention and training but instead invests
| that money in poaching.
|
| What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if
| you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can
| easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using
| that saved money to poach your best employees.
| dgunay wrote:
| Why didn't companies just grant raises more aggressively? Was
| the ease of poaching engineers not a clear market signal?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| When I worked at a very small company we were extremely
| concerned about this, and so we paid people well enough
| that they didn't want to leave. All I can figure is that
| the bean counters just don't understand that churn has a
| cost.
| izacus wrote:
| Same reason why companies don't pay everyone 10 million
| bucks a month. Where do you think the money comes from?
| endemic wrote:
| Funny, I was at my previous company almost exactly two years.
| They never even gave me a cost of living increase, much less
| a "raise." So I was effectively earning less each year.
| Change needs to happen from both sides if extended tenure is
| the goal.
| ike2792 wrote:
| When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up
| the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly
| impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing
| engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies
| themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.
| semiquaver wrote:
| People have been saying this for at least 30 years.
| loeg wrote:
| Arguably, the cross-pollination of developers moving around
| is good for employers.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| This will naturally select for the people who are self driven
| learners. In a sense this is nothing new, just a continued
| progression of the raising of the bar of who is still able to
| contribute economic value to the market
| frmersdog wrote:
| I don't know if that's it. Speaking from outside the tech
| space: most of my office jobs since 2012 have been "doing the
| easy/annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people
| didn't want to 'waste time' dealing with."
|
| So, there are two parts to this:
|
| The first is that a lot of those tasks are non-trivial for
| someone who isn't a digital native (and occasionally trivial
| for people who are). That is to say that I often found myself
| doing tasks that my bosses couldn't do in a reasonable time
| span; they were tasks which they had ALWAYS delegated, which is
| another way of saying that they were tasks in which proficiency
| was not necessary at their level.
|
| This leads into the second part, which is that performing these
| tasks did not help me advance in relevant experience at all.
| They were not related to higher-level duties, nor did they
| endear me to the people who could have introduced me to such
| duties. My seniors had no interest in our growth as workers;
| anyone who wanted to see that growth had to take it into their
| own hands, at which point "junior-level" jobs are only worth
| the paycheck.
|
| I don't know if it's a senior problem generally, or something
| specific to this cohort of Boomer/Gen-X seniors. Gun-to-my-
| head, I would wager the latter. They give enough examples in
| other arenas of public life to lend credence to the notion that
| that they simply don't care what happens to their juniors, or
| to their companies after they leave, particularly if there is
| added hassle in caring. This is an accusation often lobbed at
| my own generation, to which I say, it's one of the few things
| our forebears actually did teach us.
|
| Yet again, AI is just a cover for mismanagement.
| x0x0 wrote:
| My 2 cents: they're too expensive.
|
| We had code school grads asking for $110-$130. Meanwhile, I can
| hire an actual senior engineer for $200 and he/she will be
| easily 4x as productive and useful, while also not taking a ton
| of mentorship time.
|
| Since even that $110 costs $140, it's tough to understand how
| companies aren't taking a bath on $700/day.
| zingar wrote:
| Do you mind giving some examples of the work that annoys
| seniors?
| ansgri wrote:
| For me the most annoying would be a technically correct
| solution that completely ignores the "higher-level style" of
| the surrounding code, at the same time defending the chosen
| solution by referencing some "best practices" that are not
| really applicable there for some higher-level reasons, or by
| insignificant performance concerns. Incidentally, LLMs often
| produce similar problems, only one doesn't need to politely
| argue with them.
| twosdai wrote:
| Writing unit tests, manual validation work, manual testing.
| Automating Deployments of infrastructure, DNS work, tracking
| down annoying one off bugs, fixing and validating dependency
| issues.
|
| Basically this type of maintenance work for any sufficiently
| complex codebase. (Over 20k LOC)
|
| When I was an QA intern / Software Dev Intern. I did all of
| that junk.
| amarant wrote:
| My hottest take on this is that it might be healthy for the
| business. During the recent boom everyone and their
| grandmother's dog got a job as software engineers, and some
| aren't really fit for it.
|
| AI provides a bar. You need to be at least better than AI at
| coding to become a professional. It'll take genuine interest in
| the technology to surpass AI and clear that bar. The next
| generation of software professionals will be smaller, but
| unencumbered by incompetents. Their smaller number will be
| compensated by AI that can take care of the mundane tasks, and
| with any luck it's capabilities will only increase.
|
| Surely I'm not the only one who's had colleagues with 10+years
| experience who can't manage to check out a new branch in git?
| We've been hiring people we shouldn't have hired.
| carlCarlCarlCar wrote:
| Maybe... that's fine?
|
| We're not hiring a lot of rotary phone makers these days.
|
| Who is hiring their own shoe-smith? It's been 30-ish years since
| my carpenter father last had work boots resoled.
|
| It's almost as if... technology and economy evolve over time.
|
| For all the arguments software people make about freedom to use
| their property as they see fit, they ignore non-programmers use
| of personal technology property is coupled to the opinions of
| programmers. Programmers ignore how they are middlemen of a sort
| they often deride as taking away the programmer's freedom! A very
| hypocritical group, them programmers.
|
| What's so high tech about configuration of machines with lexical
| constructs as was the norm 60+ years ago? Seems a bit old
| fashioned.
|
| Programmers are biology and biology has a tendency to be
| nostalgic, clingy, and self selecting. Which is all programmers
| are engaged in when they complain others won't need their skills.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| > Imagine a tech industry where relationship skills weren't just
| nice-to-have but essential. Where navigating complex human
| systems was seen as a core competency.
|
| If that were to actually happen, we'd wind up excluding many of
| our greatest technical performers while drowning in a sea of
| would-be middle managers. People skills matter, but so do many
| other strengths that don't always overlap with being naturally
| good at navigating interpersonal dynamics.
| ah979 wrote:
| I think I know what you may have in mind when you describe the
| "interpersonal dynamics" of a "would-be middle manager", and I
| probably agree with you (original author here).
|
| But some of the best "people" people that I've seen in my
| career have been the most technical, also. They were really
| good at being able to communicate the value of their solution,
| the problems it solves, and risks and rewards. They could get
| buy-in from stakeholders and other teams. They could listen
| empathetically when faced with issues and blockers. And they
| did so with authenticity and genuine care because they were
| passionate about software engineering.
|
| I believe those are skills that can be learned and practiced
| and that you don't have to be necessarily "social" to grow in
| that area.
| constantcrying wrote:
| The idea that the only reasonable path into a software related
| career is through networking may be true, but it obviously
| signals something deeply wrong with the culture around work.
|
| It is also something which is likely to be quite harmful, since
| it selects for people who are great at networking over people who
| have good technical skills. Obviously interpersonal communication
| is important, but how well a 20 year old in University performs
| at it should not doom or make their career.
|
| And even people with bad social skills deserve to exist and
| should be allowed into their chosen career. Being someone who
| does good work and is respectful, but not overly social, _should_
| be good enough.
