16 ms·

The Junior Hiring Crisis

• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  That's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal" her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself). > The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer. Mentoring is difficult; especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors. For myself, I'm happily retired from the Rodent Rally, and find that LLMs have been a huge help, when learning new stuff.
  • pelagicAustral 1y ago
    I think I would also ad to the mix that young folk these days are incredibly overconfident and averse to criticism. A few years back they got a junior dev in here, and I was supposed to help him get on our stack, and ultimately mentor him. This kid would not accept seniority, would constantly and publicly try to divert from the stack we worked with, he would not take any input on his work without actively fighting the process and will crowd the conversation at team meetings with never-ending Reddit-tier takes that contributed to nothing other than fill his ego. In the end I managed to convince my boss to get him out, and he now works in Cyber, which will probably cause even more damage in the long run, but at least I can now say "not my problem".
    • carlosjobim 1y ago
      > young folk these days You should have stopped to think about why such a person was hired in the first place, while there are an endless supply of very talented, hard working, and honest young people who would never be given a chance at all. But if I guess right, hiring is not seen as the responsibility of your company. And that's the core of the problem.
      • shinjitsu 1y ago
        Sometimes people who are able to talk a lot do quite well in interviews - and University students need to be exposed to a wide variety of topics, but rarely support large projects for a long time, so that wouldn't be something that would come up in an interview.
        • johnnyanmac 1y ago
          well yes. the people who are really hiring are not the ones who will be working with them. It's a reflection of the MBA optimized culture we live in, so no wonder those who speak the language get in... even if they can't actually work with their immediate teammates.
      • bsder 1y ago
        > You should have stopped to think about why such a person was hired in the first place The hiring process is probably barely better than random, and, probably even closer to random for a junior hire. Junior hires mostly don't know anything. So, you're pretty much hiring on "seems smart, curious, and enthusiastic" and praying a lot that you can train them. You're simply going to get misses. This is one of the advantages that you get running "cooperative engineering" programs. You get to vet juniors before they get welded into your pipelines.
        • johnnyanmac 1y ago
          Yeah but internships are also on the decline, sadly. more and more broken windows and no one is even picking up the shards anymore.
  • elric 1y ago
    > especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors What world is this? This not match my experiences at all. Is this a common sentiment among your peers?
    • silisili 1y ago
      It matches mine as well. People will pretend to be your best friend, but when push comes to shove, they will absolutely throw you under the bus. And maybe that's human nature, but I don't have it in me. The people who will give you credit where it's due and lift you in my experience are more rare than not, and almost always an older member, which perhaps is because they don't feel the need to prove themselves as much anymore. Despising older folks has been a thing a long time, made famous by Zuck starting out. Now that he's older, I wonder if he still feels the same way...
      • shinjitsu 1y ago
        >Despising older folks has been a thing a long time, made famous by Zuck starting out. and before that is was hippies with "Don't trust anyone over 30" which became deeply ingrained in at least American culture.
        • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
          Yup. The difference, this time, is the CEO is now a younger person, when they used to always be someone in at least their forties (more often fifties or sixties).
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    > where we are taught to despise older folks 9 times out of 10 it goes the other way around. Most young people have only had very negative interactions with their seniors, which has been wholly on the part of the senior. The current young generation is very respectful towards older people.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      > The current young generation is very respectful towards older people. This has not been my experience. I worked for a company that prized seniority, and I regularly dealt with folks older than me, more experienced than me, more capable than me, and willing to help me out. I worked there for almost 27 years, and it was awesome. In my experience, I'm usually written off as an "OK Boomer," before I've even had a chance to open my mouth to prove it (or not). My fave, is when we have a really promising text-only relationship, then, the minute they see me, it goes south.
  • hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
    People skills are so important, I agree. Intergenerational people skills are especially important; in most things that matter, the old guard are the ones keeping their eye on the younger hires, pattern matching what they see over months of observation to who they've seen succeed before.
• RicoElectrico 1y ago
  The most frustrating thing about this whole junior position drought is how it simultaneously affects those who are passionate and get it, not only the opportunist bootcamp alumni who were lured by the prospect of high earnings. If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
  • ge96 1y ago
    /r/cscareerquestions the horror eg. applied to 2000 jobs got 1 offer
    • Justsignedup 1y ago
      Honestly, with the AI slop of resumes, I applied to dozens of jobs, and only got a callback to ones I had either a recruiter for or direct connections to, after 20 years of experience. Because I didn't have a big fat "worked at google for 10 years" on my resume. And I'd like to think of myself as someone who can take a very bad situation and make it look smooth.
      • ge96 1y ago
        Other than Indeed/Hired all my other roles were from recruiters, I don't have a degree so it's harder for me to get a job application wise, at least now I have the 6 yrs+ experience which isn't a lot but better than 0 Will say what's gotten me hired are my projects eg. robotics or getting published online for hardware stuff, I work in the web-cloud space primarily though, hardware would be cool but hard to make that jump
      • QuercusMax 1y ago
        Even with 10 years of google on my resume I got absolutely zero non-automated responses for all the jobs I applied to after being laid off a few months back (I'm working again). Connections from my network and recruiter reach-outs were the only real leads. But looking back on my 30 years of working (including in high school), every job I've ever had I got through personal referrals or recruiter reach-outs. I've gotten to interviews before but never actually taken a job without a personal connection.
• buellerbueller 1y ago
  Want to stand out in a world where all the job applications are AI slop? Network. The original kind. Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human relationships matter.
  • dkdcio 1y ago
    genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if you’re a new grad where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on? I do think I could get a job from my network because I’ve worked in the industry for years and done good work; I’m a little skeptical of advice to network to junior/new grads. I at least ignore those LinkedIn requests
    • rsaz 1y ago
      - share your work online (twitter used to be the far-and-away best place for getting eyes, but this is a bit less clear now. youtube can work well, maybe also tiktok or sites like medium?) - go to events/conventions/join clubs related to programming (need to be located near a large city for this) - talk to other students/self-learners and wait for them to get to the next step I’ve been unemployed a long time and have been thinking of improving at networking. These are what I came up with.
    • AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      If you're a junior, develop connections with a few seniors. If you're a senior, maintain relations with last year's graduating class (and with your placement services people). If you get an internship, keep in touch with people there.
    • the_snooze 1y ago
      For anyone still in school, networking is easy for students who take initiative. This doesn't mean going to networking events. It means actually doing things with actual people: get involved in undergraduate research, sports, arts, Greek life, volunteering, on-campus part-time jobs, etc. Universities have those low-barrier low-risk things going on that you can just try out. Students who do this get the inside track on opportunities that aren't broadly advertised, so they face far less competition and are likely better fits for those opportunities due to the experience they got by being involved.
• CSSer 1y ago
  This article talks a lot about AI, but what I find odd is that in my relatively short (but long enough) ~9 yr career so far, this problem predates AI. I don't deny that it exacerbates it, but you don't kill a disease by addressing the symptoms. From the first time I was ever involved in the hiring process, senior leadership always encouraged me to hire more experienced staff, always most heavily scrutinized juniors, and had negotiations fall through with mid-level candidates the most. This was despite juniors passing technical screens with strong showings. This was not at a Fortune 500. This was a micro-cap subsidiary of a private, billion dollar company. And although it hasn't discouraged me, I have to admit that I've been burned by juniors when caught in the middle between them and senior leadership on output expectations or strategy because frankly it's much more challenging to mentor how to navigate company politics than it is to mentor professional coding acumen. I want to be humble here. I don't think that's the junior's fault. It feels like these problems go a lot deeper than AI. Most shops want software teams that are either silently embedded black boxes that you insert rough instructions into and get working software as output or an outsourced team. We've all experienced this. It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
  • 1970-01-01 1y ago
    Yes, AI isn't helping but the corporate world has been doing this for decades! Junior devs are second class citizens internally. I don't blame them for moving on after a few years.
    • CSSer 1y ago
      I guess I should clarify too: I don't believe in junior titles. They handicap people into the position you describe where they must move on to progress. When I describe "junior" above, I generally mean a candidate with <=1.5 years of experience. When I say mid I mean any amount of experience greater but not senior according to technical review. And yep, I know this is not the best heuristic because there are definitely people with no working experience who have mid-senior coding skills (although they're rare). I think that's sort of part of the problem too. Senior management is disincentived from understanding the roles and growth trajectories, so our heuristics for hiring are totally warped and stomped on.
• Herring 1y ago
  We're still in the early days. It's gonna get a lot worse, if the LLM scaling laws are to be believed. https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
• avidiax 1y ago
  This isn't the first time that the industry has foot-gunned itself. The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind. Even before LLMs, there were periods recently where multiple companies had "senior only" hiring policies. That just inflated what "senior" was until it was basically 5 years of experience. This time seems a bit different, however. There are both supply and demand side problems. The supply of students it tainted with AI "learning" now. Colleges haven't realized that they absolutely have to effectively crack down on AI, or the signal of their degrees will wither to nothing. The demand side is also low, of course, since the candidates aren't good, and AI seems to be a good substitute for a newly graduated hire, especially if that hire is just going to use the AI badly.
