7 ms·
Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have
- uberman 2mo agoI'm not sure what the article actually has to say about the topic it presents. It seems to want to be something about not hiring junior talent (something by the way not restricted to the tech industry) but instead it ends up more a critique about people wanting to use a waterfall pipeline.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoDouble negative title implies clickbait :)
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoI'm just staring at the title, wondering how this offensive, double-and-a-half-negative phrase made it all the way to the frontpage. I'm going to skip this one for that obvious reason.
- foldr 2mo agoIt's not really a double negative as the negations are in different clauses. If you remove both negations, you get a completely different statement: > Hiring junior engineers will solve the problem you think you have.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoClause change doesn't rescue the logic. If anything it makes it harder to process. Refusing to hire junior engineers won't fix your actual problem. Fixed. I would click that.
- foldr 2mo ago> Clause change doesn't rescue the logic I don’t understand what you mean here. > Fixed Your edit is the same in terms of the negatives (though refusing to do something isn’t really the same as just not doing it). But you’ve changed what it says by referring to “your actual problem” instead of “the problem you think you have”.
- teach 2mo agoI agree with the sibling comment and also don't understand how the title is "offensive". I literally can't think of anything that could be offensive about any term in the title or the title as a whole.
- 1970-01-01 2mo agoIt's the logic that is offensive. Mimically restated - The title isn't incorrect but it won't be misunderstood by few. A synonym for offensive is disgusting.
- teach 2mo agoOkay, that's an interesting complaint and I can understand it. For me, the title is QUITE clear. There's a very strong narrative in the zeitgeist that "no one" is hiring entry level jobs anymore because they're being replaced with AI. There's some pretty solid hiring data for CS grads, at least, that backs this up, even when controlling for the down economy as a whole. So the first part "Not hiring junior engineers" is very clear. Whatever this blog post is, it's a message to companies that are making these hiring decisions. Then, the rest follows: "<that thing you're doing> won't work". It won't solve the problem you think you have. Now that I've got your perspective, it IS possible for me to force my brain to incorrectly parse the title in a way that produces word salad, so I guess I can get it. I had all the context I needed to easily grok it at first glance. The intended audience of the article (people who are deciding to hire fewer junior engineers) ALSO probably have that context. But it's not hard for me to believe that there are lots of people even on HN that didn't! Thanks for clarifying
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- forgetfreeman 2mo ago[dead]
- potentdream 2mo agovery hard for junior engineers out there now.
- alephnerd 2mo agoThere are too many new grads and the quality bar outside of target programs has dropped nor never existed to begin with. And the target programs graduate around 15-20k EECS adjacent majors a year. It's hard to justify hiring a (choosing random college) CS@Ouachita Baptist University grad for $140K TC (50th percentile for an entry level SWE) or even $100K TC [0] (25th percentile for an entry level SWE) unless they are truly an outlier. For example, back in college I had a buddy who really didn't want to take our OS class because it was hard, so he used transferology and found an OS class offered by some random Christian university in Texas where the class assignments were either writing biblical analogies for system programming concepts like memory management or basic fizzbuzz level assignments. My alma mater's CS program ended up blacklisting that college when admin was working on transferring the credits for that class and began reviewing the class's curriculum. While that is an extreme example, outside of target programs, the quality bar drops dramatically, and an entire generation of grads are truly unemployable at the current prevailing wages. [0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-level/locations/united-states https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
- pelagicAustral 2mo agoWell, this is the thing. I was talking to someone a few days back, someone in Academia, and the conversation around the table was about how can we make it so we don't have to resort to increasingly more sophisticated ways to surveil students so they don't AI slop their entire degrees. The problem is that universities, seemingly on a global scale, decided to run on economic incentives instead of academic ones. There are way too many people just doing degrees they have no interesting in learning about because university is just a way to a better job, and guess what, that "better job" no longer exists... and yet, year after year we have more and more people that have no clue what their credentials claim they should know by heart.
- frmersdog 2mo ago
- daun_gee 2mo ago[flagged]
- wizzwizz4 2mo agoPlease don't use human slurs for computer programs you don't like.
- daun_gee 2mo ago[dead]
- lukebitts 2mo agoIf it’s so necessary make sure to use your real account next time
- daun_gee 2mo ago[flagged]
- 8note 2mo agoyou can be critical without being abraisive or demeaning about it. a professional opinion includes some professionalism
- inigyou 2mo agoAre we worried about offending the machine?
- wizzwizz4 2mo agoNo, we're worried about contributing to a hostile environment for people who have nothing to do with this complaint. To illustrate: replace the slur with a racial or sexist one, and see how it reads. If you want to insult people, take the time to come up with a relevant insult: don't just fire your gun into the air.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo agoHiring seniors is a waste of money. You need someone who knows enough to drive LLMs, but not too much more. The LLMs are good enough to do the debugging, the coding, and a big part of the design work and system architecture. Most of the work today is manual testing and feeding the bugs back into the LLMs.