| ah979 wrote:
| I agree with you, actually (I'm the original author of the
| post). It's literally one of the main reasons that I'm writing
| about networking so much. I have seen so many people fail up in
| technology because they were good at networking while so many
| other people who had better technical skills felt stuck. I
| don't believe that to be a strong networker you have to be
| social, though, just intentional. Technical people who may
| struggle with the people side of things can leverage their
| systems thinking strengths and apply it to stakeholder,
| mentee/direct report, and cross team relationships in a way
| that helps them move the needle on their goals. It's not easy,
| but I do think that intentionality and sincerity are key.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Communication, as always, is a critical skill. You don't have
| to be a social butterfly to effectively communicate.
| j6m8 wrote:
| This is neat -- I do think this is relevant to more than just the
| software engineering space. See also, healthcare and law (I wrote
| more at length here, not to derail this comment thread [1]). Our
| junior training on-ramps for a lot of knowledge-work fields are
| in some semblance of equilibrium, but it's an unstable one.
|
| [1] https://blog.jordan.matelsky.com/AI-doctors-bum-me-out/
| beginnings wrote:
| this is the end game of capitalism, where the greed driven
| pursuit of profit wins over social maintenance and development.
| we see it very clearly with the incredibly socially damaging mass
| immigration to replenish the slave class and maintain the
| mythical GDP growth, which is only "necessary" because the native
| slave classes have been squeezed out of breeding
|
| new grads will be fed to the meat grinder with no regards, its a
| closed shop unless you know someone
| austin-cheney wrote:
| There are two problems here.
|
| 1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior.
|
| 2. Most seniors today are the prior generation's juniors with
| almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume.
|
| The article asks about what happens when today's seniors retire
| in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture
| now.
| leptons wrote:
| Retire? I can never retire. I'll likely die at my keyboard.
| Software has not provided the future I was hoping for.
| tptacek wrote:
| Over the timeline in this post, ZIRP and the pandemic seem like
| equally important factors to LLMs in explaining hiring trends.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Sadly - as I've mentioned on HN a bunch - junior salaries need to
| fall dramatically to somewhere in the $60k-$100k range in order
| to make it cost effective against automation/AI or offshoring.
|
| The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just
| doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async
| induced offshoring.
|
| Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new
| grad range have largely risen because having experienced
| developers really does matter and provides positive business
| outcomes.
|
| State and local governments needs to play the same white collar
| subsidy game that the rest of the world is playing in order to
| help fix the economics of junior hiring for white collar roles.
| This is why Hollywood shifted to the UK, VFX shifted to
| Vancouver, Pharma shifted to Switzerland, and Software to India.
| supportengineer wrote:
| My fear is that isn't low enough.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Not really.
|
| Building a GCC ends up costing around $60k-$100k per head in
| operating costs without subsidizes, and deploying vibe coding
| tools to fully replace an entire dev team end up in a similar
| price range (but conversely they could arguably enhance
| productivity for new grads and hires eg. Glean Search).
| viraptor wrote:
| > The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer
|
| It was always a weird US thing driven by huge companies and
| VCs. In other western, developed countries ~$50k equivalent
| would be normal. Even adjusting for other provided social
| benefits, there's still a long way down...
| stalfosknight wrote:
| This problem is not new. No one's wanted to give juniors the time
| of day since at least 2018 when it took me 8 months to land my
| first software developer role.
| jmclnx wrote:
| > The social contract between large companies and employees has
| been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for
| quarterly earnings
|
| I started in tech in the late 70s. I can say this break happened
| during the Reagan Years with a bit of help from the Nixon Years.
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'd attach a different name and org to that change -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#General_Electric
| bradlys wrote:
| I upvoted the article for the purpose of discussion. I disagree
| with it. The core tenant of the article is that AI is the reason
| why companies aren't hiring juniors. That's just not it. Do
| people just blindly believe whatever some CEO or company says in
| their press briefings? This was all happening before the AI boom.
| Interest rates went up, hiring went way down, and then AI
| launched. Before interest rates, interviewing was getting harder
| and harder every year. That's usually an indication that you have
| more supply than demand. The bar for getting into _any_ American
| tech company was getting much harder - not just FAANG. Leetcode
| had gone from having practiced 50-100 questions to there being a
| bank of over 3000+ with many people having regularly studied
| hundreds. It went from easy /medium to being typical in
| interviews to medium/hard being typical with many original hard
| questions now being reclassified as mediums.
|
| Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago.
| The joke of senior FAANG engineers making $400k has been a meme
| for over 5 years. Yet, inflation has done over 20% in 5 years?
| Look at new offers for people joining the majority of positions
| available at public tech companies. You're not seeing $500k
| offers regularly. Maybe at Jane Street or Anthropic or some other
| companies that are barely hiring - all of which barely employ
| anyone compared to FAANG. You're mostly seeing the same
| $350-400k/yr meme.
|
| The reason we're not employing new grads is the same reason as
| the standards getting much more aggressive. Oversupply and senior
| talent has always been valued more.
| ah979 wrote:
| I appreciate you adding nuance to the conversation. The problem
| is much more complicated than just AI, but I (original author)
| was using those two research studies that I cited as the basis
| for the conversation. While 13% hiring drop doesn't mean a
| catastrophic difference, it's a trend worth noting.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| > Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago
|
| Not true for Western Europe. Getting more than 60k euros yearly
| as a software engineer was hard in 2019, it's now basically
| impossible to get less than that.
| dcchambers wrote:
| The companies that are abandoning junior roles are making a life-
| or-death bet that AI will eventually replace ALL work.
|
| Because those senior people will NOT be around forever. And they
| have killed their talent development and knowledge transfer
| pipelines.
|
| Either direction you take it, this feels like a lose-lose
| situation for everyone.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a
| networking service, something which is not really made clear
| until near the end.
|
| The article is self-serving in identifying the solutions ("do
| things related to the service we offer, and if that doesn't work,
| buy our service to help you do them better"), but it is a subject
| worth talking about, so I will offer my refutation of their
| analysis and solution.
|
| The first point I'd like to make is that while the hiring market
| is shrinking, I believe it was long overdue and that the root
| cause is not "LLMs are takin' our jerbs", but rather the fact
| that for probably the better part of two decades, the software
| development field has been plagued by especially unproductive
| workers. There are a great deal of college graduates who entered
| the field because they were promised it was the easiest path to a
| highly lucrative career, who never once wrote a line of code
| outside of their coursework, who then entered a workforce that
| values credentialism over merit, who then dragged their teams
| down by knowing virtually nothing about programming. Productive
| software engineers are typically compensated within a range of at
| most a few hundred thousand dollars, but productive software
| engineers generally create millions in value for their companies,
| leading to a lot of excess income, some of which can be wasted on
| inefficient hiring practices without being felt. This was bound
| for a correction eventually, and LLMs just happened to be the
| excuse needed for layoffs and reduced hiring of unproductive
| employees[1].