  • viraptor 1y ago
    > The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind. So the irony here is that LLMs are actually going to be decent at COBOL by default. And other uncommon/esoteric codebases. For example I vibe-ported some Apple ii assembly to modern C/SDL and... it works. It's stuff that I just wouldn't even attempt at manual development speed. It may be actually an easier path than training someone to do things, as long as you have a large enough test suite or detailed enough requirements.
• hex4def6 1y ago
  > We used to have a training ground for junior engineers, but now AI is increasingly automating away that work. Both studies I referenced above cited the same thing - AI is getting good at automating junior work while only augmenting senior work. So the evidence doesn’t show that AI is going to replace everyone; it’s just removing the apprenticeship ladder. Was having a discussion the other day with someone, and we came to the same conclusion. You used to be able to make yourself useful by doing the easy / annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to waste time dealing with. In exchange you got on-the-job experience, until you were able to handle more complex tasks and grow your skill set. AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad. I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally. It's almost like the aftermath of a war killing off 18-30 year olds leaving a demographic hole, or the effect of covid on education for certain age ranges.
  • weatherlite 1y ago
    > I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?); Who knows if we'll even need senior devs in 5 years. We'll see what happens. I think the role of software development will change so much those years of technical experience as a senior won't be so relevant but that's just my 5 cents.
    • giancarlostoro 1y ago
      The way I'm using claude code for personal projects, I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output, and reviewers of the output. Which is good, plenty of us have said for ages, devs dont read code enough. Well now you get to read it. ;) While the work seems to take similar amounts of time, I spend drastically less time fixing bugs, bugs that take me days or God forbid weeks, solved in minutes usually, sometimes maybe an hour if its obscure enough. You just have to feed the model enough context, full stack trace, every time.
      • 1y ago
• newcompscigrad 1y ago
  After graduating with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science in December of 2024, my career path so far has been doing sex work and then a minimum wage job once I got finically stable enough to not do sex work, but my financial situation is precarious enough I still have to do sex work off and on when unexpected costs come up. I spent a few months applying to everything I could after getting my degree, but got nothing but automated rejections back if anything. I didn't have the best networking skills to be fair, but I spent most of my college doing remote classes and didn't have much of a chance to network or whatever. I'm thinking about doing grad school so I can have another chance at developing some kind of network or make myself more attractive to employers. My grades were good and I genuinely enjoy computer science so spending half a year improving my portfolio sounds like a fun time. But going to grad school wouldn't really about getting employment, I just want to use my brain for something. Just working a job makes me feel completely insane, like I know that I can do so much more. I feel like I'm wasting the best years of my life and there's no place in this market where I can be useful. The only value I have is selling my body or being a human stand in for a robot at my "real" job. Maybe this isn't the best place to post this. I have very little hope that I will ever get a job programming, and I'm just sad. What a waste of a life the past 5 years have been. On a kind of funny note, I would say that doing sex work is genuinely less humiliating than applying to jobs as a new compsci grad. At least I have some signal that I have some value selling myself.
• carlCarlCarlCar 1y ago
  Maybe... that's fine? We're not hiring a lot of rotary phone makers these days. Who is hiring their own shoe-smith? It's been 30-ish years since my carpenter father last had work boots resoled. It's almost as if... technology and economy evolve over time. For all the arguments software people make about freedom to use their property as they see fit, they ignore non-programmers use of personal technology property is coupled to the opinions of programmers. Programmers ignore how they are middlemen of a sort they often deride as taking away the programmer's freedom! A very hypocritical group, them programmers. What's so high tech about configuration of machines with lexical constructs as was the norm 60+ years ago? Seems a bit old fashioned. Programmers are biology and biology has a tendency to be nostalgic, clingy, and self selecting. Which is all programmers are engaged in when they complain others won't need their skills.
• frumplestlatz 1y ago
  > Imagine a tech industry where relationship skills weren’t just nice-to-have but essential. Where navigating complex human systems was seen as a core competency. If that were to actually happen, we'd wind up excluding many of our greatest technical performers while drowning in a sea of would-be middle managers. People skills matter, but so do many other strengths that don't always overlap with being naturally good at navigating interpersonal dynamics.
  • ah979 1y ago
    I think I know what you may have in mind when you describe the "interpersonal dynamics" of a "would-be middle manager", and I probably agree with you (original author here). But some of the best "people" people that I've seen in my career have been the most technical, also. They were really good at being able to communicate the value of their solution, the problems it solves, and risks and rewards. They could get buy-in from stakeholders and other teams. They could listen empathetically when faced with issues and blockers. And they did so with authenticity and genuine care because they were passionate about software engineering. I believe those are skills that can be learned and practiced and that you don't have to be necessarily "social" to grow in that area.
• constantcrying 1y ago
  The idea that the only reasonable path into a software related career is through networking may be true, but it obviously signals something deeply wrong with the culture around work. It is also something which is likely to be quite harmful, since it selects for people who are great at networking over people who have good technical skills. Obviously interpersonal communication is important, but how well a 20 year old in University performs at it should not doom or make their career. And even people with bad social skills deserve to exist and should be allowed into their chosen career. Being someone who does good work and is respectful, but not overly social, should be good enough.
  • ah979 1y ago
    I agree with you, actually (I'm the original author of the post). It's literally one of the main reasons that I'm writing about networking so much. I have seen so many people fail up in technology because they were good at networking while so many other people who had better technical skills felt stuck. I don't believe that to be a strong networker you have to be social, though, just intentional. Technical people who may struggle with the people side of things can leverage their systems thinking strengths and apply it to stakeholder, mentee/direct report, and cross team relationships in a way that helps them move the needle on their goals. It's not easy, but I do think that intentionality and sincerity are key.
    • QuercusMax 1y ago
      Communication, as always, is a critical skill. You don't have to be a social butterfly to effectively communicate.
  • Daishiman 1y ago
    Agree, but ultimately it's a regression to the mean of most white-collar professions, where grades and network make for a significant jump-start in someone's career.
• j6m8 1y ago
  This is neat — I do think this is relevant to more than just the software engineering space. See also, healthcare and law (I wrote more at length here, not to derail this comment thread [1]). Our junior training on-ramps for a lot of knowledge-work fields are in some semblance of equilibrium, but it's an unstable one. [1] https://blog.jordan.matelsky.com/AI-doctors-bum-me-out/ https://blog.jordan.matelsky.com/AI-doctors-bum-me-out/
• beginnings 1y ago
  this is the end game of capitalism, where the greed driven pursuit of profit wins over social maintenance and development. we see it very clearly with the incredibly socially damaging mass immigration to replenish the slave class and maintain the mythical GDP growth, which is only "necessary" because the native slave classes have been squeezed out of breeding new grads will be fed to the meat grinder with no regards, its a closed shop unless you know someone
• austin-cheney 1y ago
  There are two problems here. 1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior. 2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume. The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.
  • leptons 1y ago
    Retire? I can never retire. I'll likely die at my keyboard. Software has not provided the future I was hoping for.
    • nobodyandproud 1y ago
      Is that a monetary future unfulfilled, or something else?
  • johnnyanmac 1y ago
    >Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities I highly doubt throwing even a 3YOE "senior" of 2012 at a modern junior interview would turn out as well as you'd expect. the standards have gotten sky high. That doesn't mean they can't do the job, it means the industry created more hoops to jump through. I agree to an extent with title inflation (and where the hell is the mid level?), but I don't think peple are confusing "juniors" here. It's new grads to at best 2 years of experience. not much controversy there. I also don' think the idea that the 2014 graduating CS class is smarter than the 2024 class would pass the sniff test.
    • austin-cheney 1y ago
      It’s not that people from 10, 15, 20 years ago were smarter. It’s that they were expected to do more. The business goal, even then, was not higher quality output but was commoditization of hiring/firing and this has been fulfilled more efficiently over time. Title inflation is often the result of retention, which is another aspect of hiring/firing.
• tptacek 1y ago
  Over the timeline in this post, ZIRP and the pandemic seem like equally important factors to LLMs in explaining hiring trends.
  • somekyle2 1y ago
    Yeah, it makes sense that going from a decade or so where SWE was one of the best possible career paths if you have any aptitude to a period where tech cos were staffing up aggressively (I recall reading ~60% growth), there's gonna be a hangover. The educational pipeline probably still has a few years of oversupply to work through, and all of the people laid off post covid still need to work. Even in a world where AI being able to automate some of the key skills required for SWE has no negative impact on employment, we'd expect a few more years of rough job prospects.
• alephnerd 1y ago
  Sadly - as I've mentioned on HN a bunch - junior salaries need to fall dramatically to somewhere in the $60k-$100k range in order to make it cost effective against automation/AI or offshoring. The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer just doesn't work in a world with the dual pressures of AI and async induced offshoring. Heck, once you factor in YoE, salaries and TCs outside the new grad range have largely risen because having experienced developers really does matter and provides positive business outcomes. State and local governments needs to play the same white collar subsidy game that the rest of the world is playing in order to help fix the economics of junior hiring for white collar roles. This is why Hollywood shifted to the UK, VFX shifted to Vancouver, Pharma shifted to Switzerland, and Software to India.
  • supportengineer 1y ago
    My fear is that isn't low enough.
