14 ms·

There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

263 points by mooreds 1y ago

scarface_74 1y ago
I saw absolutely no compelling evidence to back up his thesis
- freddie_mercury 1y ago
  While I'm deeply sympathetic to the original claim, I agree the evidence is lacking. All I really see is the assertion that AI means onboarding and coming up to speed is faster. Which feels a bit unproven? (Unrelated but the post has a funny rhetorical thing where it says nobody is hiring juniors then also says if you don't hire then your competition will... But you already said nobody is hiring them?!)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
hyperhello 1y ago
I wonder if an AI wrote this. It seems to have all the hallmarks.
- kelsey98765431 1y ago
  1. It's not just x - it's y.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    You're absolutely right!
    - anal_reactor 1y ago
      You've touched on something profound and deeply human.
- jclarkcom 1y ago
  looks that way to me. However, that isn't necessarily a bad thing if a human reviewed and guided AI to get the article they want.
  - ares623 1y ago
    if I wanted to read AI text I could have just prompted it myself.
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      If I wanted to implement the next Twitter, I could have just vibe coded it myself.
  - nbngeorcjhe 1y ago
    I can and will judge anyone who can't write a few paragraphs on their own
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  It also reeks of lower pay propaganda. Shallow nothing points with AI can make juniors almost as good as seniors.
coliveira 1y ago
I hope this happens quickly. These companies that use only AI should be devastated.
hellojimbo 1y ago
The real problem with hiring juniors is that tech does not have flexible pay. Realistically, hiring juniors is high risk high reward so they should naturally be on some kind of probational pay.
- hooskerdu 1y ago
  As in “kick ass and we’ll pay ya even better than we are now” probation?
  - hellojimbo 1y ago
    Yes
    - hooskerdu 1y ago
      I’m all about that.
- ta1243 1y ago
  Companies hire juniors at low rates, but then when they like them they don't increase the rates. Instead the juniors leave for another company.
  - throwawaysleep 1y ago
    If they have to pay market for seniors anyway, why pay to raise them? If you had to pay market rates for cows once grown, would you breed cows and feed them? Thats the problem. If you have the pay market when they become seniors, you may as well just pay market for seniors today.
    - tavavex 1y ago
      You don't pay as much to retain an employee as you do to hire one. If your employee feels like they're earning 5-10% below market rate, it's probably far less likely that they'll want to find another job than if you pay them 25%+ below market rate. There is a cost and a risk to switching jobs, and most established people at the company won't jump ship due to a discrepancy as small as this. So, the upside is that you get to train people and pay them at a slight discount, as opposed to having to put up a higher senior pay offer to attract someone willing to do the job. Though, as a current new grad, the desperation market is setting in. I am open to getting paid basically anything a person can survive on where I live to just gain more experience, and many other people are in the exact same situation. The junior market's demands will keep going down until either the benefit of employing us becomes large enough for companies, or until we all leave.
vasco 1y ago
Ok, which companies has it killed? At least one example?
- jeron 1y ago
  many companies are walking corpses - see GE
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    This GE? https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/earnings/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/earnings/ https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GE/ge-aerospace/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GE/ge-aerospace/pr... Certainly not in the top tier, but doesn't seem like it is at imminent risk of failing.
  - vasco 1y ago
    And the sun looks yellow, but maybe back to the topic, is there an example of a company which was killed primarily by not hiring juniors? Its like I asked of examples of burn victims and you told me "steve has the flu".
  - missedthecue 1y ago
    GE today is not the GE it was 5 years ago. They have really paired down the company. They spun off finance, sold healthcare, and got out of energy & power. GE today is essentially just an engineering company in the aerospace sector, and they've paid down $100B of debt since 2018. Today they're sitting on $10B in cash and do another $10B in free cashflow annually. Not very corpse-like!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
itake 1y ago
I’m not sure where they’re getting their data about companies not hiring juniors. In 2021, 104,874 CS students graduated—the highest number ever [0] (1.5x more than the 4 years prior). But the job postings 2022-2025 have certainly not maintained that trajectory. If the number of graduates keeps climbing while the total number of jobs shrinks, then naturally more new grads will struggle to find work. Playing devil’s advocate: some “senior” folks may now be competing with juniors, since they’re willing to take lower titles or pay just to stay employed. I’m not sure how much that actually shifts the market, considering companies famously don't hire overqualified people and tech workers face age-ism risk. [0] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...
- ThrownOffGame 1y ago
  My final stretch of employment lasted from May 2020-March 2024. My company went through mergers and acquisitions and 4 rounds of layoffs, and I managed to tenaciously hang in there (I was even "terminated" 4 times but they just kept re-hiring me!) I was definitely competing with entry-level kids who had just graduated, even those who had just graduated from the boot camps we provided. And I was hired with no college degree, no certifications, and nothing relevant on my résumé since 1999. So yeah, I got minimum-wage treatment. It was a fantastic, cushy WFH job. The parameters were ideal for my style. The supervisors were very, very patient and encouraging. I was a rock star, if I do say so myself, but there were plenty of competent colleagues who had plenty to contribute in the same role as me. Eventually I earned 3 certifications and a college completion certificate, and that made zero difference. No raises, no promotions, no acknowledgements of my achievements from my employer. So, college isn't all it's cracked up to be. Yes, seniors are competing with juniors and entry-levels. It's fierce. Be the best and do your best, and don't be reluctant to settle for a good employer.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    Sadly, WFH is de facto dead unless you want to compete with Parul in Pune, Pavel in Prague, and Peter in PEI. If anyone wants to be justified getting hired in this market and not be offshored, they will need to be in an area with a large density of tech jobs in order to find the next opportunity to land AND go into the office a couple days a week.
tayo42 1y ago
Doesn't or didn't Netflix only hire seniors for a while when they were doing some of their most interesting technical work? And shopify seems like an odd company from the outside.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Shopify experiments with hiring practices, and that's a good thing. I've been following their program to recruit high potential high schoolers and have them work as junior SWEs while doing their degree part-time. I think this kind of a model is highly underutilized and would solve issues on both the hirer and the employee's end. The issue is over the past decade, universities have dramatically reduced the scope of CS programs and removed foundational courses that have traditionally been gatekeepers to ensure some base maturity. Think like that theory of computation course, your CompArch course, or your OS Dev course.
  - tayo42 1y ago
    Shopify had me do a timed test of multiple choice brain teasers. That is an odd thing to do... I just checked the public school i went to and their required courses for CS include those that you listed
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      In Canada right? Canadian programs haven't been watered down to the same degree as American programs and we can pay y'all 20-30% less than Americans. If not, what program and year? The last few years of new grad hiring at portfolio companies left a bad taste in everyone's mouth so hiring shifted abroad. Depending on the university in the US we might already be targeting them but then the cost aspect comes to play.
      - tayo42 1y ago
        SUNY binghamton https://www.binghamton.edu/watson/student-services/advising/requirements/cs23.html https://www.binghamton.edu/watson/student-services/advising/...
alephnerd 1y ago
I mentioned why this is happening in a previous comment on HN [0]. I can't justify spending $120k or more on base salary for a new grad who lacks table stake skills becuase a program like UCB or MIT (let alone much lower ranked programs) reduced the requirements for fundamental theory and OS classes, offered the ability to take padded classes to bypass requirements (look at Cal's BA CS requirements in 2015 [1] versus 2025 [2]), or offer the ability to take these classes pass/fail thus reducing the incentive to study. Sadly, Bootcamp grads also soured an entire generation of hiring managers away from nontraditional hiring. Screw you YC for enabling predatory programs like Lambda School (YC S17). That said, I think an apprenticeship style program where a community college new grad earning $50k and gets a paid bachelors degree or directly hiring a bachelor degree new grad for $70k-90k while working would probably solve the issue. This is assuming those new grads don't meet the curriculum bar of the students they are competing with abroad. I think Shopify tried something similar and it worked. I'm also not sure an "AI first" approach is the right approach unless you are looking for someone to manage generic CRUD type work (and that kind of work is a race to the bottom anyhow from a salary perspective). If I'm hiring a prompt engineer, then imo a Linguistics or Philosophy major (or any major where you are taught Structuralism) with a CS minor would probably be the best bang for your buck. There needs to be coordinated reform in CS curricula, hiring incentives (eg. providing tax credits comparable to those which CEE, Israel, and India provide to attract FDI), and ease of doing business in order to resolve this crisis. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413516 [1] - https://berkeleyguidearchive.github.io/2014-15/undergraduate/degree-programs/computer-science/ https://berkeleyguidearchive.github.io/2014-15/undergraduate... [2] - https://undergraduate.catalog.berkeley.edu/programs/A5201U https://undergraduate.catalog.berkeley.edu/programs/A5201U
- elevation 1y ago
  You get the best bang for your buck if you just hire teachable people and fill the gaps that matter to you. Sometimes teachability subsides over the course of your career: A senior I know has terrible git hygiene but is so close to retirement, he simply won't change. But some juniors I've mentored have significantly improved their ability to compose an atomic commit with a quality commit message, and are now valuable team contributors. Even the core concepts of your CS162 course are easily within the grasp of a CS major from a less rigorous program; you could assign some required reading as part of your onboarding process if missing these concepts would prevent them from thinking critically about problems in your org.
anilgulecha 1y ago
Boot camp level skills are dead now - deeper grounding in CS is a requirement. With the 2022 hiring boom over and AI taking on some of the work, the junior market has more competitive, and will remain so in the foreseeable future. My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved for senior-level engineers. FOSS software is any other place to build skills and value until you land paying roles.
- tylerflick 1y ago
  > My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved for senior-level engineers. This is just sound advice in general. A good professional analogue to recommending a junior college as a stepping stone to a university.
- lisbbb 1y ago
  That's actually good news in a way because boot camps were so surface level and we didn't get a lot of actually good developers out of those programs, just lots of arguments by people defending ideas that weren't well-founded.
- jimbob45 1y ago