|
| Therefore, I believe the premise that you need to focus entirely
| on doing things an LLM can't -- networking with humans -- is
| deeply faulty. This implies that it is no longer possible to
| compete with LLMs on engineering merit, and I could not possibly
| disagree more. Rather than following their path forward, which
| emphasises only networking, my actual suggestion to prospective
| junior engineers is: build things. Gain experience on your own.
| Make a portfolio that will wow someone. Programming is a field
| that doesn't require apprenticeship. There is not a single other
| discipline that has as much learning material available as
| software development, and you can learn by doing, seeing the pain
| points that crop up in your own code and then finding solutions
| for them.
|
| Yes, this entails programming as a hobby, doing countless hours
| of unpaid programming for neither school nor job. If you can't do
| that much, you will never develop the skills to be a genuinely
| good programmer -- that applied just as much before this supposed
| crisis, because the kind of junior engineer who never codes on
| their own time was not being given the mentorship to turn into a
| good engineer, but rather was given the guidance to turn them
| into a gear that was minimally useful and only capable of
| following rote instructions, often poorly. It is true that the
| path of the career-only programmer who goes through life without
| spending their own time doing coding is being closed off. But it
| was never sustainable anyways. If you don't love programming for
| its own sake, this field is not likely to reward you going
| forward. University courses do not teach nearly effectively
| enough to make even a hireable junior engineer, so you must take
| your education into your own hands.
|
| [1] Of course, layoff processes are often handled just as
| incompetently as hiring processes, leading to some productive
| engineers getting in the crossfire of decisions that should
| mostly hurt unproductive engineers. I'm sympathetic to people who
| have struggled with this, but I do believe productive engineers
| still have a huge edge over unproductive engineers and are highly
| likely to find success despite the flaws in human resource
| management.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a
| networking service, something which is not really made clear
| until near the end.
|
| I have been seeing an uptick of articles on HN where someone
| identifies a problem, then amps it up a bit more and then tells
| you that they are the right ones to solve it for a fee.
|
| These things should not be taken seriously and upvoted.
| ah979 wrote:
| Full disclosure, I'm the author (although I didn't put the
| post up here on HN). Thanks for pointing out that I wasn't
| very clear in my CTA and maybe made it sound shady. That's
| not what I wanted to do, obviously.
|
| It's just an app, not a service, that my husband and I built
| (and quit our jobs for) that has a generous free trial.
| (Technically, right now it's completely free because it's in
| early access, so if you never upgrade, you could use it for
| free forever.)
|
| The CTA at the end was just in an effort to talk to more
| people (for free) and see how we can help and make our
| software better. I come from the DevOps world, and they
| always say you have to first know how to do something really
| well manually before you can automate it, and that's what
| we're trying to do by talking to people (for free).
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The problem is that praying that someone stumbles upon your
| brilliant hobby projects and offers you a job is a _terrible_
| bet. Yes, you have to be good a software development, but being
| good at software development doesn 't land you job. Being good
| at software development, _and cutting through the noise_ gets
| you a job. Because even if all those laid off people are
| incompetent, they 're still applying for the same jobs you are,
| and it is very difficult to identify who's who.
|
| So, from a individual's perspective, figuring out how to meet
| people who will help you sidestep the "unwashed masses" pile of
| applications is probably the next most important thing after
| technical competence (and yeah, ranking above technical
| excellence).
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| > and it is very difficult to identify who's who.
|
| That's exactly what the portfolio is for. Having an actual
| body of work people can look at and within a couple of
| minutes of looking think "wow, this person will definitely be
| able to contribute something valuable to our project" will
| immediately set you apart from every applicant who has vague,
| unreliable credentials that are only extremely loosely
| correlated with competence, like university trivia. You do
| need to get as far as a human looking at your portfolio,
| which isn't a guarantee on any given application, but once
| you get that far your odds will skyrocket next to University
| Graduate #130128154 who may have happened to get human eyes
| on their application but has nothing else to set them apart.
| mhedgpeth wrote:
| Hey there, I'm the developer of the app along with my wife, the
| author of the post. We quit our jobs over a year ago to work on
| a problem we care about and helping people connect to their
| goals through people is what we landed on. That being said, we
| spend most of our time on the tech! And I think your advice is
| spot on, that a portfolio of projects really is THE MOST
| IMPORTANT THING. It's where I would tell people to start. But
| from there, connecting people to others who care about that
| portfolio, is also important. I think a lot of technical people
| pay attention to the former, and tend to ignore the latter.
| Which is me too! So rather than "this is the only true way" I
| hope it comes across like a potential piece of the puzzle to
| some people.
|
| Thanks for giving it some thought and for your perspectives,
| they really help.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > The social contract between large companies and employees has
| been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for
| quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees.
|
| Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a
| number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently
| making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee
| townhalls. They also are in the process of gutting multiple
| departments as fast as possible with little regard for the long
| term consequences. This is not the only company that I know of
| acting in this way (acting like they're about to go bankrupt when
| in fact they are seeing record profits).
|
| To me the societal risk is that an entire generation of employees
| becomes extremely jaded and unmotivated, and fairly so. We used
| to work under the assumption that if our company is successful,
| then the employees would be successful. Record profits == raises
| for all, bonuses for all. And while we know that that connection
| was never that strong, it was strong enough to let us at least
| pretend that it was a law of universe.
|
| That fundamental social contract is now at its breaking point for
| so many workers. Who can really blame people for putting in
| minimal effort when they have so much evidence that it will not
| be rewarded?
| Herring wrote:
| What social contract? Companies have always been for
| shareholders. Do you people have some kind of contract with
| Tesla that I don't know about?
|
| This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want
| socialism, vote for socialism. If you want raw unfiltered
| capitalism, vote for the billionaire. You can't vote for the
| billionaire and expect safety nets. That's madness.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| It is not socialism to note that in the past, some companies
| have believed that their optimal relationship with their
| employees required recognizing their value and awarding them
| accordingly, thusly allowing them to attract/retain the best
| employees as well as maximizing the quality of the output
| from those employees. There has always been such a spectrum,
| that's not socialism. The trend to notice is that the
| spectrum is so strongly weighted towards the merciless,
| cutthroat end of things that may actually not be optimal for
| long term survivability of those companies whilst also as I
| noted, be breaking the social contract that workers have
| assumed for decades, which is also not socialism.
|
| Socialism has a specific meaning, it's not just a label we
| get to put on behaviors that we - or rather, specifically you
| in this case - don't like.
| Herring wrote:
| There's never been any such contract. You guys must not
| have studied the Great Depression at school.
|
| Or more to the point, productivity has consistently
| outpaced pay for most of the US workforce since the
| mid-1970s. That's ~50 years that companies have been
| ripping you off. It's only now you notice, because
| rent/mortgage/school/medical have finally become so much
| larger than pay.
|
| Well now you get to live through the Great Depression and
| study it up close.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > That's ~50 years that companies have been ripping you
| off. It's only now you notice, because
| rent/mortgage/school/medical have finally become so much
| larger than pay.
|
| The alternate way of looking at it is that the 50s to mid
| 70s era saw a period of unprecedented prosperity and now
| we are just seeing a reversion to the mean.
| Herring wrote:
| What do you mean "we"? The rich are much much richer than
| they've ever been. The stock market is soaring. Companies
| are seeing record profits.