    • alephnerd 1y ago
      Not really. Building a GCC ends up costing around $60k-$100k per head in operating costs without subsidizes, and deploying vibe coding tools to fully replace an entire dev team end up in a similar price range (but conversely they could arguably enhance productivity for new grads and hires eg. Glean Search).
  • viraptor 1y ago
    > The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer It was always a weird US thing driven by huge companies and VCs. In other western, developed countries ~$50k equivalent would be normal. Even adjusting for other provided social benefits, there's still a long way down...
    • deleted 1y ago
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  • xboxnolifes 1y ago
    Fall into the 60-100k range? Thats where the vast majority of them have been. Only the bay and NYC city area sees otherwise, and even in those areas I see plenty of listing for 90-110k for junior positions.
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• stalfosknight 1y ago
  This problem is not new. No one's wanted to give juniors the time of day since at least 2018 when it took me 8 months to land my first software developer role.
• jmclnx 1y ago
  > The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings I started in tech in the late 70s. I can say this break happened during the Reagan Years with a bit of help from the Nixon Years.
  • bell-cot 1y ago
    I'd attach a different name and org to that change - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#General_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#General_Electric
• bradlys 1y ago
  I upvoted the article for the purpose of discussion. I disagree with it. The core tenant of the article is that AI is the reason why companies aren't hiring juniors. That's just not it. Do people just blindly believe whatever some CEO or company says in their press briefings? This was all happening before the AI boom. Interest rates went up, hiring went way down, and then AI launched. Before interest rates, interviewing was getting harder and harder every year. That's usually an indication that you have more supply than demand. The bar for getting into any American tech company was getting much harder - not just FAANG. Leetcode had gone from having practiced 50-100 questions to there being a bank of over 3000+ with many people having regularly studied hundreds. It went from easy/medium to being typical in interviews to medium/hard being typical with many original hard questions now being reclassified as mediums. Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago. The joke of senior FAANG engineers making $400k has been a meme for over 5 years. Yet, inflation has done over 20% in 5 years? Look at new offers for people joining the majority of positions available at public tech companies. You're not seeing $500k offers regularly. Maybe at Jane Street or Anthropic or some other companies that are barely hiring - all of which barely employ anyone compared to FAANG. You're mostly seeing the same $350-400k/yr meme. The reason we're not employing new grads is the same reason as the standards getting much more aggressive. Oversupply and senior talent has always been valued more.
  • ah979 1y ago
    I appreciate you adding nuance to the conversation. The problem is much more complicated than just AI, but I (original author) was using those two research studies that I cited as the basis for the conversation. While 13% hiring drop doesn't mean a catastrophic difference, it's a trend worth noting.
  • zer0tonin 1y ago
    > Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago Not true for Western Europe. Getting more than 60k euros yearly as a software engineer was hard in 2019, it's now basically impossible to get less than that.
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• dcchambers 1y ago
  The companies that are abandoning junior roles are making a life-or-death bet that AI will eventually replace ALL work. Because those senior people will NOT be around forever. And they have killed their talent development and knowledge transfer pipelines. Either direction you take it, this feels like a lose-lose situation for everyone.
  • _carbyau_ 1y ago
    From an individual senior exec point of view - all staff are replaceable. You just hire from outside the company. People don't think in terms of shared commons and that if all companies are doing the same thing then there won't be much of a "senior" market left to hire.
    • dcchambers 1y ago
      When companies stop hiring juniors it completely kills the employee leveling process. It all but stops the creation of skilled senior employees. You say you can just hire from outside the company - but what do you do when there is no one left to hire because the talent pool is completely drained? Abandoning the junior employee will slowly drain that talent pool until there are no seniors available to hire, the "just hire from outside the company" plan doesn't work any more.
      • _carbyau_ 1y ago
        I feel as though you reiterated my point. But maybe I'm missing something.
• anonymous908213 1y ago
  This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a networking service, something which is not really made clear until near the end. The article is self-serving in identifying the solutions ("do things related to the service we offer, and if that doesn't work, buy our service to help you do them better"), but it is a subject worth talking about, so I will offer my refutation of their analysis and solution. The first point I'd like to make is that while the hiring market is shrinking, I believe it was long overdue and that the root cause is not "LLMs are takin' our jerbs", but rather the fact that for probably the better part of two decades, the software development field has been plagued by especially unproductive workers. There are a great deal of college graduates who entered the field because they were promised it was the easiest path to a highly lucrative career, who never once wrote a line of code outside of their coursework, who then entered a workforce that values credentialism over merit, who then dragged their teams down by knowing virtually nothing about programming. Productive software engineers are typically compensated within a range of at most a few hundred thousand dollars, but productive software engineers generally create millions in value for their companies, leading to a lot of excess income, some of which can be wasted on inefficient hiring practices without being felt. This was bound for a correction eventually, and LLMs just happened to be the excuse needed for layoffs and reduced hiring of unproductive employees[1]. Therefore, I believe the premise that you need to focus entirely on doing things an LLM can't -- networking with humans -- is deeply faulty. This implies that it is no longer possible to compete with LLMs on engineering merit, and I could not possibly disagree more. Rather than following their path forward, which emphasises only networking, my actual suggestion to prospective junior engineers is: build things. Gain experience on your own. Make a portfolio that will wow someone. Programming is a field that doesn't require apprenticeship. There is not a single other discipline that has as much learning material available as software development, and you can learn by doing, seeing the pain points that crop up in your own code and then finding solutions for them. Yes, this entails programming as a hobby, doing countless hours of unpaid programming for neither school nor job. If you can't do that much, you will never develop the skills to be a genuinely good programmer -- that applied just as much before this supposed crisis, because the kind of junior engineer who never codes on their own time was not being given the mentorship to turn into a good engineer, but rather was given the guidance to turn them into a gear that was minimally useful and only capable of following rote instructions, often poorly. It is true that the path of the career-only programmer who goes through life without spending their own time doing coding is being closed off. But it was never sustainable anyways. If you don't love programming for its own sake, this field is not likely to reward you going forward. University courses do not teach nearly effectively enough to make even a hireable junior engineer, so you must take your education into your own hands. [1] Of course, layoff processes are often handled just as incompetently as hiring processes, leading to some productive engineers getting in the crossfire of decisions that should mostly hurt unproductive engineers. I'm sympathetic to people who have struggled with this, but I do believe productive engineers still have a huge edge over unproductive engineers and are highly likely to find success despite the flaws in human resource management.
• Octoth0rpe 1y ago
  > The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings, not long term investment in their employees. Going to throw out another anecdote here. At a company that a number of my friends work for (a fortune 50), they are currently making record profits that they loudly brag about during employee townhalls. They also are in the process of gutting multiple departments as fast as possible with little regard for the long term consequences. This is not the only company that I know of acting in this way (acting like they're about to go bankrupt when in fact they are seeing record profits). To me the societal risk is that an entire generation of employees becomes extremely jaded and unmotivated, and fairly so. We used to work under the assumption that if our company is successful, then the employees would be successful. Record profits == raises for all, bonuses for all. And while we know that that connection was never that strong, it was strong enough to let us at least pretend that it was a law of universe. That fundamental social contract is now at its breaking point for so many workers. Who can really blame people for putting in minimal effort when they have so much evidence that it will not be rewarded?
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • Herring 1y ago
    What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders. Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about? This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism. If you want raw unfiltered capitalism, vote for the billionaire. You can't vote for the billionaire and expect safety nets. That's madness.
    • Octoth0rpe 1y ago
      It is not socialism to note that in the past, some companies have believed that their optimal relationship with their employees required recognizing their value and awarding them accordingly, thusly allowing them to attract/retain the best employees as well as maximizing the quality of the output from those employees. There has always been such a spectrum, that's not socialism. The trend to notice is that the spectrum is so strongly weighted towards the merciless, cutthroat end of things that may actually not be optimal for long term survivability of those companies whilst also as I noted, be breaking the social contract that workers have assumed for decades, which is also not socialism. Socialism has a specific meaning, it's not just a label we get to put on behaviors that we - or rather, specifically you in this case - don't like.
• beginnings 1y ago
  for anyone with children, dont waste their time with traditional school, that path is stone dead and is leading nowhere but the abyss of the permanent underclass apologise for inflicting this era on them and teach them to be entrepreneurial, teach them how to build, teach them rust on the backend, teach them postgres, teach them about assets maintaining value while money loses its tell them to never under any circumstances take on a mortgage, especially not the 50 year variety. tell them to stay at home for as long as possible and save as much as possible and put it into assets: gold, silver, bitcoin, monero they must escape the permanent underclass, nothing else matters
  • koakuma-chan 1y ago
    Just don't have children. All this churn (learning whatever) isn't worth it (for them).
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      >Just don't have children. Despite everything, I like it that humanity exists. I want humanity to continue to exist. I reject any notion or attitude that would, taken to its logical conclusion, result in the extinction of humanity. And, even more so, that would result in the extinction of my family and lineage. For your sake, I hope that this is just edgy horseshit that you will soon grow out of.
      • koakuma-chan 1y ago
        Let's see if I will grow out of it. I am curios as well. I currently think the opposite—that humanity is inherently flawed, and that the vast majority of humans will always live miserably.