  No one cares about FOSS experience. You’re lucky if they even visit your GitHub/Lab/Berg at all and even luckier if they look at anything past your heatmap. Fact is, if FOSS experience counted for anything, then those charged with hiring would also possess the capacity to understand that C# and Java experience are nearly 1:1. Sadly, it doesn’t and they don’t.
  - jonathanlydall 1y ago
    As someone who is very experienced primarily as a C# dev, I wouldn’t say Java is “nearly 1:1”. At a syntax level they’re practically the same and they both use GC, but in terms of ecosystem they’re very different. It might not seem like it to people who are just starting out at programming, but syntax is probably the easiest part of it. Sure, I would probably be productive in Java if I had to start using it fully tomorrow, but it would take me months or years to get that same nuanced knowledge of its ecosystem to be as effective with it as I am with C#.
saltyoldman 1y ago
We just lost our 3 summer interns and now I had to take over one of the projects from one of them. The code was a bit messy, but holy crap did they get a LOT done in 3 weeks. Just finished fixing it up in 2 weeks, but if I still had him, he would have done all the fixes in less than 4 days. He was twice as fast as anyone here.
- carabiner 1y ago
  Ok?
  - agrnet 1y ago
    Ok!
- arjvik 1y ago
  Sounds like its time to make him an offer he can't refuse
- shomp 1y ago
  Out of curiosity, how did you "lose" them? Was it a 3 week stint from the getgo?
theOGognf 1y ago
Along the same lines of missing good junior engineers at work, we occasionally interview stellar engineers that’ve inflated their resume a bit to get an interview, but we end up rejecting them for not having all the specific experiences our manager wants them to have even though they’re generally great and could clearly upskill where necessary. No wonder we can’t grow the team when we’re out here looking for unicorns
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Employers need to get back to expecting to have to train new employees. This used to be pretty common. My first two employers after college hired a lot of people with no programming experience into programming roles. They just looked for smart people who were willing to learn, and they taught them to program.
hibikir 1y ago
Hiring juniors is always great if you, somehow, have a much better filter for finding the stars than the rest of the market. But if you don't, hiring bad juniors is a disaster: No different than outsourcing bits to a bad satellite office. So are you actually good at finding the good juniors in this very difficult environment? Can you change your hiring machinery to improve, as most traditional ways have stopped working? Because hiring a lot of juniors that don't work out sure can kill companies.
- goalieca 1y ago
  Hire one junior per team. Don’t overload your senior staff with OKRs and managerial tasks. Let mentorship and apprenticeship happen.
  - throwawaysleep 1y ago
    I guess what’s the value of the junior there? Why is that superior to just having the seniors have their heads down coding and not being pestered by a junior?
    - amrocha 1y ago
      Because the junior grows into a senior in a couple of years and the company is better off for it
      - Salgat 1y ago
        That's fine if you can compensate them accordingly to retain them, but if you're going to pay them senior level in a couple of years, why not just hire a senior level to begin with?
        trenchpilgrim 1y ago
        Because highly experienced seniors are rarely on the job market. >The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market. >The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career. >The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that company, it’s often to go to a startup with a friend, or to follow a great boss to another company, or because they decided they really want to work on, say, Eclipse, because Eclipse is cool, so they look for an Eclipse job at BEA or IBM and then of course they get it because they’re brilliant. [Replace Eclipse with $HOT_TECHNOLOGY, like AI agents this year.] >If you’re lucky, if you’re really lucky, they show up on the open job market once, when, say, their spouse decides to accept a medical internship in Anchorage and they actually send their resume out to what they think are the few places they’d like to work at in Anchorage. >But for the most part, great developers (and this is almost a tautology) are, uh, great, (ok, it is a tautology), and, usually, prospective employers recognize their greatness quickly, which means, basically, they get to work wherever they want, so they honestly don’t send out a lot of resumes or apply for a lot of jobs. - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve... Most of the best programmers I know have worked 2-3 tech jobs. An internship or entry level job, a cushy job at a major company, and either retirement or a third job that they took because the problem was incredibly interesting and they got nerd sniped. I even saw the "medical internship" scenario happen once; a great colleague of mine had to move to France for his partner's career in medicine, so he quit his job and found something over there.
zeroq 1y ago
hot take: covid killed a generation If you were a junior in 2020 and right of the bat you were forced to work remotely you missed a great deal of learning experience. Or you had really bad time getting hired, at least up to a point, because business was booming. Oh, and then you had that whole swarm of bootcamp graduates who thought they could cheat the system, get a degree in hello world and land a $300k job. Back in 2013 I was making fun of job offers that would require 5-7y of experience in JS for a senior position. 7y of what? JQuery? Same thing applies today. If someone started his career in 2001 I wouldn't even consider him if he had a job in BigCo.
- lisbbb 1y ago
  Not sure why you're getting the hate. What you said is fairly accurate--there was a time period in which a lot of poorly skilled people were getting hired and that caused a lot of disruption inside of companies because you ended up getting all these ego-driven, writing checks their skills can't cash type of people. It was annoying as hell. I remember having a problem that was a slam dunk for using a state machine and this one guy argued against it because he didn't even know what a state machine was, but of course could not admit that to anyone. Anyways, he lost that argument, but why did we have to have it in the first place? Ooooh right--someone got hired as a Sr. Dev who wasn't really Senior anything.
  - zeroq 1y ago
    Unsolicited advise, that's one thing I've learned about far too late in my life. You know, if you have a brother or someone really, really close, and you're preparing for a wedding or a funeral, and they have a shirt that look absolutely ridiculous and you tell them that, they look at you, you match your eyes, and they trust you with their life. Well that doesn't happen in normal life. Normally, what happens in ordinary life is you have a colleague that looks, smells or did something stinky, you want to be the good guy, you let him know and he's like "omg, he hates me, all hands to battle stations, that guy, aim that guy, he tried to wrong me!". And if he's slightly less on the spectrum than you - you're toasted. You're under fire, and there's no getting out. And this happens every time you try to swim up the river in this current.
britch 1y ago
I was confused by why "use of AI" was a top-level requirement of this, but I see now that weave is AI-driven "engineering output measurement" company, down to the individual contributor level. I can understand why you would have better luck hiring eager new-grads than seasoned engineers. I'm sure some IC find the weave stats useful, but it also sounds like a toxic manager's dream. I can understand why more senior engineers would steer clear.
pyb 1y ago
Not mentioned in the article : interns/juniors are too expensive these days ; seniors offer better value per dollar of comp.
- nick__m 1y ago
  Why not just pay them significantly less than seniors? if there is a surplus of juniors shouldn't the invisible hand of the market adjust the salaries accordingly?
  - ares623 1y ago
    The invisible hand of the market is saying to hire offshore
  - throwawaysleep 1y ago
    Depends on what you think the cause is. They can’t work for $20 a month legally in most cases.
  - t-writescode 1y ago
    The invisible hand of the market is playing games with promises of AI allowing one senior to do the work of a senior and 4 juniors. Whether or not it works will be something we find out long past the early-experience tenure of those junior engineers.
  - pyb 1y ago
    Anectodally, I've seen that some newly graduated engineers prefer to forgo the job search altogether, rather than lower their comp demands to get a foot in the door.
throwawaysleep 1y ago
Is Shopify a great company? Stock below peak in a market giving extremely rich tech valuations. Canadian engineers hardly aspire to work there. Politics of the founders also seem to come up a lot. This isn’t meant to be an attack but more an observation that it seems to be one of the companies getting killed. To address the article itself, the argument isn’t juniors ca seniors, but juniors vs AI. Why is a junior worth paying 10,000x more than Claude? And it’s perfectly loyal, perfectly energetic, and can add its learnings to a contributions.md doc.
- gen220 1y ago
  What makes a company great? I think by most rational business metrics (top line revenue growth, gross margins, operating margins, cash flow, balance sheet), Shopify in 2025 is a fantastic business that seems to only be getting better? This is notably different from an analysis of whatever the market price for its equity is or has been. I think that market price is ~40% overvalued today and it’s been much more overvalued than that in the past… but the fundamentals of the business have never been stronger. In what way is it getting killed? To force a comparison within the sector, is Amazon not a great company? Market price point aside, it’s arguably more politically charged and less aspirational engineering culture-wise. But I think I’d still call it a great company, same as Shopify.
Cornbilly 1y ago
When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds). Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.
- dottjt 1y ago
  I feel like it's at two ends of the extreme. Either the junior is literally better than everyone else on the team, or they know nothing.
- MountDoom 1y ago
  > The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds). Why is this a problem, though? Imagine hiring doctors or architects with that expectation. "The problem is that no one is truly passionate about dissecting cadavers anymore". I think our industry got hooked on being able to hire self-taught geniuses in the early days of tech. But the profession has gotten a lot more commoditized, and we just can't continue like that. Gotta hire "normal" people and teach them what they need to know. And yeah, "normal" means people who decided to learn programming because it pays well, not because they want to design compilers in their spare time.
  - imgyuri 1y ago
    because there are multiple abstractions in software that one is bound to come across once the software becomes complicated enough, and from that point on "passion" and "fundamentals" determine how effective they are at navigating that path
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
The gap between juniors and seniors today is really not that big. I know a lot of people with senior in their title that are closer to a junior. Have them actually read the docs for a month straight, and a junior would know more than a senior. Also, if you really want to hire a senior, and you can't compete on pay, maybe compete by going remote? Almost all the job listings I see are for hybrid roles. Do they realize they're just throwing away all the candidates in other cities? Are hiring managers/CEOs masochists?
- willvarfar 1y ago
  Yeah see this all the time :( Senior is often about time in industry not competence. A lot of 'senior' engineers are completely ineffective and seemingly unable to ever become effective. They just joined the industry a while ago and are treading water and tricking the next hiring manager that they were called 'senior' at their last job so of course they are a 'senior' now. If they aren't applying for 'staff' level jobs. The correlation between being smart, getting things done, speeding everyone up, being trusted etc and 'seniority' is not causal :)
- clickety_clack 1y ago