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20200428221848/https://www.nyt
| ime...
| snovymgodym wrote:
| When billionaires own the media companies that influence
| public opinion and have legal avenues to essentially bribe
| elected officials, does the public have a meaningful avenue
| to vote anti-billionaire?
| Herring wrote:
| I might sympathize, but reality doesn't care. At the end of
| the day it doesn't matter why they voted for something.
| They did and it's here.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Henry Ford for all his faults (and there were MANY) at least
| understood that you gotta have a customer base for your
| products, and that paying workers well helps everybody out.
| Herring wrote:
| Ok so that's 1 guy 100 years ago. How many golden
| parachutes and layoffs have there been since then? Cmon
| people put 2+2 together, it's not that hard.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The behavior you're describing really got big in the 80s
| with Jack Welch at GE. Which, admittedly, is nearly half
| a century ago.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Many of our current society's problems can be directly
| traced back to Reagan-era policies. Anyone who seriously
| believes in trickle-down Reaganomics is a fool or a liar.
| alecco wrote:
| Henry Ford wanted to raise salaries of his employees but
| the Dodge brothers (who owned only 10% of the company)
| successfully sued and "As of 2025, in Delaware, the
| jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies
| are domiciled, shareholder primacy is still upheld."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
| newsclues wrote:
| My understanding is that that legal case really states
| that you can't defraud your shareholders by funnelling
| money into other businesses they have no ownership in.
|
| It doesn't set the legal standard that profits must be
| maximized which is impossible.
| Ethee wrote:
| Correct, a quote from the linked wiki article: "Dodge is
| often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of
| shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not
| the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of
| conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate.
| The business judgment rule [which was also upheld in this
| decision] protects many decisions that deviate from this
| standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all
| the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting."
| -- M. Todd Henderson
| moregrist wrote:
| Socialism is when the state (ie: the government) _owns_
| industries.
|
| A social contract is an implicit agreement that everyone more
| or less accepts without anything being necessarily legally
| binding.
|
| For example, the courtesy of two weeks notice in the US is a
| social contract: there's nothing legally requiring it, but
| there are _social_ consequences (ie: your reference might be
| less positive) if you don't follow it.
|
| Everything that's kind of in an employee's favor is not
| socialism. You don't have to like the idea of "work hard,
| help the company do well, get rewarded," but that isn't
| socialism. It's just a thing you don't like.
| Herring wrote:
| It's not that I don't like it. It's more that I think
| you're being lied to. Inequality has been going up in the
| US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are
| not being rewarded as much as they should. But they still
| buy into the system that is impoverishing them.
|
| The top 10% of income earners in the US account for 50% of
| consumer spending. LMK if you think that's part of the
| contract.
| https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/24/higher-
| income-a...
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Inequality going up means the situation is changing and
| that is what people are complaining about. There
| definitely has been a culture shift as MBAs took over
| executive leadership and their compensation packages
| skyrocketed. Companies were always for the share holders
| but there used to be more consideration of the longer-
| term value for the company that amounted to appreciation
| of and fairer treatment for both employees and customers.
|
| I also think though that individual experiences of this
| kind are more about specific companies maturing than a
| widespread culture shift. A lot of people on these forums
| worked in tech companies that are relatively young and
| have changed a lot over the past two decades.
| Atomic_Torrfisk wrote:
| > What social contract? Companies have always been for
| shareholders.
|
| You are not wrong, but the contract is/was metaphorical. For
| a long time people were able to make a living for themselves
| by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with a career
| which payed off. That was the invisible "contract". Hell I
| went to university for things which seem like academic navel
| gazing, but I still got a good tech job on the other side.
| That's not the reality for a lot of graduates nowdays who
| take more practical degrees at masters and phd levels.
|
| Again even if the literal statement is clearly false, it is
| the sentiment which matters, and this sentiment does not just
| apply to graduates. I think many just feel like working hard
| does not work anymore, especially in the face of housing,
| cost of living, job competition and social media flaunting
| the wealth of others.
|
| I get the idea from my younger siblings, "Why try if you are
| already a looser."
| alephnerd wrote:
| > For a long time people were able to make a living for
| themselves by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with
| a career which payed off
|
| Recessions like the GFC, the Dot Bomb, the early 90s, the
| Asian Financial Crisis, the early 80s, Stagflation, and
| others show otherwise.
|
| The extended bull run that SWEs had from the early 2010s to
| 2022 was an outlier, and the whiplash being felt today is
| comparable to what law and finance grads faced in the
| 2010s, accounting majors in the 2000s, and Aerospace/MechE
| majors in the 1990s.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Those of us familiar with the Dilbert comic strip of the
| '90s-'00s are having a good chuckle at the idea that there was
| ever a social contract. What you think of as a social contract
| was a fiction enabled only by the explosive growth of the
| software industry during the Internet and mobile web of the
| last twenty years. It's easy to be generous to employees when
| the profits just keep growing on their own. It's easy to
| overlook mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) when as many warm
| bodies are possible are needed to fulfill business objectives.
|
| That's all over now; the growth spurt of a young software
| industry has given way to maturity. We'll be navigating an
| employment environment much like what the norm is in other
| technical professions with tougher standards and fiercer
| competition for good jobs.
| timoth3y wrote:
| I think a lot of this has to do with the explosion of CEO (and
| by extension CxO) pay over the past 30 years.
|
| Today, a CEO can turn in a few quarters of really solid
| earnings growth, they can earn enough to retire to a life a
| private jets. Back when CxO pay was lower, the only way to make
| that kind of bank was to claw your way into the top job and
| stay there for a decade or more.
|
| The current situation strongly incentivizes short-term
| thinking.
|
| With today's very high, option-heavy compensation a CEO making
| long-term investments in the company rather than cutting staff
| and doing stock buybacks is taking money out of his own pocket.
|
| It's a perverse incentive.
| beginnings wrote:
| for anyone with children, dont waste their time with traditional
| school, that path is stone dead and is leading nowhere but the
| abyss of the permanent underclass
|
| apologise for inflicting this era on them and teach them to be
| entrepreneurial, teach them how to build, teach them rust on the
| backend, teach them postgres, teach them about assets maintaining
| value while money loses its
|
| tell them to never under any circumstances take on a mortgage,
| especially not the 50 year variety. tell them to stay at home for
| as long as possible and save as much as possible and put it into
| assets: gold, silver, bitcoin, monero
|
| they must escape the permanent underclass, nothing else matters
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Just don't have children. All this churn (learning whatever)
| isn't worth it (for them).