      • venturecruelty 1y ago
        Friendly reminder that, on a planet of eight billion (and climbing) people, many of whom live in places with too much heat and not enough food and water, not everyone has to have children. And that's okay.
• jedberg 1y ago
  I've been saying this for years, since the first AI coding models came out. Where do the juniors go to learn? I'm a senior engineer because I got to do a bunch of annoying tasks and innovate just slightly to make them better. That opportunity is now lost. In a few years we will lack senior engineers because right now we lack junior engineers. All is not lost however. Some companies are hiring junior engineers and giving them AI, and telling them to learn how to use AI to do their job. These will be our seniors of the future. But my bigger concern is that every year the AI models become more capable, so as the "lost ladder" moves up, the AI models will keep filling in the gaps, until they can do the work of a Senior supervised by a Staff, then the work of a Staff supervised by a Principal, and so on. The good news is that this is a good antidote to the other problem in our industry -- a lot of people got into software engineering for the money in the last few decades, not for the joy of programming. These are the folks that will be replaced first, leaving only those who truly love solving the hardest problems.
  • devin 1y ago
    I'm more pessimistic. It costs too much to go back to college and retrain. The result is going to be a generation of ambitious people doing a craft they hate. The results are going to be dismal.
• jmyeet 1y ago
  Short term thinking and short term profit seeking are going to destroy every industry they touch. This article failed to bring up 2 important points. Firstly, we've been here before, specifically in 2008. This was the real impact of the GFC. The junior hiring pipeline got decimated in many industries and never returned. This has created problems for an entire generation (ie the millenials) who went to college and accumulated massive amounts of debt for careers that never eventuated. Many of those careers existed before 2008. The long-term consequences of this are still playing out. It's delaying life milestones like finding a partner, buying a house, having a family and generally just having security of any kind. Secondly, there is a whole host of other industries this has affected that the author couldn't pointed to. The most obvious is the entertainment industry. You may have asked "why do we need to wait 3 years between seasons of 8 episodes now when we used to put out 22 episodes a year?" It's a good question and the answer is this exact same kind of cost-cutting. Writers rooms got smaller and typically now the entire season is written and then it's produced when the writers are no longer there with the exception of the showrunner, who is the head writer. So writers are rarely on set now. This was the training ground for future showrunners. Also, writers were employed for 9 months or more for the 22 episode run and now they're employed for maybe 3 months so need multiple jobs a year. Getting jobs in this industry is hard and time-consuming and the timing just may not work out. Plus the real cost of streaming is how it destroyed residuals because Netflix (etc) are paying far fewer residuals (because they're showing their own origianl content) and those residuals sustained workers in the entertainment industry so they could have long-term careers and that experience wouldn't be lost. The LA entertainmen tindustry is in a dire state for these reasons and also because a lot of it is being offshored to further reduce costs. Bear in mind that the old system produced cultural touchstones and absolute cash cows eg Seinfeld, Friends, ER. Circling back, the entire goal of AI Is to displace workers and cut costs. That's it. It's no more compolicated than that. And yes, junior workers and less-skilled workers will suffer first and the most. But those junior engineers would otherwise be future senior engineers. What I would like for people to understand that all of this is about short-term decisions to cut costs. It's no more complicated than that.
  • CyberDildonics 1y ago
    Are you really saying the production turn around time of a multi-camera sitcom compared to full on movie quality TV shows is due to more writers?
• aynyc 1y ago
  I'm gonna get some downvote, but I'll say this. Over the last 10 years, the quality of the juniors trends opposite of salary curve. We don't have a crazy interview process, nor are we working on anything ground breaking. By any measurement, we are a run of the mill company that don't offer top end salary but market competitive. The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the name nor the high end salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and HR suck in general. My no-hire/hire ratio is literally 50:1. Most of them can't even answer basic computer science questions such as under what condition that a binary search is useful, what's the difference between NoSQL database and relational database, or converting binary to decimal, etc.. They all talk about cloud and distributed computing, etc..
  • mierz00 1y ago
    I feel this pain. We have an intern that is finishing a four year computer science degree that has no clue what git is, never used a log and all he presents is AI garbage. I find it profoundly depressing to try and teach someone who has no interest in the craft.
  • Tade0 1y ago
    > The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the name nor the high end salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and HR suck in general. My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1. I'm sorry but to me this part reads like a humorous phrase that's popular in some circles in my region which goes: "Maybe <list of negative things, usually correct characterizations of the speaker>, but at least <something even worse>" The companies I worked for used automated coding quizzes like Codility to weed out the worst applicants, but I suspect you're already doing that. How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?
    • aynyc 1y ago
      > How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired? Because of our work is changing, faster than ever, not day to day but over time. You need a foundation to handle that change. My 2X years experience showed me that the people who has strong foundation handle the transition well. If I'm going to hire and invest and mentor, I want that person to be successful.
• ericmcer 1y ago
  > "Companies replace junior positions with AI + Senior engineers have been excused from mentorship responsibilities + Companies optimize for immediate results = A systemic issue that no one person can fix" They forgot to add in "Aging billionaires spend a trillion dollars on longevity research" which results in "110 year old Senior engineers still working"
  • ah979 1y ago
    touché (author here)
• teeray 1y ago
  > the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation. This is because "management" includes a bunch of BS that few engineers want to actually deal with. Performance discussions, 1:1s, being hauled into mandatory upper-level meetings, not actually building things anymore, etc. If it was simply pairing with juniors from time to time to hack on things and show them cool stuff, it would be wonderful.
  • QuercusMax 1y ago
    Many companies have different career tracks for managers than for individual contributors (even tech leads are considered ICs). Mentoring junior engineers is absolutely in scope for what senior ICs can be recognized for.
  • anilgulecha 1y ago
    What you like is for yourself. What you seem to dislike are things that improve others (team/stakeholders). Seniors are such because they take on more of the latter. This will now become even more normalized given that on technical skills seniors are no longer needed for juniors to skill up. AI and the evolving ecosystem will help and assist them way more. In the new world, the more technical and non-technical work you do towards customers/teams/organization, the more senior you become. I see many not liking it, but I'm also seeing first hand that is how it is.
  • ah979 1y ago
    > If it was simply pairing with juniors from time to time to hack on things and show them cool stuff, it would be wonderful. I think that's a lot of it! (Author here, btw) I think that doing more of that actually makes performance discussions easier and takes the place of 1:1s a lot of times. The whole point of performance management is to nurture the relationship with the junior so that they grow into the type of senior that they need to be to be a contributing member of the team. And if you can achieve that better through hacking and pairing, then by all means. As far as all the other BS meetings, I think that a lot of people in leadership positions aren't intentional/strategic enough about which meetings they allow themselves to get "hauled into", so they end up totally jaded and burnt out. They think they can't say no to these things, and so they lose the reins on their actual goals. If you step back and ask yourself what stakeholders actually need from you to feel heard, seen, validated, informed, etc, then it may look different from a calendar full of meetings.
• mfbx9da4 1y ago
  Isn’t it also easier than ever to learn though? The moat that seniors built around their expertise enabled a juicy buffer of mediocre devs paid mediocre rates pushing up the value of mythical 10x engineers.
  • jltsiren 1y ago
    It's easier than ever to learn, if you want to learn. It's also easier than ever to not learn anything, if you only do what's expected from you.
• ilc 1y ago
  I think AI clouds the real issues around Junior hiring. Defective companies. Let's say you hire your great new engineer. Ok, great! Now their value is going to escalate RAPIDLY over the next 2-3 years. And by rapidly, it could be 50-100%. Because someone else will pay that to NOT train a person fresh out of college! What company hands out raises aggressively enough to stay ahead of that truth? None of them, maybe a MANGA or some other thing. But most don't. So, managers figure out fresh out of college == training employees for other people, so why bother? The company may not even break even! That is the REAL catch 22. Not AI. It is how the value of people changes early in their career.
  • QuercusMax 1y ago
    I actually got a major raise after 6m, and then another major raise 1y into my career, because my boss recognized my value. Sadly this is not as common as it should be - but I've also mentored folks at FAANGs who got promoted after 1y at the new-hire level because they were so clearly excelling. The first promotion is usually not very hard to attain if you're in the top quartile.
    • supportengineer 1y ago
      "Winner take all" environment
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      >not very hard to attain if you're in the top quartile. No biggie, just be the best in the interview stage and continue to be the best for years after that. It's that simple.
      • QuercusMax 1y ago
        I used to sit on a Google / Alphabet promo committee (more than half a decade ago, so things have changed a bit). The bar for L3 (newgrad) to L4 promotions is not high. It's certainly not a rubber stamp, but we were looking for: - Gets things done fast enough with high quality - Works mostly independently - Has recommendations from more senior peers who can speak to what they've done - Is starting to show several of the expected marks of a Senior (L5) I had at least one, maybe two new grads who I mentored get promoted to L4 within a year of starting full time; they had both done internships at Google so they didn't have as much ramp up time.
• imglorp 1y ago
  The first graph is interesting: it showed all groups about the same until late 2022 when they start to diverge. Around that time, we were talking about "greedflation" and "over hired during covid", and probably most important, the first year after expiration of Section 174 R&D was 2022. Good luck with causation/correlation vs the rise of LLM.