  I might have agreed with you on remote work before Covid, but the difference in productivity from my team that stayed remote after Covid, and the hybrid one I joined afterwards was almost impossible to believe.
  - 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
    That's the team, not the location. Take your hybrid team and move them remote and they'll perform the same.
    - clickety_clack 1y ago
      For a few months they will, but the innovation, problem solving and creativity that happens in person just can’t be replicated online and it’ll eventually drop off. I hope you’re not arguing for remote, in a non-tech hub city, but only in the US. If I thought remote individuals were as productive as in person, there would be no such thing as “remote but not too remote”. Canada is cheaper than the US and has American English speakers, if that’s important to you. LATAM is in the US time zones and is cheaper again. If I didn’t care about time zone offset there’s almost unlimited options for offshoring at a fraction of the cost of US labor.
carabiner 1y ago
The output of even junior mechanical engineers today would be considered mindblowing to the mechE's of 100 years ago, for similar reasons: computational tools have allowed an exponential increase in productivity.
meow_mix 1y ago
As someone who has been hiring juniors recently. I disagree with pretty much all these points: Great juniors learn fast and search for feedback. It’s easier to manage them. They want to improve and know what you think about their work. --> Very skeptical of this comment. It's harder to manage someone that needs managed so directly, period. Loyalty. engineers who you train from the beginning tend to stay longer. They understand your systems deeply and can mentor the next generation of junior engineers. --> They really don't. They're looking for a foot in the door. Higher ceiling. A motivated junior engineer often has more upside. You're getting someone at the beginning of their growth curve rather than the middle or end. --> Maybe? Tough to tell. They often leave. Juniors bring fresh energy to the team - they want to learn, and they have a drive to prove themselves and succeed. Their motivation can be contagious! The existing seniors in your team will enjoy working with smart and motivated developers. --> Not always. Most just want a job and are easily discouraged. Some are like this though. Juniors are not restricted by what they know. They haven't been trained to think "that's just how we do things." They’ll not try to reuse the same technologies from previous companies, or recreate those ‘amazing’ design patterns that were useful only in a specific context. It’s not just being AI-native, it’s about having less resistance to change. --> This one I sort of agree with
- t-writescode 1y ago
  > Maybe? Tough to tell. They often leave. In my experience working with juniors, the ones that look to leave are the ones that don't have their compensation appropriately adjusted as they rank up. Pay everyone well, treat them with respect. Challenge them, and give them raises and rank-ups as they gain tenure and skill (not when it's "in the budget, and oh sorry, we can only uprank one this year, but we hired a person at the higher level, so really we can't afford it. Try again later!"), and you'll have people that stay a long time
  - Salgat 1y ago
    If you're going to end up having to pay these people high salaries, why not hire a more senior person to begin with?
alakep 1y ago
We love hiring junior engineers at https://yuzu.health/careers https://yuzu.health/careers. Please apply or reach out to me over email: russell@yuzu.health.
- daemonologist 1y ago
  Oh hey I work for an (old fashioned) TPA. I need to get some sleep but I might check this out tomorrow.
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  Isn’t your pay kind of low to be an in office job in NYC?
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    Not OP but that is market rate for a junior at a startup at their stage in NYC. Salary expectations are ridiculously out of whack among junior engineers.
  - MiscCompFacts 1y ago
    That seems like a fantastic salary, I’ve never gotten close to that.
    - JustExAWS 1y ago
      It is - outside of NYC.
renewiltord 1y ago
The pool is large, resumes don't differentiate => I have to talk to them to find the guy. I don't know how to do this efficiently. If you've got that skill, go right ahead. For my part, the rise in compensation has resulted in a lot of people who don't have any interest in the subject except as a tool to make dollars and they always run into dumb stuff like wrong documentation making them unable to act. Yeah the kernel docs say one thing but the kernel behaves differently. Just look at the source. It's open source, man. Won't do it without being told. If they don't care but will be persistent, fine. But if you can't work some basics, it's not worth it. And the correlation is near 1.0 because at least passion guy has something driving him to dig to next layer. Inevitably some sucker will hire him, give him some on the job experience and then I can pay more.
jorl17 1y ago
My comment will focus only on a subset of the article: the part regarding AI. While I agree with the sentiment that AI has changed the practice forever, and therefore it is pretty silly to forbid AI during interviews (much like it was always silly to me to forbid a candidate from googling something during an interview), I haven't really seen evidence that juniors with AI have faster onboarding times. Onboarding, to me, is about having the new team member adopt the existing team's practices, such as learning preferred code patterns, communication channels, established frameworks, and overall just getting to truly be a part of the team (tech and non-tech team). In that sense, AI has done very little to help. If, on one hand, AI can help us produce better documentation that will help with this process and studying existing libraries and practices better, on the other hand, AI also enables a new team member to seek others less early on (a point the article itself makes), which I believe makes the onboarding process (according to my definition) slower — i.e. less communication = slower onboarding. As I mentioned, we can also relate onboarding to getting to know the codebase, in which case AI definitely helps (and as more code is written with proper AI engineering practices, it will help more), but I really feel that this is a small part of the equation. Similarly, I think getting to know the actual domain of a project (the users, the requirements, the 'language', the problems, etc.) is an important part of onboarding and, again, AI helps here, but not a whole lot. It's about people, not bits. Sure, if you hire a junior to get him to work straight away on a new project, the new hire will be "productive" faster (therefore seeming to have been "onboarded" faster) than before, because the AI does make them "go faster" than before, but I wouldn't say they were _really_ onboarded. Perhaps it's just a case of a different culture, a too-rigid definition of "quality", or just a different set of workplaces, but this has not been my experience at all. Most junior hires take at least 6-8 months to produce code with our standards of quality without a decent chunk of supervision. Even a junior with a very solid capability to think the system as a whole has a tendency to over-engineer or place code in the wrong places due to inexperience, which definitely affects their productivity.
- hyperadvanced 1y ago
  Orthogonal comment here but “onboarding” has always struck me as weird. I’ve only had 3 tech jobs in 15 years and may not need to get another one, but at every one I just showed up on day one and started doing things that people asked me to. Clone the repo, run it locally, deploy a change to dev, poke around at it, read some docs, do a little refactor or comment on other people’s PR’s. There is much to do. I don’t get these people who show up and like.. don’t do anything. Even if you do something dumb and have your PR ready for review EOD it’s all good. I have never seen the effort that goes into these mountains of onboarding docs that some of my coworkers have pay off, I just pair with the new people and we solve things and they learn.
blindriver 1y ago
Another “here are the 5 easy steps to hiring a great engineer” post, said confidently but with zero empirical evidence that his techniques actually work. There is nothing more useless than posts that purport how to hire effectively but offer no data.
rurban 1y ago
We don't hire juniors, just seniors. For juniors we do have AI. They have crazy ideas, like shooting sparrows with cannons. Eg using terraform for a setting up a static repo hosting website. Or kubernetes for a GNU parallel job. Very ambitious, yes. Overly ambitious. It's called massive overengineering
nextworddev 1y ago
The real pro tip: hire someone with 2-3 years of experience
aaron_m04 1y ago
This article feels a little suspect. They beat the AI drum a bit hard. So I go to https://workweave.dev https://workweave.dev and of course their business model is tied up with LLMs.
yeputons 1y ago
> We focus on system design, architectural decisions, and reasoning through trade-offs. Are we still talking about hiring juniors? I hope I misunderstood and it's not about "design messaging app" type of questions. Otherwise we're firmly back in the Leetcode land.
pmg101 1y ago
Remember Joel Spolsky' guide to hiring [0]? 1. Smart 2. Gets things done Personally I think the junior/senior distinction is overstated. Yes, experience does count for something. But it comes a distant third on the list to the two Joel mentions. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
JohnBooty 1y ago
Hiring too many junior engineers is killing companies... ...although this is a fault of management, not the juniors. I've seen the following at two companies: - Large, complex codebases - Management hires a bunch of juniors because they're cheaper - The juniors "move fast and break things" and write a lot of extremely high tech debt code - Management, lacking the ability or will to understand tech debt, think these juniors are productive because they see short-term productivity but cannot understand the medium- and long-term ramifications - The juniors, not knowing better, don't realize the damage they're causing (again, not their fault) - At some point the juniors outnumber the seniors and the lunatics are running the asylum. (More politically crafty seniors utilize this to their advantage and cultivate fiefdoms of juniors) I am of course speaking in generalities. There are amazing juniors and terrible seniors. I have been in this career long enough to see the same things over and over, so I stand by my generalizations. However... I have also seen enough exceptions to know that you can't judge pre-judge any particular individual by "years of experience" or any other metric.
porker 1y ago
When companies hire more senior engineers is the quality of software produced increasing and delivery time decreasing? It's a good time to see if bodies or experience matters more.
neilv 1y ago
> "[...] it’ll take juniors too long to ramp up" I think unsaid about a version of that belief is "... and, after expensive ramp-up including mentoring, they'll probably job-hop for a better salary, or better company, before the company sees payoff." It's not just latency on payoff, but risk of any payoff at all. > “...interns bring [...]" "...a relatively low-cost way to evaluate a candidate hire, and then, if they show promise, you have their attention to make them an offer for a real job." Given how hard tech companies find vetting candidates (e.g., many still cling to Leetcode and what school someone went to), and the demands of post-ZIRP on effectiveness, interns (and expecting to spend more on mentoring than the interns produce in value) are one solution for finding good future junior hires.
Joel_Mckay 1y ago
It takes 1 to 3 years to train new generic skilled grads on average. A company initially typically loses $35k to $140k in resources to train a Junior to be minimally useful. Thus, most ponder if a hire is going to have a career long enough on a team to offset that liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect In general, entry level gigs have a narrow scope of skills for many reasons, as managers know people plan to jump ship sooner or later. Staffing agencies have a feed queue for these roles in a large firm, and simply maintain the churn. Good luck, =3
yaur 1y ago