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Just don't have children.
|
| Despite everything, I like it that humanity exists. I want
| humanity to continue to exist. I reject any notion or
| attitude that would, taken to its logical conclusion, result
| in the extinction of humanity. And, even more so, that would
| result in the extinction of my family and lineage. For your
| sake, I hope that this is just edgy horseshit that you will
| soon grow out of.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Let's see if I will grow out of it. I am curios as well. I
| currently think the opposite--that humanity is inherently
| flawed, and that the vast majority of humans will always
| live miserably.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This is a weird take. There are plenty of ways to build a
| meaningful life that don't involve writing code or slinging
| emails and powerpoints for a living. The guy I call to do
| plumbing work has several kids and does fine for himself.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Chances are he smokes or gets drunk or beats his wife or
| any combination thereof, or other similar activities. This
| can be said about any person who works as a plumber,
| construction worker, or similar, their whole life. And I am
| not blaming them, this appears to be the sad reality and
| the nature of our society.
| jedberg wrote:
| I've been saying this for years, since the first AI coding models
| came out. Where do the juniors go to learn? I'm a senior engineer
| because I got to do a bunch of annoying tasks and innovate just
| slightly to make them better.
|
| That opportunity is now lost. In a few years we will lack senior
| engineers because right now we lack junior engineers.
|
| All is not lost however. Some companies are hiring junior
| engineers and giving them AI, and telling them to learn how to
| use AI to do their job. These will be our seniors of the future.
|
| But my bigger concern is that every year the AI models become
| more capable, so as the "lost ladder" moves up, the AI models
| will keep filling in the gaps, until they can do the work of a
| Senior supervised by a Staff, then the work of a Staff supervised
| by a Principal, and so on.
|
| The good news is that this is a good antidote to the other
| problem in our industry -- a lot of people got into software
| engineering for the money in the last few decades, not for the
| joy of programming. These are the folks that will be replaced
| first, leaving only those who truly love solving the hardest
| problems.
| devin wrote:
| I'm more pessimistic. It costs too much to go back to college
| and retrain. The result is going to be a generation of
| ambitious people doing a craft they hate. The results are going
| to be dismal.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Short term thinking and short term profit seeking are going to
| destroy every industry they touch. This article failed to bring
| up 2 important points.
|
| Firstly, we've been here before, specifically in 2008. This was
| the real impact of the GFC. The junior hiring pipeline got
| decimated in many industries and never returned. This has created
| problems for an entire generation (ie the millenials) who went to
| college and accumulated massive amounts of debt for careers that
| never eventuated. Many of those careers existed before 2008.
|
| The long-term consequences of this are still playing out. It's
| delaying life milestones like finding a partner, buying a house,
| having a family and generally just having security of any kind.
|
| Secondly, there is a whole host of other industries this has
| affected that the author couldn't pointed to. The most obvious is
| the entertainment industry.
|
| You may have asked "why do we need to wait 3 years between
| seasons of 8 episodes now when we used to put out 22 episodes a
| year?" It's a good question and the answer is this exact same
| kind of cost-cutting. Writers rooms got smaller and typically now
| the entire season is written and then it's produced when the
| writers are no longer there with the exception of the showrunner,
| who is the head writer.
|
| So writers are rarely on set now. This was the training ground
| for future showrunners. Also, writers were employed for 9 months
| or more for the 22 episode run and now they're employed for maybe
| 3 months so need multiple jobs a year. Getting jobs in this
| industry is hard and time-consuming and the timing just may not
| work out.
|
| Plus the real cost of streaming is how it destroyed residuals
| because Netflix (etc) are paying far fewer residuals (because
| they're showing their own origianl content) and those residuals
| sustained workers in the entertainment industry so they could
| have long-term careers and that experience wouldn't be lost. The
| LA entertainmen tindustry is in a dire state for these reasons
| and also because a lot of it is being offshored to further reduce
| costs.
|
| Bear in mind that the old system produced cultural touchstones
| and absolute cash cows eg Seinfeld, Friends, ER.
|
| Circling back, the entire goal of AI Is to displace workers and
| cut costs. That's it. It's no more compolicated than that. And
| yes, junior workers and less-skilled workers will suffer first
| and the most. But those junior engineers would otherwise be
| future senior engineers.
|
| What I would like for people to understand that all of this is
| about short-term decisions to cut costs. It's no more complicated
| than that.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Are you really saying the production turn around time of a
| multi-camera sitcom compared to full on movie quality TV shows
| is due to more writers?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Here's a decent video about the impact of streaming on the
| traditional TV system:
|
| https://youtu.be/b8eB-VnHdZ4
| jmyeet wrote:
| There are multiple factors.
|
| For example, the death of optical media has had a massive
| impact on the entertainment industry, particularly movies.
| Matt Damon has spoken about this, on Hot Wings of all places
| [1].
|
| Streaming began as a alternate path for monetizing old
| content other than cable TV syndication. And it was excelelnt
| for this in the early years. At that time it was bonus
| income.
|
| But streaming also ushered in a golden age for watching
| serialized content so it's a mixed bag.
|
| Loss of writers is just one factor. Filming fewer episodes,
| moving production out of the US and loss os residuals all
| contribute to killing this ecosystem.
|
| [1]: https://streamable.com/pedvjq
| aynyc wrote:
| I'm gonna get some downvote, but I'll say this. Over the last 10
| years, the quality of the juniors trends opposite of salary
| curve. We don't have a crazy interview process, nor are we
| working on anything ground breaking. By any measurement, we are a
| run of the mill company that don't offer top end salary but
| market competitive. The quality of junior engineers I've
| interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the
| name nor the high end salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and
| HR suck in general. My no-hire/hire ratio is literally 50:1. Most
| of them can't even answer basic computer science questions such
| as under what condition that a binary search is useful, what's
| the difference between NoSQL database and relational database, or
| converting binary to decimal, etc.. They all talk about cloud and
| distributed computing, etc..
| mierz00 wrote:
| I feel this pain.
|
| We have an intern that is finishing a four year computer
| science degree that has no clue what git is, never used a log
| and all he presents is AI garbage.
|
| I find it profoundly depressing to try and teach someone who
| has no interest in the craft.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been
| abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the name nor the high end
| salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and HR suck in general.
| My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1.
|
| I'm sorry but to me this part reads like a humorous phrase
| that's popular in some circles in my region which goes:
|
| "Maybe <list of negative things, usually correct
| characterizations of the speaker>, but at least <something even
| worse>"
|
| The companies I worked for used automated coding quizzes like
| Codility to weed out the worst applicants, but I suspect you're
| already doing that.
|
| How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to
| what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?
| aynyc wrote:
| > How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant
| to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?