• maciejzj 1y ago
  This is truly heartbreaking, programming was the last profession beside medicine doctor that guaranteed young people good start in life in my country. It is insane how much screwed over we are. I am about to turn 30 soon with 5 YoE, PhD in ML which supposedly is the cutting edge stuff. Yet I have no prospects to even buy a tiny flat and start “normal life”. AI eats its own tail, I have no idea what I should do and what to learn to have any sensible prospects in life.
• silexia 1y ago
  A lot of this may be due to the recent far left changes in curriculum at many universities. A degree used to sort of a certificate an employer could rely upon that someone had basic skills. That is no longer the case. This makes older employees where the certificate was still reliable more attractive.
  • QuercusMax 1y ago
    "far left changes"? What are you even talking about? You think there's some new "woke" CS curriculum which doesn't actually teach algorithms?
    • silexia 1y ago
      Grade inflation, everyone passes with A's, racial discrimination against asian and whites, etc.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • QuercusMax 1y ago
        /eyeroll OK, you're one of those people. Good grief, get a grip.
  • nobodyandproud 1y ago
    Irrelevant. I went to a very bottom-tier school with a piss-poor reputation (but no debt!). That didn’t stop me from getting employed, because employees were looking for workers when I started my employment journey.
• tempire 1y ago
  Nothing has changed. The problem is the same as it always was. There is an unbounded amount of opportunity available for those who want to grab hold of it. If you want to rely on school and get the approval of the corporate machine, you are subject to the whims of their circumstance. Or, you can go home, put in the work, learn the tech, become the expert, and punch your own ticket. The information is freely available. Your time is your own. Put. In. The. Work.
• lordnacho 1y ago
  I suspect this junior hiring crisis thing is linked to the ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days. When I was starting, you were checked for potential as a trainee. In my case, options trading. They checked over that you could do some mental arithmetic, and that you had a superficial idea of what trading was about. Along with a degree from a fancy university, that was all that was needed. I didn't know much about coding, and I didn't know much about stochastic differential equations. A couple of weeks ago, a young guy contacted me about his interview with an options trading firm. This guy had spent half a year learning every stat/prob trick question ever. All those game theory questions about monks with stickers on their foreheads, all the questions about which card do you need to turn over, the lot. The guy could code, and had learned a bunch of ML to go with it. He prepared for their trading game with some really great questions to me about bet sizing. I was convinced he was simply overly nervous about his prospects, because I'd never met someone so well prepared. Didn't get the job. Now I can assure you, he could have done the job. But apparently, firms want to hire people who are nearly fully developed on their own dime. When they get their analyst class, I guess there is going to be nobody who can't write async python. Everyone will know how to train an ML on a massive dataset, everyone will already know how to cut latency in the system. All things that I managed to learn while being paid. You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where people have to already know the job before they get their first job. Where everyone is like a doctor: already decided at age 16 that this was the path they wanted to follow, choosing classes towards that goal, and sticking with it until well into adulthood. And they have to essentially pay to get this job, because it comes at at cost of exploring other things (as well as actual money to live).
  • supportengineer 1y ago
    I feel like only the biggest companies can afford to put up all these roadblocks to employment. A smaller size company, perhaps in a lower COL city, might have a more "human" side to them, simply because they can't afford all the nonsense.
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Sadly, tarriffs are making those companies scared at best and defunct at worst, so they also aren't hiring.
• dataviz1000 1y ago
  Ask HN: I have a friend of a friend in his mid 20s who finished a masters degree in data science focused on AI. There isnt a job for him and I think hes given up. In Letters to a Young Poet Rilke responded to a young aspiring poet who asked how a person knows whether the artistic path is truly their calling: > “There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.” How do I respond to this friend of a friend? Is data science or coding in general the path for you only if you would rather die than stop merging pull requests into main every day even when nobody is paying you? Is coding the new poetry? What do I tell this guy?
  • zer0tonin 1y ago
    Having a data science degree doesn't really mean much by itself. There's a lot of graduates that come out of it with no marketable skills. And no, coding is not the new poetry. I wish people would stop spamming this website with doomer nonsense like this.
  • lordnacho 1y ago
    99% of us can't live like that. The other place you will meet struggling artists is sports. Train several times a week, neglect your social life, your studies, just learn how to chase after a ball. Only people who are crazy driven will actually do this. The ones who don't make it, they try to climb up from lower league clubs. They go on and on, carving out a career. But most kids do not have a burning passion for anything. They are curious, they're smart, they want to explore the world. But they haven't found a calling. If they try to go through the eye of the needle, they find it's quite hard, because those paths are taken by guys with a mental lock on a certain career. What to tell the guy? He's picked the subject that is the most useful for learning about the world. Go around and look at things. There's so much that a person who can code and can deal with statistics can apply himself do.
• supportengineer 1y ago
  Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first? Single-Payer health care would help our industry immensely if it came to pass. Imagine having no fear any more.
  • alephnerd 1y ago
    > Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first It actually might help. This is the model used in Eastern Europe and India - the vast majority of new grads are hired by mass recruiters like EPAM, WITCH, Deloitte, and Accenture at low base salaries but also the expectation that they self train and learn how to become productive SWEs, or they just stagnate at the low rungs. Japan, Korea, and China use a similar model as well. But honestly, even FTE isn't much of a headache if I can hire a junior SWE for $60k-80k, invest in training them, and then bumping salaries to market rate after they have matured. This is what a number of traditional F500s like Danaher [0], AbbVie [1], and Capital One [2] do via Leadership and Trainee Development Programs, and honestly, it's much easier to make a case to hire someone if they have a couple of years of real world work experience. [0] - https://jobsblog.danaher.com/blog/leadership-development-programs/ https://jobsblog.danaher.com/blog/leadership-development-pro... [1] - https://www.abbvie.com/join-us/student-programs.html https://www.abbvie.com/join-us/student-programs.html [2] - https://www.capitalonecareers.com/get-ahead-with-early-career-programs-for-students https://www.capitalonecareers.com/get-ahead-with-early-caree...
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      >if I can hire a junior SWE for $60k-80k, invest in training them, and then bumping salaries to market rate after they have matured. 1. if you're in a high CoL area, how are they living off of 60k? 2. the big gamble is trusting companies to give a salary bump after that point and not instead cut them off. trust in corporate isn't exactly high right now.
      • alephnerd 1y ago
        1. They have no choice but to find a way, just like Brits and Canadians are today because they are now competing in a global market. Additionally, every other white collar field offers new grad salaries in that range in Tier 1 cities in the US. Why do CS majors deserve to be paid more than an Accounting major, Nursing major, or a MechE major? 2. True, but it's also easier to get hired once you have the new grad stink removed.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• rybosworld 1y ago
  It's not obvious to me that AI is the reason for the hiring slowdown. ChatGPT was pretty useless when it first released. It was neat that you could talk to it but I don't think it actually became a tool you could depend on (and even then, in a very limited way) until sometime in 2024. Basically: - the junior hiring slowdown started in 2022. - but LLM's have only really been useful in a work context starting around 2024. As for this point: > According to very recent research from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, published in August of this year, companies that adopt AI at higher rates are hiring juniors 13% less The same point stands. The junior hiring slowdown existed before the AI spend.
  • nateglims 1y ago
    I think the interest rate and shareholder pressure were the most immediate causes. In 2021 you could get head count to do trivial projects at many tech companies and by the end of 2022 you had layoffs and hiring freezes.
  • tschellenbach 1y ago
    Tend to agree here. The slowdown here has more to do with the financial ecosystem. IE less capital available for some companies, higher salaries and a changed approach to work. The AI wave didn't start yet. Will hit in 26/27
  • johnnyanmac 1y ago
    No one wants to say we're in a recession yet, so we gotta deal with beating around the bush for another few years. But yeah, it's bad in general. seniors are struggling too. This was cooking for even longer, but more mess got added to the stack.
• Barathkanna 1y ago
  This is true. As a startup founder I’ve invested heavily in mentoring juniors, and all of my current developers actually started as interns. They’ve grown fast and delivered real results because we gave them trust, support, and room to learn. The companies that say “there are no good juniors” are usually the ones that never bothered to train any.