The thing is its much harder to higher a good junior dev. With a senior dev i can ask about the [hardest/most interesting/thing you would like to talk about] bug and talk through how they solved it to understand how their brain works. With a Jr you basically need to spend an hour pair programming to sus out the great ones and no one has yet put in the time to filter out the bottom X0%.
flustercan 1y ago
Junior engineers should spend half their time doing customer support. It allows them to provide meaningful value to the company without needing to code, it shows them a customer first approach to the product, it teaches them empathy for users and the CS team. It also teaches them repro/debugging skills.
- ares623 1y ago
  Just seems like a fast way to lose some juniors.
neilv 1y ago
> Look for passion and curiosity. You want the ones who light up when talking about their projects. They should show real excitement about the problems they've solved. These conversations should be energizing for both of you! Interview prep tells candidates to fake "passion" and (now) "curiosity". (The prep materials don't say to fake it, but they will phrase it implying that that's the truth, and that it's something that interviewers look for. The prep might give examples of when to be sure to "convey your passion", such as when discussing a project you worked on.) The net result is that interview prep materials, and companies that select for that, end up selecting for people who will go through the motions of appearances. Which is OK if you are a stodgy huge company sitting on its laurels, that wants everyone to be a compliant worker drone, more than they want excellence. Not OK if you're a startup that really needs to execute with more than worker-drone capabilities. Maybe an interviewer seeking genuine "passion" and "curiosity" would be better off giving points to someone who seems to have skills but didn't seem to have done interview prep, since they must have gotten that far by being genuine and non-drone?
- adchurch 1y ago
  If you keep asking questions eventually you hit something they don't actually know. How long it takes to get there + what they say when they get there is what makes this interesting imo!
zkmon 1y ago
Not very long ago, the real reason smart managers, in consulting firms, hired juniors by boat loads, though they are not very skilled, is because the young staff has other compensating qualities. The work these companies had was quite irregular, unstructured and unexpected as well. This demands a workforce that is very flexible, work over nights, can learn fast, can switch to any work easily (they are not stuck to a single kind of work role). Juniors wore many hats easily as situation demanded (faking included). They are also very mobile, can travel to a client site in any country. Most of them are singles. Feed them, do team outings, reward them and give gadgets (my team got first version of iPods free). They would give 50 hour weeks plus weekends. They hardly have any life outside of office. Sometimes they slept at office. Also, the young workforce has a high team-bonding nature (romances included, intentionally). This makes them very good team players. What a manager means by "team player" is, they work for team goals, with poorly defined roles and tasks, without complaining. There were a few seniors who review and guide the work, but the bulk of work was done by very mediocre, hard-working junior staff. When things go wrong, managers are ready to do crisis management and shuffle their young worker crowd across teams. In other industries they are called MSGs: multi-skilled-gangs. These are very fluid work force. They don't know what kind of work will assigned to them on a certain day. It can be anything, from taking a support call, arranging lunch or pub party for the team, writing some html, testing some UI, giving a presentation to clients. Undefined work requires undefined roles and employees that aren't yet married to certain work role, life style, or other person.
- stalfosknight 1y ago
  That’s rather gross.
adchurch 1y ago
Author here, great to see all the conversation & thoughts you all have shared so far! One thing I've seen a lot of people saying: hiring juniors isn't worth it because they'll just leave for more money in a couple years. I got hired with 0 experience for my first job and stayed for 3.5 years (I left when I decided to start my own company). I was otherwise never tempted to leave because I got all the support and growth opportunities I could have hoped for, and I always felt fairly compensated. So based on my own experience, it's possible for a company to treat people well enough that they won't just leave. I do think software companies tend to be bad at this specific thing though - I'd imagine many have had an experience unlike my own.
- 0rdinal 1y ago
  From my experience, junior's tend to churn out after around three years. There are often factors that go beyond whether they felt they were treated well. Looking at it holistically, younger people tend to want to move around more. It is no surprise to me that the average tenure of a junior employee is about the same length as a degree - separating life stages in to 1-3 year periods is a mindset embedded into young people throughout their education. I would wager that perception plays heavily into this too. It can be difficult to shake a perception of "being a junior", especially when the path to seniority is unclear or poorly defined. Plus, the "two years and disappear" ethos of job hopping for quicker compensation capitalises on companies' conservative promotion criteria (and more liberal hiring criteria). Loyalty is rarely rewarded in these cases.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Also, as the unemployment rate for CS grads goes up, they are probably less likely to leave than in the past.
EZ-E 1y ago
This has been driving me crazy, at my mid sized company, higher management insists pretty hard in only hiring senior/staff. But to be honest we are far from solving novel, challenging technical problems. Inevitably we hire (expensive) super senior people who end up having responsibilities that do not match their level in tech and also in product. The good ones that want a challenge leave after ~1y. Junior or mid level would be a better fit in many cases. When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually happens in the company. In the past when we hired junior, mid level engineers they ramped up pretty well, their salaries went up and they are still with us.
- wiether 1y ago
  > When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually happens in the company. At every company at work to, each time there was openings for the team I worked in, I read the job descriptions and I was like: "I would never apply for this position, I'm not qualified". So I asked HR to lower the expectations, otherwise we would never find candidates. They told me that it was to avoid inexperienced people to apply. And then 99% of the candidates they pushed and I interviewed lied on their XP. Good stuff!
domq 1y ago
The technical term is “recession”
a96 1y ago
In small startups - “we are a very small team and we don’t have time to mentor juniors, we need engineers who will be very productive from day 1" In medium-sized companies - “we are going to grow very fast, we need engineers who can handle scale and have faced such challenges before" In big companies - “our infrastructure is super complex, it’ll take juniors too long to ramp up". Seeing things like this, I pretty much always hear "We don't know what we're doing and want to find someone who does and will make us make money fast".
red_rech 1y ago
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fatih-erikli-cg 1y ago
My experience, real work is what a junior dev does, without an exception. Senior developer creates over-engineered version of what junior dev made. Senior devs gibber about database systems, sql, nosql, clustering, etc. The real work storing the input in text file, querying with a simple loop. Plus there is an additional huge misconception in industry, if something is realtime, it is a senior dev thing. It is something like a plague.
- slekker 1y ago
  TCO and YOE?
  - fatih-erikli-cg 1y ago
    I don't understand these acronyms.
    - slekker 1y ago
      Sorry, Total compensation (salary + equity) and years of experience
- poshmosh 1y ago
  I have 14 YOE and its the opposite. Really brilliant jrs don't have the experience to know the consequences of their designs, they build fast under pressure. They reinvent things that already exist (they don't know because they a Junior). Seniors have PTSD and push back.
strathmeyer 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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alphazard 1y ago
The biggest hiring hack for junior engineers is to hire the ones that have already been programming for a decade, and are called "junior" because they recently graduated university. The junior/senior language is corporate-speak to equate everyone's value to "years of service" in industry or at a company. Obviously that's not how competency works, and if you are serious about hiring competent people, you should mostly ignore it. It's useful for listings, it is common terminology after all, but it's not semantically or descriptively useful.
- runeblaze 1y ago
  Yea experience is very useful (it is very hard to exert influence without power and be the tech lead of a team unless you have some corporate experience) but at some point one needs to realize that if someone was writing Haskell at the age of 12 and they got decent scores at USACO they would make quite a decent engineer...
- never_inline 1y ago
  This is a positive signal, but doesn't necessarily tell whether the person has intellectual capability to write "proper" code or just had some opportunity at the early age to be exposed to programming. I have seen good and bad engineers who had been programming before graduation. Fortunately, good ones outnumber the bad ones.
Axol 1y ago
Tragedy of the commons. People will prioritize selfish, short-term gains by taking from a finite pool of resources at the expense of long-term sustainability for everyone.
zygentoma 1y ago
Completely off-topic: How cool is that the headline text gets outlined when selected!
never_inline 1y ago
Here are some real open-ended questions you can use to see how well a junior hire with no Industry background will do. * Test whether they understand data types and abstraction. * You have a function returning two numbers in <your favorite language>, how will you do? * Now you need 4 items from this function called getUserInfo(), how will you return it? (Eg: username, email, location and age). * You need to share some state between two calls to this function. i.e a database connection. How will you do it? * Now imagine multiple threads / requests call this function. how will you share state? And so on.. r/CSMajors types who have done only leetcode will fumble this kind of open ended discussion. Similarly for networks * Google "my IP address" from your phone? * Is it really the IP address of your phone? * There are more than 4 billion mobiles + computers on this planet. How are they getting unique IPs then? * If you run your school project (likely to be django or express js app), will you be able to reach it from another phone or desktop using this IP? * Why or why not? These are kind of things they should be able to answer if their networking / OS etc... classes were any good.
hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
I’d buy this argument but for heaven’s sake don’t rest your argument on what Shopify might be doing. Shopify has famously done everything and then the opposite for the past 5 years. They’re highly opportunistic in their messaging and marketing around hiring and what they publicly reveal there is better seen as propaganda than an indication of their actual hiring approach.
namblooc 1y ago
Why do these blog posts always assume that utilization of AI makes employees faster at coding when the opposite has been proven to be true?
- bubblyworld 1y ago
  I think you are making the same mistake. Nothing of the sort has been proven conclusively in either direction.
danans 1y ago
> How to hire the right junior engineers... The advice given doesn't just apply to junior software engineers, but also senior. It's pretty much how all the senior engineers at my company (including me) were hired. While I found the process heavy as a candidate, it did seem to select for like-minded and similarly motivated co-workers. That said, the company has also hired several university interns through a similar process, and they have been great co-workers.
atan2 1y ago
I read the article but it felt more like wishful thinking than actually providing any tangible data on the gains of hiring junior devs.