|
| Because of our work is changing, faster than ever, not day to
| day but over time. You need a foundation to handle that
| change. My 2X years experience showed me that the people who
| has strong foundation handle the transition well. If I'm
| going to hire and invest and mentor, I want that person to be
| successful.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1
|
| 80% of the candidate I interview pass (leetcode style coding
| interview, as mandated by the company). This is actually
| annoying because I'll probably have to raise the bar and start
| rejecting very good candidates.
| aynyc wrote:
| Sorry, flip that number around. 1 in 50 passes the interview.
| ericmcer wrote:
| > "Companies replace junior positions with AI + Senior engineers
| have been excused from mentorship responsibilities + Companies
| optimize for immediate results = A systemic issue that no one
| person can fix"
|
| They forgot to add in "Aging billionaires spend a trillion
| dollars on longevity research" which results in "110 year old
| Senior engineers still working"
| ah979 wrote:
| touche (author here)
| teeray wrote:
| > the unintended consequence of that is that we've spent a decade
| normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next
| generation.
|
| This is because "management" includes a bunch of BS that few
| engineers want to actually deal with. Performance discussions,
| 1:1s, being hauled into mandatory upper-level meetings, not
| actually building things anymore, etc. If it was simply pairing
| with juniors from time to time to hack on things and show them
| cool stuff, it would be wonderful.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Many companies have different career tracks for managers than
| for individual contributors (even tech leads are considered
| ICs). Mentoring junior engineers is absolutely in scope for
| what senior ICs can be recognized for.
| mfbx9da4 wrote:
| Isn't it also easier than ever to learn though? The moat that
| seniors built around their expertise enabled a juicy buffer of
| mediocre devs paid mediocre rates pushing up the value of
| mythical 10x engineers.
| ilc wrote:
| I think AI clouds the real issues around Junior hiring. Defective
| companies.
|
| Let's say you hire your great new engineer. Ok, great! Now their
| value is going to escalate RAPIDLY over the next 2-3 years. And
| by rapidly, it could be 50-100%. Because someone else will pay
| that to NOT train a person fresh out of college!
|
| What company hands out raises aggressively enough to stay ahead
| of that truth? None of them, maybe a MANGA or some other thing.
| But most don't.
|
| So, managers figure out fresh out of college == training
| employees for other people, so why bother? The company may not
| even break even!
|
| That is the REAL catch 22. Not AI. It is how the value of people
| changes early in their career.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I actually got a major raise after 6m, and then another major
| raise 1y into my career, because my boss recognized my value.
|
| Sadly this is not as common as it should be - but I've also
| mentored folks at FAANGs who got promoted after 1y at the new-
| hire level because they were so clearly excelling. The first
| promotion is usually not very hard to attain if you're in the
| top quartile.
| supportengineer wrote:
| "Winner take all" environment
| imglorp wrote:
| The first graph is interesting: it showed all groups about the
| same until late 2022 when they start to diverge. Around that
| time, we were talking about "greedflation" and "over hired during
| covid", and probably most important, the first year after
| expiration of Section 174 R&D was 2022.
|
| Good luck with causation/correlation vs the rise of LLM.
| maciejzj wrote:
| This is truly heartbreaking, programming was the last profession
| beside medicine doctor that guaranteed young people good start in
| life in my country.
|
| It is insane how much screwed over we are. I am about to turn 30
| soon with 5 YoE, PhD in ML which supposedly is the cutting edge
| stuff. Yet I have no prospects to even buy a tiny flat and start
| "normal life". AI eats its own tail, I have no idea what I should
| do and what to learn to have any sensible prospects in life.
| silexia wrote:
| A lot of this may be due to the recent far left changes in
| curriculum at many universities. A degree used to sort of a
| certificate an employer could rely upon that someone had basic
| skills. That is no longer the case. This makes older employees
| where the certificate was still reliable more attractive.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| "far left changes"? What are you even talking about? You think
| there's some new "woke" CS curriculum which doesn't actually
| teach algorithms?
| tempire wrote:
| Nothing has changed. The problem is the same as it always was.
|
| There is an unbounded amount of opportunity available for those
| who want to grab hold of it.
|
| If you want to rely on school and get the approval of the
| corporate machine, you are subject to the whims of their
| circumstance.
|
| Or, you can go home, put in the work, learn the tech, become the
| expert, and punch your own ticket. The information is freely
| available. Your time is your own.
|
| Put. In. The. Work.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I suspect this junior hiring crisis thing is linked to the
| ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days.
|
| When I was starting, you were checked for potential as a trainee.
| In my case, options trading. They checked over that you could do
| some mental arithmetic, and that you had a superficial idea of
| what trading was about. Along with a degree from a fancy
| university, that was all that was needed. I didn't know much
| about coding, and I didn't know much about stochastic
| differential equations.
|
| A couple of weeks ago, a young guy contacted me about his
| interview with an options trading firm. This guy had spent half a
| year learning every stat/prob trick question ever. All those game
| theory questions about monks with stickers on their foreheads,
| all the questions about which card do you need to turn over, the
| lot. The guy could code, and had learned a bunch of ML to go with
| it. He prepared for their trading game with some really great
| questions to me about bet sizing.
|
| I was convinced he was simply overly nervous about his prospects,
| because I'd never met someone so well prepared.
|
| Didn't get the job.
|
| Now I can assure you, he could have done the job. But apparently,
| firms want to hire people who are nearly fully developed on their
| own dime.
|
| When they get their analyst class, I guess there is going to be
| nobody who can't write async python. Everyone will know how to
| train an ML on a massive dataset, everyone will already know how
| to cut latency in the system.
|
| All things that I managed to learn while being paid.
|
| You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where
| people have to already know the job before they get their first
| job. Where everyone is like a doctor: already decided at age 16
| that this was the path they wanted to follow, choosing classes
| towards that goal, and sticking with it until well into
| adulthood. And they have to essentially pay to get this job,
| because it comes at at cost of exploring other things (as well as
| actual money to live).
| supportengineer wrote:
| I feel like only the biggest companies can afford to put up all
| these roadblocks to employment.
|
| A smaller size company, perhaps in a lower COL city, might have
| a more "human" side to them, simply because they can't afford
| all the nonsense.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where
| people have to already know the job before they get their first
| job. Where everyone is like a doctor: already decided at age 16
| that this was the path they wanted to follow, choosing classes
| towards that goal, and sticking with it until well into
| adulthood. And they have to essentially pay to get this job,
| because it comes at at cost of exploring other things (as well
| as actual money to live).
|
| With the way higher-ed works in the US, and the way certain
| schools opportunity hoard to an insane degree, that is
| effectively already the case for whole industries and has been
| so for decades at this point. It's practically an open secret
| that getting _into_ some schools is the golden ticket rather
| than the grades you earn while there. Many top schools are just
| networking and finishing schools for whole "elite" industries.