- RobRivera 2mo agoIs this a poorly instructed llm? Or a poorly constructed thought?
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo agoIt's lived experience. My management is a lot happier when I move too fast to really pay attention to the problems and use my expertise, and the output is good enough that nobody really complains. Building most software is no longer skilled work; it takes minimal training. The industry just hasn't caught up yet.
- sumanthvepa 2mo agoWell. I own my business and I really hate this attitude that some startups executives have. I want quality. Not blind speed. I want speed to be a by product of a well built product and a system that builds it. Not a bunch of slop thrown over the wall that I have to then debug and fix.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo agoThe AI is pretty good at debugging and fixing it. It's quite a bit better at it than writing the code, to be honest. And, you're right, I used to enjoy my job a lot more before AI. But in the end, the paychecks keep coming, and I can produce a lot of acceptable code quickly with little skill. Skill in coding no longer makes economic sense.
- bgilroy26 2mo ago
- lbriner 2mo agoI'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI. What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because of AI, then that is daft although I can understand a period where companies are deciding whether they still need 50 Developers instead of 20 + AI. For me, the worst change for Juniors is remote working. I don't want the experience of newly qualified engineer being sitting in their bedroom all day chatting to people on Teams and not knowing when they can interrupt and when they can't. We used to have an office so we could at least do 2 days per week together but we don't any more. The banter, the office, the observation, the overhearing things is a critical part of both learning engineering and learning how to be part of a workplace.
- mpfh 2mo agoYou’re in a whirlwind of propaganda at the moment. The talking points and takes are mostly planted. Even the title has an inner circle nod to it.
- foobar_______ 2mo agowhat does this mean? can you explain? legit question not rhetorical
- MattGaiser 2mo agoI guess a lot of this depends on whether you consider juniors to be part of your talent pool. Unless you are retaining them, it is just subsidizing industry at large to train them. I stayed less than a year at my first two jobs. They bet wrong.
- suzzer99 2mo agoThis is standard because after a year of experience, a fresh junior dev is worth roughly twice as much on the open market. Most companies won't give a 100% raise because it would upset the apple cart with other employees wanting similar raises. So the junior dev has to move on to get paid what they're worth.
- CoffeeOnWrite 2mo agoI would have liked the article to address more specifically what skills will be needed in the future and how engineers of all levels will learn them. Senior engineers in my circle feel their own brainrot, and at the same time feel like super wizards combining our deep software knowledge with the amazing AI dev tools. How will the AI native engineers learn the things, do they need to learn the things, what does anybody need to learn anyway? Let’s talk about it.
- DetroitThrow 2mo agoThis blogpost didn't really address the elephant in the room that increasingly the bottleneck is no longer the part that jr devs could help out with. Every startup I know that hired some level of jr's and encouraged them to use AI found themselves in a code review bottleneck for basic code quality and architecture decisions. Many startups I know are largely forgoing jr devs. Code quality regarding evolvability, reliability, maintainability is still part of the development process. All of the people who claimed src code is just assembly on Twitter some months ago have started chiming in that they were wrong. I do wonder what this does to the talent pipeline like mentioned in the post.
- guywithahat 2mo agoThere’s an irony too, in that junior engineers are more likely to understand and use AI tools, and quickly become more performant than their senior engineers asking questions on stack overflow. It’s what’s happening at my company and it feels silly since certain projects are way behind and constantly hiring because the very senior lead refuses to use AI
- threatofrain 2mo agoSeniors don’t use SO anymore, it virtually died if you look at traffic. The reason the market is so tough for juniors isn’t because seniors are bad at chat or agent workflows, it’s quite the opposite of what you say.
- win311fwg 2mo ago> Seniors don’t use SO anymore Did they ever? SO wasn't around during my junior days so I never got to experience it from that angle, but it looked like it would have been an incredible resource for those who juniored in its heyday. However, I never found it to be successful in delivering to the problems I encountered as a senior.
- cataphract 2mo agoRight, SO was always better at answering beginner questions then advanced ones, except if the complex question had a broad appeal. Part of it is because the format is not good for asking a context-heavy question. Another part because you were dependent on the pool of people answering, and the more niched the question was (using a library not very popular, for instance) or the more expertise it required, the less likely you were to find someone.
- threatofrain 2mo agoBack then library and framework authors were also less competitive. Now open source authors do the full court press with very beautiful docs for both humans and agents.
- assanineass 2mo ago[dead]
- scotty79 2mo ago> The AI version of this argument is not a new insight. It’s an old (and mistaken) preference, wearing new clothes. Everything sounds like AI now when you squint just a bit.
- wasabi359 2mo ago[flagged]
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoWouldn't the logic to only hire Junior engineers if AI could do the work, what do you need the Senior salary for if they're both just asking AI to do things. This is obviously assuming the ideology of an organization that would consider something like "We shouldn't be hiring engineers anymore" in the first place so they obviously have absolute trust in AI.