263 points by mooreds 1y ago

scarface_74 1y ago

I saw absolutely no compelling evidence to back up his thesis

freddie_mercury 1y ago
While I'm deeply sympathetic to the original claim, I agree the evidence is lacking. All I really see is the assertion that AI means onboarding and coming up to speed is faster. Which feels a bit unproven? (Unrelated but the post has a funny rhetorical thing where it says nobody is hiring juniors then also says if you don't hire then your competition will... But you already said nobody is hiring them?!)
deleted 1y ago
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hyperhello 1y ago

I wonder if an AI wrote this. It seems to have all the hallmarks.

kelsey98765431 1y ago
1. It's not just x - it's y.
- bitwize 1y ago
  You're absolutely right!
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    You've touched on something profound and deeply human.
jclarkcom 1y ago
looks that way to me. However, that isn't necessarily a bad thing if a human reviewed and guided AI to get the article they want.
- ares623 1y ago
  if I wanted to read AI text I could have just prompted it myself.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    If I wanted to implement the next Twitter, I could have just vibe coded it myself.
- nbngeorcjhe 1y ago
  I can and will judge anyone who can't write a few paragraphs on their own
citizenpaul 1y ago
It also reeks of lower pay propaganda. Shallow nothing points with AI can make juniors almost as good as seniors.

coliveira 1y ago

I hope this happens quickly. These companies that use only AI should be devastated.

hellojimbo 1y ago

The real problem with hiring juniors is that tech does not have flexible pay. Realistically, hiring juniors is high risk high reward so they should naturally be on some kind of probational pay.

hooskerdu 1y ago
As in “kick ass and we’ll pay ya even better than we are now” probation?
- hellojimbo 1y ago
  Yes
  - hooskerdu 1y ago
    I’m all about that.
ta1243 1y ago
Companies hire juniors at low rates, but then when they like them they don't increase the rates. Instead the juniors leave for another company.
- throwawaysleep 1y ago
  If they have to pay market for seniors anyway, why pay to raise them? If you had to pay market rates for cows once grown, would you breed cows and feed them? Thats the problem. If you have the pay market when they become seniors, you may as well just pay market for seniors today.
  - tavavex 1y ago
    You don't pay as much to retain an employee as you do to hire one. If your employee feels like they're earning 5-10% below market rate, it's probably far less likely that they'll want to find another job than if you pay them 25%+ below market rate. There is a cost and a risk to switching jobs, and most established people at the company won't jump ship due to a discrepancy as small as this. So, the upside is that you get to train people and pay them at a slight discount, as opposed to having to put up a higher senior pay offer to attract someone willing to do the job. Though, as a current new grad, the desperation market is setting in. I am open to getting paid basically anything a person can survive on where I live to just gain more experience, and many other people are in the exact same situation. The junior market's demands will keep going down until either the benefit of employing us becomes large enough for companies, or until we all leave.

vasco 1y ago

Ok, which companies has it killed? At least one example?

jeron 1y ago
many companies are walking corpses - see GE
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  This GE? https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/earnings/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/general-electric/earnings/ https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GE/ge-aerospace/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GE/ge-aerospace/pr... Certainly not in the top tier, but doesn't seem like it is at imminent risk of failing.
- vasco 1y ago
  And the sun looks yellow, but maybe back to the topic, is there an example of a company which was killed primarily by not hiring juniors? Its like I asked of examples of burn victims and you told me "steve has the flu".
- missedthecue 1y ago
  GE today is not the GE it was 5 years ago. They have really paired down the company. They spun off finance, sold healthcare, and got out of energy & power. GE today is essentially just an engineering company in the aerospace sector, and they've paid down $100B of debt since 2018. Today they're sitting on $10B in cash and do another $10B in free cashflow annually. Not very corpse-like!

deleted 1y ago

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itake 1y ago

I’m not sure where they’re getting their data about companies not hiring juniors. In 2021, 104,874 CS students graduated—the highest number ever [0] (1.5x more than the 4 years prior). But the job postings 2022-2025 have certainly not maintained that trajectory. If the number of graduates keeps climbing while the total number of jobs shrinks, then naturally more new grads will struggle to find work. Playing devil’s advocate: some “senior” folks may now be competing with juniors, since they’re willing to take lower titles or pay just to stay employed. I’m not sure how much that actually shifts the market, considering companies famously don't hire overqualified people and tech workers face age-ism risk. [0] - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...

ThrownOffGame 1y ago
My final stretch of employment lasted from May 2020-March 2024. My company went through mergers and acquisitions and 4 rounds of layoffs, and I managed to tenaciously hang in there (I was even "terminated" 4 times but they just kept re-hiring me!) I was definitely competing with entry-level kids who had just graduated, even those who had just graduated from the boot camps we provided. And I was hired with no college degree, no certifications, and nothing relevant on my résumé since 1999. So yeah, I got minimum-wage treatment. It was a fantastic, cushy WFH job. The parameters were ideal for my style. The supervisors were very, very patient and encouraging. I was a rock star, if I do say so myself, but there were plenty of competent colleagues who had plenty to contribute in the same role as me. Eventually I earned 3 certifications and a college completion certificate, and that made zero difference. No raises, no promotions, no acknowledgements of my achievements from my employer. So, college isn't all it's cracked up to be. Yes, seniors are competing with juniors and entry-levels. It's fierce. Be the best and do your best, and don't be reluctant to settle for a good employer.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Sadly, WFH is de facto dead unless you want to compete with Parul in Pune, Pavel in Prague, and Peter in PEI. If anyone wants to be justified getting hired in this market and not be offshored, they will need to be in an area with a large density of tech jobs in order to find the next opportunity to land AND go into the office a couple days a week.

tayo42 1y ago

Doesn't or didn't Netflix only hire seniors for a while when they were doing some of their most interesting technical work? And shopify seems like an odd company from the outside.

alephnerd 1y ago
Shopify experiments with hiring practices, and that's a good thing. I've been following their program to recruit high potential high schoolers and have them work as junior SWEs while doing their degree part-time. I think this kind of a model is highly underutilized and would solve issues on both the hirer and the employee's end. The issue is over the past decade, universities have dramatically reduced the scope of CS programs and removed foundational courses that have traditionally been gatekeepers to ensure some base maturity. Think like that theory of computation course, your CompArch course, or your OS Dev course.
- tayo42 1y ago
  Shopify had me do a timed test of multiple choice brain teasers. That is an odd thing to do... I just checked the public school i went to and their required courses for CS include those that you listed
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    In Canada right? Canadian programs haven't been watered down to the same degree as American programs and we can pay y'all 20-30% less than Americans. If not, what program and year? The last few years of new grad hiring at portfolio companies left a bad taste in everyone's mouth so hiring shifted abroad. Depending on the university in the US we might already be targeting them but then the cost aspect comes to play.
    - tayo42 1y ago
      SUNY binghamton https://www.binghamton.edu/watson/student-services/advising/requirements/cs23.html https://www.binghamton.edu/watson/student-services/advising/...

alephnerd 1y ago

I mentioned why this is happening in a previous comment on HN [0]. I can't justify spending $120k or more on base salary for a new grad who lacks table stake skills becuase a program like UCB or MIT (let alone much lower ranked programs) reduced the requirements for fundamental theory and OS classes, offered the ability to take padded classes to bypass requirements (look at Cal's BA CS requirements in 2015 [1] versus 2025 [2]), or offer the ability to take these classes pass/fail thus reducing the incentive to study. Sadly, Bootcamp grads also soured an entire generation of hiring managers away from nontraditional hiring. Screw you YC for enabling predatory programs like Lambda School (YC S17). That said, I think an apprenticeship style program where a community college new grad earning $50k and gets a paid bachelors degree or directly hiring a bachelor degree new grad for $70k-90k while working would probably solve the issue. This is assuming those new grads don't meet the curriculum bar of the students they are competing with abroad. I think Shopify tried something similar and it worked. I'm also not sure an "AI first" approach is the right approach unless you are looking for someone to manage generic CRUD type work (and that kind of work is a race to the bottom anyhow from a salary perspective). If I'm hiring a prompt engineer, then imo a Linguistics or Philosophy major (or any major where you are taught Structuralism) with a CS minor would probably be the best bang for your buck. There needs to be coordinated reform in CS curricula, hiring incentives (eg. providing tax credits comparable to those which CEE, Israel, and India provide to attract FDI), and ease of doing business in order to resolve this crisis. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413516 [1] - https://berkeleyguidearchive.github.io/2014-15/undergraduate/degree-programs/computer-science/ https://berkeleyguidearchive.github.io/2014-15/undergraduate... [2] - https://undergraduate.catalog.berkeley.edu/programs/A5201U https://undergraduate.catalog.berkeley.edu/programs/A5201U

elevation 1y ago
You get the best bang for your buck if you just hire teachable people and fill the gaps that matter to you. Sometimes teachability subsides over the course of your career: A senior I know has terrible git hygiene but is so close to retirement, he simply won't change. But some juniors I've mentored have significantly improved their ability to compose an atomic commit with a quality commit message, and are now valuable team contributors. Even the core concepts of your CS162 course are easily within the grasp of a CS major from a less rigorous program; you could assign some required reading as part of your onboarding process if missing these concepts would prevent them from thinking critically about problems in your org.

anilgulecha 1y ago

Boot camp level skills are dead now - deeper grounding in CS is a requirement. With the 2022 hiring boom over and AI taking on some of the work, the junior market has more competitive, and will remain so in the foreseeable future. My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved for senior-level engineers. FOSS software is any other place to build skills and value until you land paying roles.