• womitt 1y ago
  Instead the: Come up with you new job instead of doing old peoples job opportunity
• robomartin 1y ago
  This topic requires analysis to a greater depth than most comments I've seen so far. It wasn't too long ago that it was common to read threads on HN and other tech fora about universities graduating software engineers seriously lacking coding skills. This was evidenced by often-torturous interview processes that would herd dozens to hundreds of applicants through filters to, among other things, rank them based on their ability to, well, understand and write software. This process is inefficient, slow and expensive. Companies would much rather be able to trust that a CS degree carries with it a level of competence commensurate with what the degree implies. Sadly, they cannot, still, today, they cannot. And so, the root cause of the issue isn't AI or LLM's, it's universities churning people through programs and granting degrees that often times mean very little other than "spent at least four years pretending to learn something". If you are thinking that certain CS-degree-granting universities could be classified as scams, you might be right. And so, anyone with half a braincell, will, today, look at the availability of LLM tools for coding as a way to stop (or reduce) the insanity and be able to get on with business without having to deal with as much of the nonsense. Nobody here makes a product or offers a service (hardware, software, anything) for the love of the art. We make things to solve problems for people and services. That's why you exists. Not to look after a social contract (as a comment suggested). Sorry, that's nonsense. The company making spark plugs makes spark plugs, they are not on this planet to support some imaginary public good. Solving the problem is how they contribute. And, in order to solve problems, you need people who are capable of deploying the skills necessary to do so. If universities are graduating people who can barely make a contribution to the mission at hand, companies are going to always look for ways to mitigate that blocking element. Today, LLM's are starting to provide that solution. So it isn't about greed or some other nonsense idealistic view of the universe. If I can't hire capable people, I will gladly give senior engineers more tools to support the work they have to do. As is often the case, the solution to so many problems today --including this one-- is found in education. Our universities need to be setup to succeed or fail based on the quality of the education they deliver. This has almost never been the case. Which means you have large scale farming operations granting degrees that can easily be dwarfed by an LLM. And don't think that this is only a problem a the entry level. I recently worked with a CTO who, to someone with experience, was so utterly unqualified for the job it was just astounding that he had been give the position in the first place. It was clearly a case of him not knowing just how much he didn't know. It didn't take much to make the case for replacing him with a qualified individual or risk damage to the company's products and reputation going forward. A knowledgeable entry-level professional who also has solid AI-as-a-tool skills is invaluable. Note that first they have to come out of university with real skills. They cannot acquire those after the fact. Not any more. NOTE: To the inevitable naive socialist/communist-leaning folks in our mix. Love your enthusiasm and innocence, but, no, companies do not exist to make a profit. Try starting one for once in your naive life with that specific mission as your guiding principle and see how far you'll get. Companies succeed by solving problems for people and other companies. Their clients and customers exchange currency for the value they deliver. The amount they are willing to pay is proportionate to the value of the problem being solved as perceived by the customer --and only the customer. Company management has to charge more than the mere raw cost of the product or service for a massive range of reasons that I cannot possibly list here. A simple case might be having to spend millions of dollars and devote years (=cost) to creating such solutions. And, responsible companies, will charge enough to be able to support ongoing work, R&D, operations, etc. and have enough funds on hand to survive the inevitable market downturns. Without this, they would have to let half the employees go every M.N years just because of natural business cycles. So, yeah, before you go off talking about businesses like you've never started or ran a non-trivial anything (believe me, it is blatantly obvious when reading your comments), you might want to make an attempt to understand that your stupid Marxists professors or sources had absolutely no clue, were talking out of their asses, never started or ran a business, and everything they pounded into your brains fails the most basic tests with objective, on-the-ground, skin-in-the-game reality.
• bitwize 1y ago
  We are all systems analysts now. We are all business people. Or we're out of a job. Programming as a skill in itself is largely obsolete. It's all about understanding the business: what it needs, how it operates. That takes holistic thinking and people skills that programmers historically just didn't have. They'll adapt, or they'll leave the field.
• dzonga 1y ago
  I personally think - Juniors will be okay, if they stick to *fundamentals* lots of "seniors" via title inflation dont have fundamentals anyways - hence a lot of broken software in the wild & also perverse incentives like Resume driven development. A.I is built on badly written open source code. because once you have the fundamentals, built a few things - you would've battle scars which makes someone a senior not the 'senior' we see in big corps or places cosplaying where promos are based on playing politics.
  • mxkopy 1y ago
    Unfortunately short of making a startup or monetizing projects it’s hard to get paid purely from the fundamentals
  • johnnyanmac 1y ago
    you gotta go resume driven because that's what gets the job. but that distracts from proper engineering skills because the interview process isn't actually testing for engineers. It's all broken.
• itsjamesmurray 1y ago
  My team wrote about this same phenomenon in marketing: https://www.behindthecmo.com/p/the-seniorification-of-marketing https://www.behindthecmo.com/p/the-seniorification-of-market... Its a double edged sword too. I see it in my biz -- its easier to spend 40 hours training a model how to do things the way we like rather than hire someone junior and spend a month+ on onboarding. We are noticing hitting a wall to a certain point with clients still wanting to talk to a real person, but I can see that changing in the next ~5 years. Zero idea what happens to those junior folks that used to get trained (me being one that sat through a 3mo onboarding program!).
  • ghaff 1y ago
    I'm not sure how much is about LLMs directly. But as I've written elsewhere, there's definitely a circular pattern where a lot of junior employees think this is going to be an 18 month thing and companies allocate training and mentoring budgets accordingly. There is a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that junior hiring--at least in the software space--is fairly difficult currently. Via internships at good schools etc. may be better but I have to believe that off the street from bootcamps and the like is pretty tough.
  • johnnyanmac 1y ago
    >. We are noticing hitting a wall to a certain point with clients still wanting to talk to a real person, but I can see that changing in the next ~5 years I don't know. if we simply defer talks to LLM's, then companies will take out the middlemen. which means less clients. We'll have our own little filter bubbble of tech where everyone is talking to their black box to try and push out their ideas instead of within the industry. Not exactly an industry I want to be in. But I don't think it'll get to that point.
• RustySwarf 1y ago
  It's like the whole idea of a company has inverted. Instead of "We'll assemble a team, then use that capability to make things, and solve problems" the idea is "the machine basically runs itself, how much can we get away with minimizing upkeep?" Default "people have value because human attention solves problems", has become default "existing org structure has value because existing revenue streams are stable." The idea of a company used to contain an implied optimism. "If we get capable people together, we can accomplish great things!" Now that optimism has been offloaded to the individual, to prove their worth before they can take part.
• ricardobeat 1y ago
  > “I’m an IC not a manager,” became an acceptable argument to avoid this work Has anyone ever seen a manager mentoring ICs? I haven't. This is a senior/staff/principal responsibility.
  • icedchai 1y ago
    I have, but these were generally founder types that accidentally became managers. They weren't "career managers." The career managers delegate that work.
  • dhussoe 1y ago
    all the time? not on technical issues, unless it's a TLM or the IC is entry level and it's pretty basic stuff they need help with, but absolutely on navigating organization, communicating, prioritization, and so on...
• crisdux 1y ago
  It feels like there is a psyop going on. Blaming job loss and less entry level jobs on "AI". The real simple reason... Jobs are going overseas, many of them junior level jobs. They are laying off people and then hiring a proportional amount of people overseas. Why are folks falling for this AI nonsense?
  • _carbyau_ 1y ago
    Meh, multinational businesses are multinational. They don't have to hire in any given country. Given the current state of affairs in the US, I'd be moving the balance elsewhere too.
    • crisdux 1y ago
      Corporate greed and government collusion have revived indentured servitude through work visas, sanctuary based illegal immigration and virtual offshore outsourcing. You are supporting a vile practice.
      • _carbyau_ 1y ago
        I never said I supported such. Merely that if I were in control, I'd probably do the same. The US has rules to play by, the corporations are playing by them. Recently some of the rules seem to involve specific donations but it is the current set of rules. In this case, the corporations have global reach, so they may decide that other countries people can be more productive per $. Whether importing or offshoring. Are they correct? That's up for debate. If you are a US citizen, then this is the result of the policies of your country. Go be upset at the US system, not a random outsider who is suffering the effects of it all as much as anyone else. :-)
        • crisdux 1y ago
          > I never said I supported such. Merely that if I were in control, I'd probably do the same. So, given the chances, you would be a criminal too. I don't know why I waste my time arguing on the internet lol. Good day.
• andrewrn 1y ago
  To try and add in some anecdotes without injecting too much baggage: I am an older gen-z and launching my career has felt nigh on impossible. At my first job, the allergy toward mentorship this article mentions was incredibly palpable. None of my several managers had management experience, and one of them openly told me they didn't want to be managing me. The one annual review I got was from someone who worked alongside me for a week. Follow that experience up with a layoff and a literally futile job search, and its hard to be optimistic about building much of a career.
  • venturecruelty 1y ago
    I'm really sorry you went through that. For what it's worth, I'm a millennial, and then best shot I had at mentorship was an extremely overworked engineer who oversaw my work for like... a few weeks, maybe? And that was at the very beginning of my career about a decade ago. Then my mentor kinda disappeared to put out a bunch of fires all the time (I eventually became the "put the fires out all the time" guy.) Basically, the experience was neither long nor formal. After that, and at every job since, I basically had to fend for myself. This industry is outright allergic to training people, and it sounds like it's reached a fever pitch. I'm praying I don't get laid off, because on top of having no desire to job hunt in this economy, I don't really know if I care to work anywhere near this industry ever again. I can't wait until it collapses.
• jpalomaki 1y ago
  We have articles that are very skeptical about whether AI companies will ever make any money. And then we have others claiming that AI is already having such a significant impact on hiring that the effects are clearly visible in the statistics.
  • AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    Those two are not contradictory. AI companies could never make any money (statement about the future, and about AI companies, and finances). And AI could be having a visible effect on hiring today (statement about now, and about non-AI companies, and about employment). They don't have to both be true, but they do not inherently contradict each other.
  • illini1 1y ago
    Those two phenomena can be true at the same time.
  • vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
    In 2000 a lot of internet companies went under while the internet had a huge impact on business and wider society.