| ashwindharne wrote:
| I've found that this phenomenon exacerbates inequality too:
|
| If you attend a well-known college that bigco's hire from
| frequently, there's a lot of knowledge floating around about
| interview prep, hiring schedules, which companies pay the best,
| etc. Clubs host "interview prep workshops" where they'd teach
| the subject matter of interviews, host events(hackathons, case
| competitions, etc.) to help you bolster your resume for
| applying to these bigco's. So just by attending a
| better/fancier school, you'd have pretty decent odds of
| eventually getting a job at one of these prestigious places.
|
| If you were to attend a less prestigious school, regardless of
| your aptitude or capability, the information asymmetry is so
| bad that you'll never learn of the prerequisites for even being
| considered for some of these roles. Not many upperclassmen will
| have interned at fancy employers, so they won't be there to
| help you drill dynamic programming/black-scholes/lbo models,
| and won't tell you that you need to have your applications
| prepped by a certain date, and won't tell you that you should
| be working on side projects/clubs, etc.
|
| I suppose that the apprenticeship model biases towards people
| that already have connections, so perhaps inequality was
| already bad, whereas now we just have an information asymmetry
| that's more easily solvable.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Ask HN:
|
| I have a friend of a friend in his mid 20s who finished a masters
| degree in data science focused on AI. There isnt a job for him
| and I think hes given up.
|
| In Letters to a Young Poet Rilke responded to a young aspiring
| poet who asked how a person knows whether the artistic path is
| truly their calling:
|
| > "There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find
| out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has
| spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to
| yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to
| write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of
| your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.
| And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn
| question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in
| accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its
| humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and
| witness to this impulse."
|
| How do I respond to this friend of a friend? Is data science or
| coding in general the path for you only if you would rather die
| than stop merging pull requests into main every day even when
| nobody is paying you?
|
| Is coding the new poetry?
|
| What do I tell this guy?
| zer0tonin wrote:
| Having a data science degree doesn't really mean much by
| itself. There's a lot of graduates that come out of it with no
| marketable skills.
|
| And no, coding is not the new poetry. I wish people would stop
| spamming this website with doomer nonsense like this.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 99% of us can't live like that.
|
| The other place you will meet struggling artists is sports.
| Train several times a week, neglect your social life, your
| studies, just learn how to chase after a ball.
|
| Only people who are crazy driven will actually do this. The
| ones who don't make it, they try to climb up from lower league
| clubs. They go on and on, carving out a career.
|
| But most kids do not have a burning passion for anything. They
| are curious, they're smart, they want to explore the world. But
| they haven't found a calling. If they try to go through the eye
| of the needle, they find it's quite hard, because those paths
| are taken by guys with a mental lock on a certain career.
|
| What to tell the guy? He's picked the subject that is the most
| useful for learning about the world. Go around and look at
| things. There's so much that a person who can code and can deal
| with statistics can apply himself do.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more
| palatable as contractors at first?
|
| Single-Payer health care would help our industry immensely if it
| came to pass.
|
| Imagine having no fear any more.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem
| more palatable as contractors at first
|
| It actually might help.
|
| This is the model used in Eastern Europe and India - the vast
| majority of new grads are hired by mass recruiters like EPAM,
| WITCH, Deloitte, and Accenture at low base salaries but also
| the expectation that they self train and learn _how_ to become
| productive SWEs, or they just stagnate at the low rungs. Japan,
| Korea, and China use a similar model as well.
|
| But honestly, even FTE isn't much of a headache if I can hire a
| junior SWE for $60k-80k, invest in training them, and then
| bumping salaries to market rate after they have matured. This
| is what a number of traditional F500s like Danaher [0], AbbVie
| [1], and Capital One [2] do via Leadership and Trainee
| Development Programs, and honestly, it's much easier to make a
| case to hire someone if they have a couple of years of real
| world work experience.
|
| [0] - https://jobsblog.danaher.com/blog/leadership-development-
| pro...
|
| [1] - https://www.abbvie.com/join-us/student-programs.html
|
| [2] - https://www.capitalonecareers.com/get-ahead-with-early-
| caree...
| rybosworld wrote:
| It's not obvious to me that AI is the reason for the hiring
| slowdown.
|
| ChatGPT was pretty useless when it first released. It was neat
| that you could talk to it but I don't think it actually became a
| tool you could depend on (and even then, in a very limited way)
| until sometime in 2024.
|
| Basically:
|
| - the junior hiring slowdown started in 2022.
|
| - but LLM's have only really been useful in a work context
| starting around 2024.
|
| As for this point:
|
| > According to very recent research from Stanford's Digital
| Economy Lab, published in August of this year, companies that
| adopt AI at higher rates are hiring juniors 13% less
|
| The same point stands. The junior hiring slowdown existed before
| the AI spend.
| Barathkanna wrote:
| This is true. As a startup founder I've invested heavily in
| mentoring juniors, and all of my current developers actually
| started as interns. They've grown fast and delivered real results
| because we gave them trust, support, and room to learn. The
| companies that say "there are no good juniors" are usually the
| ones that never bothered to train any.
| womitt wrote:
| Instead the: Come up with you new job instead of doing old
| peoples job opportunity
| robomartin wrote:
| This topic requires analysis to a greater depth than most
| comments I've seen so far.
|
| It wasn't too long ago that it was common to read threads on HN
| and other tech fora about universities graduating software
| engineers seriously lacking coding skills. This was evidenced by
| often-torturous interview processes that would herd dozens to
| hundreds of applicants through filters to, among other things,
| rank them based on their ability to, well, understand and write
| software.
|
| This process is inefficient, slow and expensive. Companies would
| much rather be able to trust that a CS degree carries with it a
| level of competence commensurate with what the degree implies.
| Sadly, they cannot, still, today, they cannot.
|
| And so, the root cause of the issue isn't AI or LLM's, it's
| universities churning people through programs and granting
| degrees that often times mean very little other than "spent at
| least four years pretending to learn something".
|
| If you are thinking that certain CS-degree-granting universities
| could be classified as scams, you might be right.
|
| And so, anyone with half a braincell, will, today, look at the
| availability of LLM tools for coding as a way to stop (or reduce)
| the insanity and be able to get on with business without having
| to deal with as much of the nonsense.
|
| Nobody here makes a product or offers a service (hardware,
| software, anything) for the love of the art. We make things to
| solve problems for people and services. That's why you exists.
| Not to look after a social contract (as a comment suggested).
| Sorry, that's nonsense. The company making spark plugs makes
| spark plugs, they are not on this planet to support some
| imaginary public good. Solving the problem is how they
| contribute.
|
| And, in order to solve problems, you need people who are capable
| of deploying the skills necessary to do so. If universities are
| graduating people who can barely make a contribution to the
| mission at hand, companies are going to always look for ways to
| mitigate that blocking element. Today, LLM's are starting to
| provide that solution.
|
| So it isn't about greed or some other nonsense idealistic view of
| the universe. If I can't hire capable people, I will gladly give
| senior engineers more tools to support the work they have to do.
|
| As is often the case, the solution to so many problems today
| --including this one-- is found in education. Our universities
| need to be setup to succeed or fail based on the quality of the
| education they deliver. This has almost never been the case.