tylerflick 1y ago
> My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved for senior-level engineers. This is just sound advice in general. A good professional analogue to recommending a junior college as a stepping stone to a university.
lisbbb 1y ago
That's actually good news in a way because boot camps were so surface level and we didn't get a lot of actually good developers out of those programs, just lots of arguments by people defending ideas that weren't well-founded.
jimbob45 1y ago
No one cares about FOSS experience. You’re lucky if they even visit your GitHub/Lab/Berg at all and even luckier if they look at anything past your heatmap. Fact is, if FOSS experience counted for anything, then those charged with hiring would also possess the capacity to understand that C# and Java experience are nearly 1:1. Sadly, it doesn’t and they don’t.
- jonathanlydall 1y ago
  As someone who is very experienced primarily as a C# dev, I wouldn’t say Java is “nearly 1:1”. At a syntax level they’re practically the same and they both use GC, but in terms of ecosystem they’re very different. It might not seem like it to people who are just starting out at programming, but syntax is probably the easiest part of it. Sure, I would probably be productive in Java if I had to start using it fully tomorrow, but it would take me months or years to get that same nuanced knowledge of its ecosystem to be as effective with it as I am with C#.

saltyoldman 1y ago

We just lost our 3 summer interns and now I had to take over one of the projects from one of them. The code was a bit messy, but holy crap did they get a LOT done in 3 weeks. Just finished fixing it up in 2 weeks, but if I still had him, he would have done all the fixes in less than 4 days. He was twice as fast as anyone here.

carabiner 1y ago
Ok?
- agrnet 1y ago
  Ok!
arjvik 1y ago
Sounds like its time to make him an offer he can't refuse
shomp 1y ago
Out of curiosity, how did you "lose" them? Was it a 3 week stint from the getgo?

theOGognf 1y ago

Along the same lines of missing good junior engineers at work, we occasionally interview stellar engineers that’ve inflated their resume a bit to get an interview, but we end up rejecting them for not having all the specific experiences our manager wants them to have even though they’re generally great and could clearly upskill where necessary. No wonder we can’t grow the team when we’re out here looking for unicorns

SoftTalker 1y ago
Employers need to get back to expecting to have to train new employees. This used to be pretty common. My first two employers after college hired a lot of people with no programming experience into programming roles. They just looked for smart people who were willing to learn, and they taught them to program.

hibikir 1y ago

Hiring juniors is always great if you, somehow, have a much better filter for finding the stars than the rest of the market. But if you don't, hiring bad juniors is a disaster: No different than outsourcing bits to a bad satellite office. So are you actually good at finding the good juniors in this very difficult environment? Can you change your hiring machinery to improve, as most traditional ways have stopped working? Because hiring a lot of juniors that don't work out sure can kill companies.

goalieca 1y ago
Hire one junior per team. Don’t overload your senior staff with OKRs and managerial tasks. Let mentorship and apprenticeship happen.
- throwawaysleep 1y ago
  I guess what’s the value of the junior there? Why is that superior to just having the seniors have their heads down coding and not being pestered by a junior?
  - amrocha 1y ago
    Because the junior grows into a senior in a couple of years and the company is better off for it
    - Salgat 1y ago
      That's fine if you can compensate them accordingly to retain them, but if you're going to pay them senior level in a couple of years, why not just hire a senior level to begin with?
      - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
        Because highly experienced seniors are rarely on the job market. >The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market. >The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career. >The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that company, it’s often to go to a startup with a friend, or to follow a great boss to another company, or because they decided they really want to work on, say, Eclipse, because Eclipse is cool, so they look for an Eclipse job at BEA or IBM and then of course they get it because they’re brilliant. [Replace Eclipse with $HOT_TECHNOLOGY, like AI agents this year.] >If you’re lucky, if you’re really lucky, they show up on the open job market once, when, say, their spouse decides to accept a medical internship in Anchorage and they actually send their resume out to what they think are the few places they’d like to work at in Anchorage. >But for the most part, great developers (and this is almost a tautology) are, uh, great, (ok, it is a tautology), and, usually, prospective employers recognize their greatness quickly, which means, basically, they get to work wherever they want, so they honestly don’t send out a lot of resumes or apply for a lot of jobs. - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve... Most of the best programmers I know have worked 2-3 tech jobs. An internship or entry level job, a cushy job at a major company, and either retirement or a third job that they took because the problem was incredibly interesting and they got nerd sniped. I even saw the "medical internship" scenario happen once; a great colleague of mine had to move to France for his partner's career in medicine, so he quit his job and found something over there.

zeroq 1y ago

hot take: covid killed a generation If you were a junior in 2020 and right of the bat you were forced to work remotely you missed a great deal of learning experience. Or you had really bad time getting hired, at least up to a point, because business was booming. Oh, and then you had that whole swarm of bootcamp graduates who thought they could cheat the system, get a degree in hello world and land a $300k job. Back in 2013 I was making fun of job offers that would require 5-7y of experience in JS for a senior position. 7y of what? JQuery? Same thing applies today. If someone started his career in 2001 I wouldn't even consider him if he had a job in BigCo.

lisbbb 1y ago
Not sure why you're getting the hate. What you said is fairly accurate--there was a time period in which a lot of poorly skilled people were getting hired and that caused a lot of disruption inside of companies because you ended up getting all these ego-driven, writing checks their skills can't cash type of people. It was annoying as hell. I remember having a problem that was a slam dunk for using a state machine and this one guy argued against it because he didn't even know what a state machine was, but of course could not admit that to anyone. Anyways, he lost that argument, but why did we have to have it in the first place? Ooooh right--someone got hired as a Sr. Dev who wasn't really Senior anything.
- zeroq 1y ago
  Unsolicited advise, that's one thing I've learned about far too late in my life. You know, if you have a brother or someone really, really close, and you're preparing for a wedding or a funeral, and they have a shirt that look absolutely ridiculous and you tell them that, they look at you, you match your eyes, and they trust you with their life. Well that doesn't happen in normal life. Normally, what happens in ordinary life is you have a colleague that looks, smells or did something stinky, you want to be the good guy, you let him know and he's like "omg, he hates me, all hands to battle stations, that guy, aim that guy, he tried to wrong me!". And if he's slightly less on the spectrum than you - you're toasted. You're under fire, and there's no getting out. And this happens every time you try to swim up the river in this current.

britch 1y ago

I was confused by why "use of AI" was a top-level requirement of this, but I see now that weave is AI-driven "engineering output measurement" company, down to the individual contributor level. I can understand why you would have better luck hiring eager new-grads than seasoned engineers. I'm sure some IC find the weave stats useful, but it also sounds like a toxic manager's dream. I can understand why more senior engineers would steer clear.

pyb 1y ago

Not mentioned in the article : interns/juniors are too expensive these days ; seniors offer better value per dollar of comp.

nick__m 1y ago
Why not just pay them significantly less than seniors? if there is a surplus of juniors shouldn't the invisible hand of the market adjust the salaries accordingly?
- ares623 1y ago
  The invisible hand of the market is saying to hire offshore
- throwawaysleep 1y ago
  Depends on what you think the cause is. They can’t work for $20 a month legally in most cases.
- t-writescode 1y ago
  The invisible hand of the market is playing games with promises of AI allowing one senior to do the work of a senior and 4 juniors. Whether or not it works will be something we find out long past the early-experience tenure of those junior engineers.
- pyb 1y ago
  Anectodally, I've seen that some newly graduated engineers prefer to forgo the job search altogether, rather than lower their comp demands to get a foot in the door.

throwawaysleep 1y ago

Is Shopify a great company? Stock below peak in a market giving extremely rich tech valuations. Canadian engineers hardly aspire to work there. Politics of the founders also seem to come up a lot. This isn’t meant to be an attack but more an observation that it seems to be one of the companies getting killed. To address the article itself, the argument isn’t juniors ca seniors, but juniors vs AI. Why is a junior worth paying 10,000x more than Claude? And it’s perfectly loyal, perfectly energetic, and can add its learnings to a contributions.md doc.

gen220 1y ago
What makes a company great? I think by most rational business metrics (top line revenue growth, gross margins, operating margins, cash flow, balance sheet), Shopify in 2025 is a fantastic business that seems to only be getting better? This is notably different from an analysis of whatever the market price for its equity is or has been. I think that market price is ~40% overvalued today and it’s been much more overvalued than that in the past… but the fundamentals of the business have never been stronger. In what way is it getting killed? To force a comparison within the sector, is Amazon not a great company? Market price point aside, it’s arguably more politically charged and less aspirational engineering culture-wise. But I think I’d still call it a great company, same as Shopify.

Cornbilly 1y ago

When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds). Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.

dottjt 1y ago
I feel like it's at two ends of the extreme. Either the junior is literally better than everyone else on the team, or they know nothing.
MountDoom 1y ago
> The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds). Why is this a problem, though? Imagine hiring doctors or architects with that expectation. "The problem is that no one is truly passionate about dissecting cadavers anymore". I think our industry got hooked on being able to hire self-taught geniuses in the early days of tech. But the profession has gotten a lot more commoditized, and we just can't continue like that. Gotta hire "normal" people and teach them what they need to know. And yeah, "normal" means people who decided to learn programming because it pays well, not because they want to design compilers in their spare time.
- imgyuri 1y ago
  because there are multiple abstractions in software that one is bound to come across once the software becomes complicated enough, and from that point on "passion" and "fundamentals" determine how effective they are at navigating that path

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

The gap between juniors and seniors today is really not that big. I know a lot of people with senior in their title that are closer to a junior. Have them actually read the docs for a month straight, and a junior would know more than a senior. Also, if you really want to hire a senior, and you can't compete on pay, maybe compete by going remote? Almost all the job listings I see are for hybrid roles. Do they realize they're just throwing away all the candidates in other cities? Are hiring managers/CEOs masochists?