• lovich 1y ago
  This is just a continuation of general labor practices in US companies. I have been unable to get a tech job for months so I’ve looked into retraining in a new field and every single one has some up front large cost via either paying for schooling or situations like mechanics needing to bring their own tools. The standard US company has completely shed all training costs and put the expectations on laborers to train themselves. And you’re shit out of luck if their requirements change during your training as so many college graduates who picked comp sci are currently learning
• gessha 1y ago
  One thing that I hypothesize about junior developers is that you need to leapfrog the handholding period and go straight to the medium/senior position on your own. You can acquire the medium/senior level of knowledge and experience making all the mistakes and bad choices by yourself and learning from the experience.
  • dangus 1y ago
    Are you saying this plan is realistic or more like a pipe dream? This is kind of like saying “Get your flight hours in on Microsoft Flight Simulator and then Delta Airlines will hire you.” All unpaid and in your spare time between your two minimum wage jobs, of course.
    • SchemaLoad 1y ago
      Maybe software development will become more like a doctor or an engineer where you are expected to come fully trained on your own time and dime. It's sad that the great opportunities have become more out of reach. But that seems almost expected for a job that's relatively easy, safe, and pays well.
      • dysoco 1y ago
        A doctor will get hired immediately after college (with very poor pay though) and become an intern/resident, their diploma is enough to show they know their stuff and are qualified for at least an entry position. A recently graduated Software Engineer or Computer Scientist won't, and they will get interviewed and have to go through hoops as if their diploma wasn't worth a dime.
• Madmallard 1y ago
  This is entirely due to sociopaths that stole trillions in assets from the general population then bought out law makers to not outlaw their blatant copyright infringement so they can make themselves richer with some self-proclaimed 'noble' aim. The general population is being rapidly sacked as a 'necessary' expense of criminal elites. No one should be happy about this.
  • ah979 1y ago
    Yes, and that.
    • Madmallard 1y ago
      If you look at the “who is looking for work december 2025” there are hundreds of replies of people with 5+ years experience we’re so cooked
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  One of the critical flaws in the article is that the first chart only looks back 5 years, and the second only looks back 10. The boom-bust recession cycle is roughly every 10 years. You can't say that AI is impacting hiring when your data just looks like the typical 10 year cycle. Your data needs to go back further. That being said, what's more likely going on: 1: There are always periods where it's hard for recent college grads to get jobs. I graduated into one. Ignoring AI, how different is it now from 10, 20, and 30 years ago? 2: There are a lot of recent college grads who, to be quite frank, don't work out and end up leaving the field. (Many comments in this thread point out how many junior developers just shouldn't be hired.) Perhaps we're just seeing many companies realize it's easier to be stricter about who they hire?
  • johnnyanmac 1y ago
    >Ignoring AI, how different is it now from 10, 20, and 30 years ago? Ignoring AI, there is simply more competition and less human interface in the process to begin with. 10 years ago, you'd throw maybe dozens of apps and study interview trivia (this was right before the "leetcdoe era" so not even that). 20 years ago you'd probably just wander around a career fair and stumble into your career. 30 years ago you were as close to shaking your managers' hand for a job as you'd ever be in the modern tech industry. 10 years ago, a reference from nearly anyone in the pipeline to the hiring manager guaranteed at least a look see at you. Now it's a 50/50 at best. "who you know" may not be enough anymore.And now career fairs are 90% advertising firms instead of actual talent aquisition. >Perhaps we're just seeing many companies realize it's easier to be stricter about who they hire? if you look at the hiring numbers, you see that hiring globally is in fact not slowing down. That's a bit of a tangent, but that may give a clue to the whole situation here. Today you may not even get a human to see your resume after 100 job apps. It's not just brutal but a solitary experince. No feedback to improve upon, no advice to take.
• skeeter2020 1y ago
  >> we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation. This seems like a deeply flawed take on the dual track IC-management ladder. Senior ICs don't keep plugging away by themselves because they're not managers, they just don't get people-management tasks. I think the leadership & mentorship they provide is harder than for me (a manager) because they don't have the hammer of a "manager" job title, and need to earn all their credibility. I have not had a senior IC and above in more than 10 years that didn't have a significant amount of junior & int development explicitly defined in their role, and the easiest way to get promoted is with leverage. Try and be 20% better than your peers with your contribution (hard). Make 10 people 3% better (much easier)
  • jmye 1y ago
    Yes! Had the same instant reaction to that line. A lead engineer doesn’t get to lock himself or herself in a closet and ignore the team, and any team/company allowing that is failing its team as a result. They should be out there helping level up tech skills, and influencing code/behavior just as much as a people manager should be guiding career trajectory.
    • ah979 1y ago
      Author here - yeah, what you're describing is absolutely what I would love to see more of. And of course my thinking was biased by my own observations at companies I've worked at as well as anecdotal confirmation from others, but nothing research based. I've seen a lot of lead/principal/staff engineers go off in their own world and dictate direction to the team instead of leading through influence and connection, which I've found very frustrating. Not all, though. And so the ones that did take a leadership role really stood out to me. I always tried to do that myself, as well, and remember what it felt like to be a junior.
• nunez 1y ago
  Annie! Good to see you hit front on here! You're totally right. 10 minutes on /r/cscareerquestions (without even sorting by `top`, though it's more brutal if you do) is enough to confirm it. I normally wouldn't cite Reddit as a source, but this same subreddit was overflowing with posts on fending off recruiters and negotiating already-sky-high comp packages just two years ago. Seeing how quickly the tables turned is sobering.
  • ah979 1y ago
    CN! Nice to cross paths! You're right that it's sobering to see how it's changed so much in the last 5 years. And yeah, it's not just the juniors that have to think about this but those in their cushy jobs that get hit with layoffs out of the blue, too. I don't say that to illicit fear; I say that to illicit action. We don't live in the same world anymore where you can rest on your laurels, unfortunately. You've always been so good at all this, though! You help others, get curious about where you can add value to their situations, people know what you're about, and you exude authenticity. Poster child for what I'm trying to tell people to do to take action. :D
• clintmcmahon 1y ago
  What about hiring junior developers to do the work I don't want to spend time training AI to do? Humans retain context, over time learn the ins and outs of the business and will sit in a meeting with stakeholders to gain understanding of the business rules and ask the 'stupid' questions that need to be asked. I would much rather have that junior take some hacks at building some features with AI along with my guidance than context switching over to AI just to walk it through doing a task which means having to explain the business and our business rules over and over again. To me cutting out a junior developer adds more time for senior developers than making their work lighter.
• BuckRogers 1y ago
  The comments here amuse me because there's a strong scent of resentment towards people using AI, along with people who copied from SO. I am a mid level developer that started using AI about 4 months ago, and view it as justice against unreasonable and constant micromanagement through estimates on every single task. You want a robot? You're getting your robot now. Not to mention I'm the only white person on my team other than the owner/operator. They already brought in bots of sorts from overseas. The constant drive to cheaper labor and gutting of the American middle class has been vast compared to the suffering the industry will have under junior developers using AI. It's definitely made my job easier. And I really don't care. No one cared about me. I have relatively low pay, no health insurance, and no 401K. When the last person left, management replied to his goodbye email saying he'd be replaced in a week. And then they proceeded to try to hire someone in Mexico City. Maintain the same time zone, but pay 3rd world wages and likely to have coercive control over them through desperation. Never found anyone. I have no love for this industry or any of the "woes" it'll have with AI. Overall it's going to lead to lower wages and less jobs. For those out there producing "AI slop", I support you. It's hardly what they deserve, but they've earned it.
• peteforde 1y ago
  I am genuinely baffled by the notion that experienced developers have a moral obligation to mentor junior developers in additional to their actual job-related tasks. They do not. Mentoring is rewarding work, but it is work. I also find it objectionable that if you're simply not interested in mentoring, you're a jerk. Some people just aren't good at it, some people are genuinely swamped with existing responsibilities, and some people might just want to focus on their goals... and that's fine. There is no but. Some folks <gasp> just don't like other people that much, and prefer working alone. Also fine, and kudos for being self-aware enough to not inflict yourself on people who probably wouldn't enjoy your oversight either. This should be celebrated as a communications success. All of which brings me to the truth: if a company wants to mentor junior developers - and there are many, many excellent reasons to develop talent long-term - then they should make sure that they have suitably experienced people who have opted-in to mentorship, and make sure that their success metrics and remuneration reflect the fact that a significant portion of their time is acknowledged to be dedicated to mentorship. Otherwise, you're describing a recipe for legitimate resentment. Likewise, if you're a junior developer desperate for mentorship... I understand that your instinct is to take any offer that will have you. But if you're able to have an honest conversation with the recruiter about what kind of mentorship culture exists in a company, you might be saving everyone a lot of pain and frustration.