- dudul 2mo agoFor now that won't work, based on my experience with LLMs, you still need a very senior engineer to prompt and review what was produced by the agent. A junior wouldn't have the experience to identify the flaws/issues. In the future, yeah maybe, when LLMs are not as dumb as they are today.
- mikeocool 2mo agoPre-AI juniors were valuable because on many tasks, it was faster for me (senior eng) to write a quick spec have a conversation with a junior, and have them go off for a few hours or a few days and write the code, and then come back with it for review. I could do that with several junior engineers and pretty reasonably paralellize the work. Now a junior takes my spec, drops it into Claude, and submits a PR a few minutes later. So I'm back to being the bottleneck -- there's constant pressure to provide specs and review code, and ultimately that process is just me having an indirect conversation with Claude (em dash is mine). The junior is probably providing negative value, since it would be more efficient for me just to talk to Claude, and they're not learning anything, because it's really hard to learn anything by skimming code that's being pooped out by Claude. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, I still think we need to train junior engineers. I think my best advice to juniors right now is stop using Claude so much. Use it to plan and answer questions, but you should still be writing code even it's slower. Because that's the only way they're going to learn enough to effectively guide AI and review output and get past being a net negative.
- collinmcnulty 2mo agoDo you think that its possible to raise the bar for junior engineers such that "you have AI now, so I need you to own farther up the review chain yourself"? I feel like I could answer either way. No, you need reps on projects to have that kind of judgement, that's what makes a senior. But also yes, while it will take the junior way longer to do that kind of review, they have the time to do it now, and its now the bottleneck so it makes sense to put their effort into that portion.
- Yopolo 2mo agoWe have the same issue and now spending more time/energy on optimizing the code review agent. This might lead to more automatisation and not less if it works. After all we might extract everything critical to us. We also now expect juniors to review the other ones code first.
- thomasnowhere 2mo agoThis, pretty much exactly what I've been noticing too. Feel for the juniors though, its rough trying to learn when the tool in front of you can just spit the whole answer out. I still think they're worth it, but tbh I just don't have a good answer yet for how to actually use them well, maybe just takes time to figure that out.
- andrewfromx 2mo agoI don't understand when he says "the job has changed to using agents but human judgement is still required" and then goes on with that assumption will remain true for our lifetimes basically. But the elephant in the room is that's going away very soon right? Think back to 2024 and how your job has changed over the last two years. It went from science fiction to reality. And as engineers surely we understand the concept of expotential growth. It's not just us outsiders using claude to make our code but internal anthropic engineers are using it to make claude itself better. (Probably they also use openai and gemini to double check stuff!) And that's the expotential loop. Does anyone really believe in 2028 human judgement will still be the thing?
- win311fwg 2mo ago> Think back to 2024 and how your job has changed over the last two years. The programming language became a lot more terse. I press the keys on the keyboard considerably less now. Otherwise, I don't see much difference. The human end hasn't changed. Neither I, nor do I expect anyone else here, was hired to be a monkey infinitely typing to produce Shakespeare in software, so the human end is what the job is and always was.
- hectdev 2mo agoMaybe if hypothetically all stakeholders express all of their concerns and desires clearly in channels AI can pick up constantly.
- randusername 2mo agoThis is a great example of a blog post that isn't obviously AI written, but that also doesn't make much sense. > Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have No payoff, what is the problem they think they have and why is it wrong? > The junior engineer question rests on a few assumptions, and all of them are flawed. No payoff, what are the assumptions and why are they flawed?
- cnj 2mo agoThe problem I have: The CEO (and the investors, or the whole industry) is obsessed with ARR per employee. That's the key metric (in their mind). It doesn't matter how much the employee costs. Let's assume you can hire two Juniors or one Senior for the same salary. If you have to optimize for ARR per employee - you can only hire one person. And if you have the choice between hiring a Junior or hiring a Senior... you're going to hire the Senior. Goodhart's law fully applies here.
- Antoniocl 2mo agoWhen you say the "whole industry", which industry are you referring to? The entire technology sector? Venture-backed companies specifically? Growth-stage VC-backed specifically? This claim is counterintuitive to me in many business contexts - ex. for an established privately-held company issuing dividends to the owners, what incentive do owners have to emphasize ARR per employee rather than net income?
- peteroettl 2mo ago[dead]
- phendrenad2 2mo agoThe "not hiring juniors" thing started before agentic LLMs were a thing, but it was close enough that it's easy to mistake it for causation. The fact that people retroactively attribute this explanation to an industry trend just reinforces it in people's minds, otherwise people might have tried to hire juniors again and realized that it's not such a bad idea. By not hiring juniors, you're putting mid-level work on seniors, who could otherwise be dedicating themselves to solving hard-and-expert-level problems. You're handicapping your company.
- atscheck 2mo ago[flagged]