willvarfar 1y ago
Yeah see this all the time :( Senior is often about time in industry not competence. A lot of 'senior' engineers are completely ineffective and seemingly unable to ever become effective. They just joined the industry a while ago and are treading water and tricking the next hiring manager that they were called 'senior' at their last job so of course they are a 'senior' now. If they aren't applying for 'staff' level jobs. The correlation between being smart, getting things done, speeding everyone up, being trusted etc and 'seniority' is not causal :)
clickety_clack 1y ago
I might have agreed with you on remote work before Covid, but the difference in productivity from my team that stayed remote after Covid, and the hybrid one I joined afterwards was almost impossible to believe.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  That's the team, not the location. Take your hybrid team and move them remote and they'll perform the same.
  - clickety_clack 1y ago
    For a few months they will, but the innovation, problem solving and creativity that happens in person just can’t be replicated online and it’ll eventually drop off. I hope you’re not arguing for remote, in a non-tech hub city, but only in the US. If I thought remote individuals were as productive as in person, there would be no such thing as “remote but not too remote”. Canada is cheaper than the US and has American English speakers, if that’s important to you. LATAM is in the US time zones and is cheaper again. If I didn’t care about time zone offset there’s almost unlimited options for offshoring at a fraction of the cost of US labor.

carabiner 1y ago

The output of even junior mechanical engineers today would be considered mindblowing to the mechE's of 100 years ago, for similar reasons: computational tools have allowed an exponential increase in productivity.

meow_mix 1y ago

As someone who has been hiring juniors recently. I disagree with pretty much all these points: Great juniors learn fast and search for feedback. It’s easier to manage them. They want to improve and know what you think about their work. --> Very skeptical of this comment. It's harder to manage someone that needs managed so directly, period. Loyalty. engineers who you train from the beginning tend to stay longer. They understand your systems deeply and can mentor the next generation of junior engineers. --> They really don't. They're looking for a foot in the door. Higher ceiling. A motivated junior engineer often has more upside. You're getting someone at the beginning of their growth curve rather than the middle or end. --> Maybe? Tough to tell. They often leave. Juniors bring fresh energy to the team - they want to learn, and they have a drive to prove themselves and succeed. Their motivation can be contagious! The existing seniors in your team will enjoy working with smart and motivated developers. --> Not always. Most just want a job and are easily discouraged. Some are like this though. Juniors are not restricted by what they know. They haven't been trained to think "that's just how we do things." They’ll not try to reuse the same technologies from previous companies, or recreate those ‘amazing’ design patterns that were useful only in a specific context. It’s not just being AI-native, it’s about having less resistance to change. --> This one I sort of agree with

t-writescode 1y ago
> Maybe? Tough to tell. They often leave. In my experience working with juniors, the ones that look to leave are the ones that don't have their compensation appropriately adjusted as they rank up. Pay everyone well, treat them with respect. Challenge them, and give them raises and rank-ups as they gain tenure and skill (not when it's "in the budget, and oh sorry, we can only uprank one this year, but we hired a person at the higher level, so really we can't afford it. Try again later!"), and you'll have people that stay a long time
- Salgat 1y ago
  If you're going to end up having to pay these people high salaries, why not hire a more senior person to begin with?

alakep 1y ago

We love hiring junior engineers at https://yuzu.health/careers https://yuzu.health/careers. Please apply or reach out to me over email: russell@yuzu.health.

daemonologist 1y ago
Oh hey I work for an (old fashioned) TPA. I need to get some sleep but I might check this out tomorrow.
JustExAWS 1y ago
Isn’t your pay kind of low to be an in office job in NYC?
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Not OP but that is market rate for a junior at a startup at their stage in NYC. Salary expectations are ridiculously out of whack among junior engineers.
- MiscCompFacts 1y ago
  That seems like a fantastic salary, I’ve never gotten close to that.
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    It is - outside of NYC.

renewiltord 1y ago

The pool is large, resumes don't differentiate => I have to talk to them to find the guy. I don't know how to do this efficiently. If you've got that skill, go right ahead. For my part, the rise in compensation has resulted in a lot of people who don't have any interest in the subject except as a tool to make dollars and they always run into dumb stuff like wrong documentation making them unable to act. Yeah the kernel docs say one thing but the kernel behaves differently. Just look at the source. It's open source, man. Won't do it without being told. If they don't care but will be persistent, fine. But if you can't work some basics, it's not worth it. And the correlation is near 1.0 because at least passion guy has something driving him to dig to next layer. Inevitably some sucker will hire him, give him some on the job experience and then I can pay more.

jorl17 1y ago

My comment will focus only on a subset of the article: the part regarding AI. While I agree with the sentiment that AI has changed the practice forever, and therefore it is pretty silly to forbid AI during interviews (much like it was always silly to me to forbid a candidate from googling something during an interview), I haven't really seen evidence that juniors with AI have faster onboarding times. Onboarding, to me, is about having the new team member adopt the existing team's practices, such as learning preferred code patterns, communication channels, established frameworks, and overall just getting to truly be a part of the team (tech and non-tech team). In that sense, AI has done very little to help. If, on one hand, AI can help us produce better documentation that will help with this process and studying existing libraries and practices better, on the other hand, AI also enables a new team member to seek others less early on (a point the article itself makes), which I believe makes the onboarding process (according to my definition) slower — i.e. less communication = slower onboarding. As I mentioned, we can also relate onboarding to getting to know the codebase, in which case AI definitely helps (and as more code is written with proper AI engineering practices, it will help more), but I really feel that this is a small part of the equation. Similarly, I think getting to know the actual domain of a project (the users, the requirements, the 'language', the problems, etc.) is an important part of onboarding and, again, AI helps here, but not a whole lot. It's about people, not bits. Sure, if you hire a junior to get him to work straight away on a new project, the new hire will be "productive" faster (therefore seeming to have been "onboarded" faster) than before, because the AI does make them "go faster" than before, but I wouldn't say they were _really_ onboarded. Perhaps it's just a case of a different culture, a too-rigid definition of "quality", or just a different set of workplaces, but this has not been my experience at all. Most junior hires take at least 6-8 months to produce code with our standards of quality without a decent chunk of supervision. Even a junior with a very solid capability to think the system as a whole has a tendency to over-engineer or place code in the wrong places due to inexperience, which definitely affects their productivity.

hyperadvanced 1y ago
Orthogonal comment here but “onboarding” has always struck me as weird. I’ve only had 3 tech jobs in 15 years and may not need to get another one, but at every one I just showed up on day one and started doing things that people asked me to. Clone the repo, run it locally, deploy a change to dev, poke around at it, read some docs, do a little refactor or comment on other people’s PR’s. There is much to do. I don’t get these people who show up and like.. don’t do anything. Even if you do something dumb and have your PR ready for review EOD it’s all good. I have never seen the effort that goes into these mountains of onboarding docs that some of my coworkers have pay off, I just pair with the new people and we solve things and they learn.

blindriver 1y ago

Another “here are the 5 easy steps to hiring a great engineer” post, said confidently but with zero empirical evidence that his techniques actually work. There is nothing more useless than posts that purport how to hire effectively but offer no data.

rurban 1y ago

We don't hire juniors, just seniors. For juniors we do have AI. They have crazy ideas, like shooting sparrows with cannons. Eg using terraform for a setting up a static repo hosting website. Or kubernetes for a GNU parallel job. Very ambitious, yes. Overly ambitious. It's called massive overengineering

nextworddev 1y ago

The real pro tip: hire someone with 2-3 years of experience

aaron_m04 1y ago

This article feels a little suspect. They beat the AI drum a bit hard. So I go to https://workweave.dev https://workweave.dev and of course their business model is tied up with LLMs.

yeputons 1y ago

> We focus on system design, architectural decisions, and reasoning through trade-offs. Are we still talking about hiring juniors? I hope I misunderstood and it's not about "design messaging app" type of questions. Otherwise we're firmly back in the Leetcode land.

pmg101 1y ago

Remember Joel Spolsky' guide to hiring [0]? 1. Smart 2. Gets things done Personally I think the junior/senior distinction is overstated. Yes, experience does count for something. But it comes a distant third on the list to the two Joel mentions. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

JohnBooty 1y ago

Hiring too many junior engineers is killing companies... ...although this is a fault of management, not the juniors. I've seen the following at two companies: - Large, complex codebases - Management hires a bunch of juniors because they're cheaper - The juniors "move fast and break things" and write a lot of extremely high tech debt code - Management, lacking the ability or will to understand tech debt, think these juniors are productive because they see short-term productivity but cannot understand the medium- and long-term ramifications - The juniors, not knowing better, don't realize the damage they're causing (again, not their fault) - At some point the juniors outnumber the seniors and the lunatics are running the asylum. (More politically crafty seniors utilize this to their advantage and cultivate fiefdoms of juniors) I am of course speaking in generalities. There are amazing juniors and terrible seniors. I have been in this career long enough to see the same things over and over, so I stand by my generalizations. However... I have also seen enough exceptions to know that you can't judge pre-judge any particular individual by "years of experience" or any other metric.

porker 1y ago

When companies hire more senior engineers is the quality of software produced increasing and delivery time decreasing? It's a good time to see if bodies or experience matters more.

neilv 1y ago

> "[...] it’ll take juniors too long to ramp up" I think unsaid about a version of that belief is "... and, after expensive ramp-up including mentoring, they'll probably job-hop for a better salary, or better company, before the company sees payoff." It's not just latency on payoff, but risk of any payoff at all. > “...interns bring [...]" "...a relatively low-cost way to evaluate a candidate hire, and then, if they show promise, you have their attention to make them an offer for a real job." Given how hard tech companies find vetting candidates (e.g., many still cling to Leetcode and what school someone went to), and the demands of post-ZIRP on effectiveness, interns (and expecting to spend more on mentoring than the interns produce in value) are one solution for finding good future junior hires.