| Which means you have large scale farming operations granting
| degrees that can easily be dwarfed by an LLM.
|
| And don't think that this is only a problem a the entry level. I
| recently worked with a CTO who, to someone with experience, was
| so utterly unqualified for the job it was just astounding that he
| had been give the position in the first place. It was clearly a
| case of him not knowing just how much he didn't know. It didn't
| take much to make the case for replacing him with a qualified
| individual or risk damage to the company's products and
| reputation going forward.
|
| A knowledgeable entry-level professional who also has solid AI-
| as-a-tool skills is invaluable. Note that first they have to come
| out of university with real skills. They cannot acquire those
| after the fact. Not any more.
|
| NOTE: To the inevitable naive socialist/communist-leaning folks
| in our mix. Love your enthusiasm and innocence, but, no,
| companies do not exist to make a profit. Try starting one for
| once in your naive life with that specific mission as your
| guiding principle and see how far you'll get.
|
| Companies succeed by solving problems for people and other
| companies. Their clients and customers exchange currency for the
| value they deliver. The amount they are willing to pay is
| proportionate to the value of the problem being solved as
| perceived by the customer --and only the customer.
|
| Company management has to charge more than the mere raw cost of
| the product or service for a massive range of reasons that I
| cannot possibly list here. A simple case might be having to spend
| millions of dollars and devote years (=cost) to creating such
| solutions. And, responsible companies, will charge enough to be
| able to support ongoing work, R&D, operations, etc. and have
| enough funds on hand to survive the inevitable market downturns.
| Without this, they would have to let half the employees go every
| M.N years just because of natural business cycles.
|
| So, yeah, before you go off talking about businesses like you've
| never started or ran a non-trivial anything (believe me, it is
| blatantly obvious when reading your comments), you might want to
| make an attempt to understand that your stupid Marxists
| professors or sources had absolutely no clue, were talking out of
| their asses, never started or ran a business, and everything they
| pounded into your brains fails the most basic tests with
| objective, on-the-ground, skin-in-the-game reality.
| bitwize wrote:
| We are all systems analysts now. We are all business people. Or
| we're out of a job. Programming as a skill in itself is largely
| obsolete. It's all about understanding the business: what it
| needs, how it operates. That takes holistic thinking and people
| skills that programmers historically just didn't have. They'll
| adapt, or they'll leave the field.
| dzonga wrote:
| I personally think - Juniors will be okay, if they stick to
| *fundamentals*
|
| lots of "seniors" via title inflation dont have fundamentals
| anyways - hence a lot of broken software in the wild & also
| perverse incentives like Resume driven development. A.I is built
| on badly written open source code.
|
| because once you have the fundamentals, built a few things - you
| would've battle scars which makes someone a senior
|
| not the 'senior' we see in big corps or places cosplaying where
| promos are based on playing politics.
| itsjamesmurray wrote:
| My team wrote about this same phenomenon in marketing:
| https://www.behindthecmo.com/p/the-seniorification-of-market...
|
| Its a double edged sword too. I see it in my biz -- its easier to
| spend 40 hours training a model how to do things the way we like
| rather than hire someone junior and spend a month+ on onboarding.
| We are noticing hitting a wall to a certain point with clients
| still wanting to talk to a real person, but I can see that
| changing in the next ~5 years. Zero idea what happens to those
| junior folks that used to get trained (me being one that sat
| through a 3mo onboarding program!).
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure how much is about LLMs directly. But as I've
| written elsewhere, there's definitely a circular pattern where
| a lot of junior employees think this is going to be an 18 month
| thing and companies allocate training and mentoring budgets
| accordingly.
|
| There is a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that junior hiring--
| at least in the software space--is fairly difficult currently.
| Via internships at good schools etc. may be better but I have
| to believe that off the street from bootcamps and the like is
| pretty tough.
| RustySwarf wrote:
| It's like the whole idea of a company has inverted. Instead of
| "We'll assemble a team, then use that capability to make things,
| and solve problems" the idea is "the machine basically runs
| itself, how much can we get away with minimizing upkeep?"
|
| Default "people have value because human attention solves
| problems", has become default "existing org structure has value
| because existing revenue streams are stable."
|
| The idea of a company used to contain an implied optimism. "If we
| get capable people together, we can accomplish great things!" Now
| that optimism has been offloaded to the individual, to prove
| their worth before they can take part.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > "I'm an IC not a manager," became an acceptable argument to
| avoid this work
|
| Has anyone ever seen a manager mentoring ICs? I haven't. This is
| a senior/staff/principal responsibility.
| crisdux wrote:
| It feels like there is a psyop going on. Blaming job loss and
| less entry level jobs on "AI". The real simple reason... Jobs are
| going overseas, many of them junior level jobs. They are laying
| off people and then hiring a proportional amount of people
| overseas. Why are folks falling for this AI nonsense?
| andrewrn wrote:
| To try and add in some anecdotes without injecting too much
| baggage:
|
| I am an older gen-z and launching my career has felt nigh on
| impossible. At my first job, the allergy toward mentorship this
| article mentions was incredibly palpable. None of my several
| managers had management experience, and one of them openly told
| me they didn't want to be managing me. The one annual review I
| got was from someone who worked alongside me for a week.
|
| Follow that experience up with a layoff and a literally futile
| job search, and its hard to be optimistic about building much of
| a career.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| We have articles that are very skeptical about whether AI
| companies will ever make any money.
|
| And then we have others claiming that AI is already having such a
| significant impact on hiring that the effects are clearly visible
| in the statistics.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Those two are not contradictory.
|
| AI _companies_ could never make any money (statement about the
| future, and about AI companies, and finances). And AI could be
| having a visible effect on hiring today (statement about now,
| and about non-AI companies, and about employment).
|
| They don't have to both be true, but they do not inherently
| contradict each other.
| illini1 wrote:
| Those two phenomena can be true at the same time.
| lovich wrote:
| This is just a continuation of general labor practices in US
| companies.
|
| I have been unable to get a tech job for months so I've looked
| into retraining in a new field and every single one has some up
| front large cost via either paying for schooling or situations
| like mechanics needing to bring their own tools.
|
| The standard US company has completely shed all training costs
| and put the expectations on laborers to train themselves. And
| you're shit out of luck if their requirements change during your
| training as so many college graduates who picked comp sci are
| currently learning
| gessha wrote:
| One thing that I hypothesize about junior developers is that you
| need to leapfrog the handholding period and go straight to the
| medium/senior position on your own. You can acquire the
| medium/senior level of knowledge and experience making all the
| mistakes and bad choices by yourself and learning from the
| experience.
| dangus wrote:
| Are you saying this plan is realistic or more like a pipe
| dream?
|
| This is kind of like saying "Get your flight hours in on
| Microsoft Flight Simulator and then Delta Airlines will hire
| you."
|
| All unpaid and in your spare time between your two minimum wage
| jobs, of course.
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