• 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  The problem is "Seniors" started becoming worse a decade ago. Not only wouldn't they mentor, but they wouldn't lead by example. Problem-solving on their own, collaborating with peers, sharing information/communication, doing proper due diligence, organizing and improving themselves and their team/product/business. This was around the same time bootcamps started flooding the industry with amateurs with no experience. These neophytes were then competing with more experienced people for the same jobs, because hiring in tech is more Ouija board than accurate assessment of professional engineering. Amidst this influx of applicants, junior and intermediate staff began getting Senior titles to justify pay raises. Soon those exact same people were moving from job to job as a "Senior", but without the relevant criteria that would've qualified for that title a decade before. You can still see people get promotions without having accomplished anything, much less learned anything, but they did keep the lights on. Today there's a sea of "Senior" engineers that can basically write code (and not especially well), but lack all the other "non-coding" skills that Seniors should have. Even if you hired 100K new Juniors tomorrow, there's nobody to train them, because most of the people working today are practically Juniors themselves. Each "generation" is getting worse than the one before, because they're learning less from the generation before, and not being required to improve. There's still good engineers around, but finding them is like playing Where's Waldo? - and you have to know what Waldo looks like, which you won't if you're not experienced! The fix isn't going to be learning to network ("relational intelligence") and mentoring more. The fix is for us to stop letting the industry devolve. Treat it like the real engineering professions, with real school requirements, real qualifications, real apprenticeships, real achievements (and titles that aren't meaningless). Otherwise it'll continue to get worse.
  • venturecruelty 1y ago
    God, thank you for writing this. I agree 100%. We are rapidly losing all of our "low-background" programmers in this industry. Even ten years ago, I encountered developers who could not debug a stack trace, of the application they were hired to develop. People would send me screenshots of Python errors and ask me how to fix them. I was shocked. I was a junior myself, but surely a programmer would know how to read a compiler error. I mean, that's the entire point of the computer telling you what went wrong... I saw the title inflation happen in real time. When the boot camp floodgates opened, that was the beginning of the end of my faith in this field. I saw people with three months of create-react-app tutorials churning out garbage, while I was called upon to put out fires and fix things when they broke. I "did devops", and rapidly became shadow developer IT, helping incapable programmers fix bugs in codebases I wasn't even familiar with, better than they could. And I am truly not that great of a programmer! I just know how to read, reason, and use grep a lot. These aren't superpowers, but finding someone who can even reason through how to debug something is impossible these days. I would love some sort of licensure or guild or standards, but I have no idea how we even begin to change that. Part of the problem is that companies don't want to change. It's cheaper to pay a few people nothing than it is to pay a lot of people a lot, and that shows no sign of changing. Maybe more planes have to fall out of the sky, I don't know. Maybe Windows has to become so buggy and unusable that multiple hospitals shut down for months on end. We don't just need a reckoning, we need a reckoning where we all wind up better on the other side. I am squinting at the horizon, but still, all I see is darkness.
• mensetmanusman 1y ago
  This is a good use of government due to the existing dynamics. Instead of only funding universities, provide lower risk curves for hiring juniors where the jobs are. The big issue is the game theory of first mover disadvantage at play. Whoever trains the junior loses all the investment when the junior jumps ship. This creates a natural situation of every company holding until the ‘foolish ones’ (in their eyes) waste resources on training. Second mover advantage is real. This is what the government can fix.
• RaccoonAttack 1y ago
  Yes, I do need a mentor. :<
• l2silver 1y ago
  Alright, bring on the downvotes. It's the bloated junior salaries that have killed their market. I never like hiring juniors, I never like working with juniors, and I'd rather pay the extra 20-30% and get someone more experienced. I'm sorry, but if you don't get into FANG, you should basically be working for nothing until you have some experience. It's cruel, it's not fair, but it's just not worth it for the employer. Especially in today's world where there is no company loyalty. All this BS about AI taking away the stuff that juniors did, in my field, software development, that was never the case. I never worked in a place where the juniors had different work than the seniors. We all did the same things, except the juniors sucked at it, and required handholding, and it would have been faster and better if they weren't there. The real trick is finding companies that do very simple work, simple enough that juniors can thrive on day one. It won't be the best experience, but it is experience, and the rest is what you make of it.
  • ah979 1y ago
    I don't disagree with this. (author here) I think it could help overall to lower starting salaries, but it'll never happen. It's all a math problem at the end of the day.
• chanux 1y ago
  > When tech companies started giving engineers an alternative career path to management by letting them climb the ranks as individual contributors instead of having to be managers, I thought that was definitely the right move. Still do. However, the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation. Interesting observation. I have personally tried to avoid getting into people manager positions (as I believed I'd be Peter Principled) but always took it as my duty to share knowledge and mentor the curious and the hungry (and even the ones that are not so). It's actually a very rewarding feeling when I hear good things about people who learned with me.
• hintymad 1y ago
  > That’s not to say that there aren’t people within those companies who care about employee development, but the system isn’t set up for that to be the companies’ top priority. There has been a cultural shift too. I don't know when it got started, but at least employees in the tech companies started to get more and more obsessed with promotions. The so-called career development is nothing but a coded phrase for getting promoted. Managers use promotion as a tool to retain talent and to expand their territories. Companies adopted to this culture too. As a result, people development increasingly became a lip service.
• mxkopy 1y ago
  As an unhired junior, I think this stems from a lack of unions and the ability of the workforce to make demands of capital (e.g. to prevent offshoring or discriminatory hiring processes)
• pf4711 1y ago
  Wow, this elitist attitude is the problem. Assuming the worst about juniors and being totally unwilling to give people a chance, God forbid any training or mentorship. f--- software engineering. What. s--- career full of elitist pricks. Yes many of these people may not be very good, just like a lot of mediocre mids and seniors that believe they're gods gift to the world even if they've stubbornly refused to learn very little over 10 years, but many of these juniors would be extremely valuable if given a chance let alone any help.
  • cindyllm 1y ago
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  • deleted 1y ago
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• tsoukase 1y ago
  To me it seems that large US tech companies had a start-up behaviour until the last years (massive hiring, ambitious goals and VC money). This fades away relatively fast now and they cash out their investments. Another reason might be the low potential of the new generation of graduates (see lower math scores and possibly IQ). They might have interviewed some and are disappointed and unwilling to hire from this pool. Last but not least comes the current trend to substitute humans by LLMs.
• TYPE_FASTER 1y ago
  > networking is absolutely essential for post-graduation job-placement success Looking back, this has absolutely been the case for me personally. My first job out of school was at a startup spun off from a lab where a friend from my CS classes had been working while at school. I just referred somebody who was eventually hired that I've worked with at two other employers in the past. Maybe chatting with a LLM with access to the codebase is equally effective as pair programming with a human. I don't have enough experience doing that yet to know. I still see it as another tool. I've found it helps to have various levels of experience on a team. I think one reason for this is people with less experience (hopefully) ask a lot of questions to fill knowledge gaps. These conversations can lead to revisiting designs, practices, etc. and a better outcome overall.
• eudamoniac 1y ago
  The biggest question that isn't being asked, "why is a university incapable of training a competent programmer in four years?" I'm quite sure I could take my cousin who has never heard the word HTML and get her to be a better programmer than the average CS graduate within 4 years of tutelage. Why is this the case? Four years is a very long time, and the universities are wasting that time. I'm certain any driven individual would end up a mid-level candidate if they skipped college and instead trained themselves for that time, especially if they hire a senior tutor for far less than the cost of the college tuition.
  • mancerayder 1y ago
    It's been a while, but one of the reasons I avoided getting a CS degree a few decades ago was because it was basically mathematics. To this day, interviews are the only thing this would have benefited thanks to Leetcode.
  • skizm 1y ago
    I think the simple answer is you can't do this with most people. Bootcamps have tried for a while and mostly failed.
    • eudamoniac 1y ago
      Are there four year bootcamps? Bootcamps also have much less stringent entry requirements. A student who is capable of meritoriously enrolling in a decent school e.g. Duke is, I think, capable of being an above average industry programmer in four years of instruction. It's something wrong with the instruction.
  • dmurvihill 1y ago
    Frankly, I think Universities are still turning out great programmers. The problem is industry doesn't want good programmers and doesn't promote them.
• Bombthecat 1y ago
  As said before, we are not hiring juniors anymore. Or last hire was last year. As far as I hear from all projects from out customers (finance, insurances, government etc) are neither hiring juniors anymore. In one of the meetings someone asked: when I go or retire, we won't have anyone to replace me, cause we don't hire juniors, management replied: that is not our problem to discuss. Aka a problem for future and someone else
• dmurvihill 1y ago
  Sorry, these studies don’t show that AI is “good at automating away junior work” _at all_, or even claim to (and what little empirical research exists points the other way). What they show is that hiring managers think they can use gen AI to get away with skipping juniors. The resulting collapse in software quality will either bite them in the ass causing a market correction, or massively enrich the big five and leave the rest of us to live with the consequences. Which outcome comes to pass is still yet to be seen (and partially under our control, as seniors)
• spjt 1y ago
  It sucks if you're looking for entry level work, of course. However, I'm a TL/manager with mostly entry-level reports and I have told them for a while the other side of this mentioned here - by the time they get to senior level they are going to be able to name their price in the shortage.
• AbstractH24 1y ago
  At this point we all know the problem. What’s the solution?
• rsanek 11mo ago
  >The most common answer from career services professionals when asked what they needed was more staff. Administrators want to hire more administrators? Shocking!
• random9749832 11mo ago
  Anyone studying CS now unless it is at Stanford, Harvard etc. is an idiot.