Joel_Mckay 1y ago

It takes 1 to 3 years to train new generic skilled grads on average. A company initially typically loses $35k to $140k in resources to train a Junior to be minimally useful. Thus, most ponder if a hire is going to have a career long enough on a team to offset that liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect In general, entry level gigs have a narrow scope of skills for many reasons, as managers know people plan to jump ship sooner or later. Staffing agencies have a feed queue for these roles in a large firm, and simply maintain the churn. Good luck, =3

yaur 1y ago

The thing is its much harder to higher a good junior dev. With a senior dev i can ask about the [hardest/most interesting/thing you would like to talk about] bug and talk through how they solved it to understand how their brain works. With a Jr you basically need to spend an hour pair programming to sus out the great ones and no one has yet put in the time to filter out the bottom X0%.

flustercan 1y ago

Junior engineers should spend half their time doing customer support. It allows them to provide meaningful value to the company without needing to code, it shows them a customer first approach to the product, it teaches them empathy for users and the CS team. It also teaches them repro/debugging skills.

ares623 1y ago
Just seems like a fast way to lose some juniors.

neilv 1y ago

> Look for passion and curiosity. You want the ones who light up when talking about their projects. They should show real excitement about the problems they've solved. These conversations should be energizing for both of you! Interview prep tells candidates to fake "passion" and (now) "curiosity". (The prep materials don't say to fake it, but they will phrase it implying that that's the truth, and that it's something that interviewers look for. The prep might give examples of when to be sure to "convey your passion", such as when discussing a project you worked on.) The net result is that interview prep materials, and companies that select for that, end up selecting for people who will go through the motions of appearances. Which is OK if you are a stodgy huge company sitting on its laurels, that wants everyone to be a compliant worker drone, more than they want excellence. Not OK if you're a startup that really needs to execute with more than worker-drone capabilities. Maybe an interviewer seeking genuine "passion" and "curiosity" would be better off giving points to someone who seems to have skills but didn't seem to have done interview prep, since they must have gotten that far by being genuine and non-drone?

adchurch 1y ago
If you keep asking questions eventually you hit something they don't actually know. How long it takes to get there + what they say when they get there is what makes this interesting imo!

zkmon 1y ago

Not very long ago, the real reason smart managers, in consulting firms, hired juniors by boat loads, though they are not very skilled, is because the young staff has other compensating qualities. The work these companies had was quite irregular, unstructured and unexpected as well. This demands a workforce that is very flexible, work over nights, can learn fast, can switch to any work easily (they are not stuck to a single kind of work role). Juniors wore many hats easily as situation demanded (faking included). They are also very mobile, can travel to a client site in any country. Most of them are singles. Feed them, do team outings, reward them and give gadgets (my team got first version of iPods free). They would give 50 hour weeks plus weekends. They hardly have any life outside of office. Sometimes they slept at office. Also, the young workforce has a high team-bonding nature (romances included, intentionally). This makes them very good team players. What a manager means by "team player" is, they work for team goals, with poorly defined roles and tasks, without complaining. There were a few seniors who review and guide the work, but the bulk of work was done by very mediocre, hard-working junior staff. When things go wrong, managers are ready to do crisis management and shuffle their young worker crowd across teams. In other industries they are called MSGs: multi-skilled-gangs. These are very fluid work force. They don't know what kind of work will assigned to them on a certain day. It can be anything, from taking a support call, arranging lunch or pub party for the team, writing some html, testing some UI, giving a presentation to clients. Undefined work requires undefined roles and employees that aren't yet married to certain work role, life style, or other person.

stalfosknight 1y ago
That’s rather gross.

adchurch 1y ago

Author here, great to see all the conversation & thoughts you all have shared so far! One thing I've seen a lot of people saying: hiring juniors isn't worth it because they'll just leave for more money in a couple years. I got hired with 0 experience for my first job and stayed for 3.5 years (I left when I decided to start my own company). I was otherwise never tempted to leave because I got all the support and growth opportunities I could have hoped for, and I always felt fairly compensated. So based on my own experience, it's possible for a company to treat people well enough that they won't just leave. I do think software companies tend to be bad at this specific thing though - I'd imagine many have had an experience unlike my own.

0rdinal 1y ago
From my experience, junior's tend to churn out after around three years. There are often factors that go beyond whether they felt they were treated well. Looking at it holistically, younger people tend to want to move around more. It is no surprise to me that the average tenure of a junior employee is about the same length as a degree - separating life stages in to 1-3 year periods is a mindset embedded into young people throughout their education. I would wager that perception plays heavily into this too. It can be difficult to shake a perception of "being a junior", especially when the path to seniority is unclear or poorly defined. Plus, the "two years and disappear" ethos of job hopping for quicker compensation capitalises on companies' conservative promotion criteria (and more liberal hiring criteria). Loyalty is rarely rewarded in these cases.
jimbokun 1y ago
Also, as the unemployment rate for CS grads goes up, they are probably less likely to leave than in the past.

EZ-E 1y ago

This has been driving me crazy, at my mid sized company, higher management insists pretty hard in only hiring senior/staff. But to be honest we are far from solving novel, challenging technical problems. Inevitably we hire (expensive) super senior people who end up having responsibilities that do not match their level in tech and also in product. The good ones that want a challenge leave after ~1y. Junior or mid level would be a better fit in many cases. When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually happens in the company. In the past when we hired junior, mid level engineers they ramped up pretty well, their salaries went up and they are still with us.

wiether 1y ago
> When I look at the job descriptions I find them ridiculously inflated in terms of expectations compared to what actually happens in the company. At every company at work to, each time there was openings for the team I worked in, I read the job descriptions and I was like: "I would never apply for this position, I'm not qualified". So I asked HR to lower the expectations, otherwise we would never find candidates. They told me that it was to avoid inexperienced people to apply. And then 99% of the candidates they pushed and I interviewed lied on their XP. Good stuff!

domq 1y ago

The technical term is “recession”

a96 1y ago

In small startups - “we are a very small team and we don’t have time to mentor juniors, we need engineers who will be very productive from day 1" In medium-sized companies - “we are going to grow very fast, we need engineers who can handle scale and have faced such challenges before" In big companies - “our infrastructure is super complex, it’ll take juniors too long to ramp up". Seeing things like this, I pretty much always hear "We don't know what we're doing and want to find someone who does and will make us make money fast".

red_rech 1y ago

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fatih-erikli-cg 1y ago

My experience, real work is what a junior dev does, without an exception. Senior developer creates over-engineered version of what junior dev made. Senior devs gibber about database systems, sql, nosql, clustering, etc. The real work storing the input in text file, querying with a simple loop. Plus there is an additional huge misconception in industry, if something is realtime, it is a senior dev thing. It is something like a plague.

slekker 1y ago
TCO and YOE?
- fatih-erikli-cg 1y ago
  I don't understand these acronyms.
  - slekker 1y ago
    Sorry, Total compensation (salary + equity) and years of experience
poshmosh 1y ago
I have 14 YOE and its the opposite. Really brilliant jrs don't have the experience to know the consequences of their designs, they build fast under pressure. They reinvent things that already exist (they don't know because they a Junior). Seniors have PTSD and push back.

strathmeyer 1y ago

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deleted 1y ago

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alphazard 1y ago

The biggest hiring hack for junior engineers is to hire the ones that have already been programming for a decade, and are called "junior" because they recently graduated university. The junior/senior language is corporate-speak to equate everyone's value to "years of service" in industry or at a company. Obviously that's not how competency works, and if you are serious about hiring competent people, you should mostly ignore it. It's useful for listings, it is common terminology after all, but it's not semantically or descriptively useful.

runeblaze 1y ago
Yea experience is very useful (it is very hard to exert influence without power and be the tech lead of a team unless you have some corporate experience) but at some point one needs to realize that if someone was writing Haskell at the age of 12 and they got decent scores at USACO they would make quite a decent engineer...
never_inline 1y ago
This is a positive signal, but doesn't necessarily tell whether the person has intellectual capability to write "proper" code or just had some opportunity at the early age to be exposed to programming. I have seen good and bad engineers who had been programming before graduation. Fortunately, good ones outnumber the bad ones.

Axol 1y ago

Tragedy of the commons. People will prioritize selfish, short-term gains by taking from a finite pool of resources at the expense of long-term sustainability for everyone.

zygentoma 1y ago

Completely off-topic: How cool is that the headline text gets outlined when selected!

never_inline 1y ago

Here are some real open-ended questions you can use to see how well a junior hire with no Industry background will do. * Test whether they understand data types and abstraction. * You have a function returning two numbers in <your favorite language>, how will you do? * Now you need 4 items from this function called getUserInfo(), how will you return it? (Eg: username, email, location and age). * You need to share some state between two calls to this function. i.e a database connection. How will you do it? * Now imagine multiple threads / requests call this function. how will you share state? And so on.. r/CSMajors types who have done only leetcode will fumble this kind of open ended discussion. Similarly for networks * Google "my IP address" from your phone? * Is it really the IP address of your phone? * There are more than 4 billion mobiles + computers on this planet. How are they getting unique IPs then? * If you run your school project (likely to be django or express js app), will you be able to reach it from another phone or desktop using this IP? * Why or why not? These are kind of things they should be able to answer if their networking / OS etc... classes were any good.

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago

I’d buy this argument but for heaven’s sake don’t rest your argument on what Shopify might be doing. Shopify has famously done everything and then the opposite for the past 5 years. They’re highly opportunistic in their messaging and marketing around hiring and what they publicly reveal there is better seen as propaganda than an indication of their actual hiring approach.

namblooc 1y ago

Why do these blog posts always assume that utilization of AI makes employees faster at coding when the opposite has been proven to be true?

bubblyworld 1y ago
I think you are making the same mistake. Nothing of the sort has been proven conclusively in either direction.

danans 1y ago

> How to hire the right junior engineers... The advice given doesn't just apply to junior software engineers, but also senior. It's pretty much how all the senior engineers at my company (including me) were hired. While I found the process heavy as a candidate, it did seem to select for like-minded and similarly motivated co-workers. That said, the company has also hired several university interns through a similar process, and they have been great co-workers.

atan2 1y ago

I read the article but it felt more like wishful thinking than actually providing any tangible data on the gains of hiring junior devs.