alt Hacker NewsWhat if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
Comments
The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So what ends up happening is seniors become more heads down, getting things done, and juniors struggle to get time with more experienced coworkers.
AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time.
Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on the mismanagement and/or ridiculously over-engineered/over-complicated custom tech stacks companies run if they say "AI" anywhere in their reports.
As someone who worked remote for 8 years I can see a few reasons
- Really hard to get juniors up to speed when they are remote, when I started out as a junior I sat around a bunch of senior folks, and inhaled in all the knowledge via the interactions we had all day.
- In my previous company, we hired a bunch of juniors who clearly were not self-motivated. There were few who were actively disengaged, would not even care to turn the camera on. They were a few boot-camp grads who though motivated, I could not for the life of me teach computer fundamentals. You can't learn a 4 yr degree's worth of stuff in 6 months at a bootcamp.
Yes Covid was great for us senior folks who did not need direction and were disciplined, but really bad for junior folk.
In my anecdotal experience in a FAANG, weak junior hiring started during the hiring freezes in mid 2022, and was made worse by the layoff cycles that began soon after. Once you know headcount is going to be extremely tight indefinitely, you want to use your precious few slots to hire someone that can deliver value pretty quickly, rather than take years to coach up.
It personally seems hard to connect that to remote work as that had been going for 2 years and in between was the largest hiring burst we'd done, which included many junior folks. Though admittedly I'm biased as a remote worker.
Follow the money.
ZIRP caused a massive overhiring in certain fields, especially in tech. The post-COVID hiring started to cool down around 2.5 years ago, and hit rock bottom 1 year ago. There were almost 4 times as many listings at the peak, 4 year ago, than there were 1 year ago.
A quick data point: US Software job listings
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
US interest rates
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
So companies are flush with cash, and ride a bubble where there's a huge demand for digital tools. People that enrolled college during the height of the bubble were promised jobs left and right, and good salaries. People need to remember that these sort of things rarely change overnight - there can be a latency that takes months to years.
At least to me, it seems like a classic example of a boom and bust. When I did my EE degree, everyone that specialized in control / automation were guaranteed a oil & gas job, many had a job offer 1 year before the graduated. The petro companies would wine and dine us, and we could send out competing offers to negotiate.
Then came a huge crash, and almost no one had a job. The offers were rescinded, multi year hiring freeze. All in all very bad times.
I'm not at all buying the argument that WFH has any serious effect on junior hiring.
What if Financial Times has a vested interest in the real estate industry, and therefore wants RTO mandates? Something something AI I mean.
I have worked with graduates joining remotely during the pandemic, like most graduates they also lacked the skill to work in a real environment, but we can teach them, it's easy. But during the AI boom, the people who could teach the graduates were let go, leaving only a handful of senior engineers that had to "increase their productivity" while also mentoring the juniors. Guess where people cut corners to keep their job longer?
What if there are several reasons all at once?
* Economy is tighter overall.
* Covid overhiring followed by firing means fresh graduates face competition from a large cohort of people with a few years of work experience.
* Even if it's not necessarily true, if the C-suite _believes_ that AI can replace juniors, that's enough to funnel money away from hiring and into AI investments. When money for hiring is tight, seniors are prioritized.
* Like it or not, workforce immigration (such as H-1B) causes displacement.
* The number of CS graduates in the US has doubled over the last decade.
In Sweden, fresh graduates across a number of fields are having a hard time finding jobs. Many of thosee seem to have either a STEM education affected by a dip in "green" capex/investments, or in "overhead" sectors likely to be tightened in bad times, such as HR specialists.
Weak junior hiring is due to:
- Longtime trends of companies trying to externalize training costs.
- Avoiding hiring in general due to uncertainty in the economy.
- Companies dumping tons of money into AI thus having to cut money from other places, particularly ones that don't add much value in the quarter (internships).
What if it's interest rates?
I'm amazing at how anybody can discuss any questions about the tech job market without addressing the end of zero-interest rate policy. "It's interest rates, stupid" ought to be the first thing we consider, and stuff about AI/remote/etc only comes in when we have a specific reason to consider it.
The paper:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6787638
Unclear if it's been peer reviewed. The abstract looks fairly convincing. But it is argued against by the majority of research on this topic.
I couldn't imagine working remote straight out of college. I'm very glad I work remote now though.
For those without a FT subscription: https://archive.ph/DrFSW
I have found working with remote first natives that the narrowness of their knowledge is also very high. When you work in an office there is a some knowledge transfer happening having lunch with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team. This non structured learning is missed in remote work.
Most teams are run as skeleton crews and if I’m a hiring manager I’m ensuring I get senior, experienced employees regardless of where they work. If a company allows remote then my net for quality senior employees is massively increased.
Now tell me which executives ever did the math on how remote working makes juniors take longer to learn and then took hiring decisions based on that math. This all seems good in theory, but doesn’t seem to hold out in the real world if you’ve ever worked with higher ups in your life
Why would remote working have anything to do with the amount of junior hiring? You can maybe make the case that remote work isn't as helpful for juniors etc etc. but that has absolutely nothing to do with the decision to create a job requisition or not.
A lot of disagreements ITT, but a lack of counterexamples. If this theory were false, we'd expect to see:
* places with strong in-office presence where juniors are not being hired
* remote teams with strong hiring of juniors
I'm all in for remote working. My first job out of college has been remote. As much as I would love for a senior to help me out when stuck, my org completely made it clear they needed juniors who could independently own products end to end without handholding. It's frowned upon to not have domain knowledge there, and in fact within month of joining I had to answer any questions related to the domain handed to me. This burnt me out. I wish organizations did not expect this much from juniors. My only aid has been burning myself out to learn fast and use AI to confirm my learnings, costing my mental and physical health. If my company was onsite, it would have been even worse to have the answers ready on spot.
What if hiring offshore developers is to blame for not hiring onshore ones?
Intial folks in gold rush benefits. Later folks don't. It happens everywhere. This weak junior hiring was seen by everyone 10 years ago when our politicians were asking coal miners to learn to code.
we hired a few juniors at our fully remote company - no issue
this is ft trying to help their real estate portfolio
Large companies opting to hire several overseas engineers into their GCC for way less pay than a single domestic junior is a factor as well.
This is a pretty narrow anecdote but my employer prefers hiring right out of undergrad and training. They also were quite aggressive in ending remote work after Covid. I felt a lot better about the new developers I worked with before LLMs got big than I do now.
My previous submission to the same article (without the syndication code, hence not recognized by the HN deduplication):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319392 (2 comments)
What if is, and always was, having people with no discernible skills or expertise being in charge of filling the hiring pipeline?
It's telling how rhetoric and conjecture are now normalized in company and business culture. When we were at the peak of remote work, companies were reporting record high revenues.
You know that thing about the answer to any headline that’s a question being almost always “No”?
I’ve been fully remote for 17 years and, before that, did short periods of remote work as early as 2003.
The first junior I remember being onboarded remotely (into an irc-mostly, voice call for ultra rare cases job) was me and it worked pretty well.
From about 2010 to 2012 I grew the support team of a database services company from 2 to about 20 people (the 2 at the start was counting me). A lot of the new hires were junior when it came too dabatases, some just junior period, and it worked great too.
There were some in person meetings but the vast majority of onboarding and training happened remotely.
Maybe people invested in office real estate are perhaps biased to get the wrong answer on this one.
If I had time now, I’d write an article titled “is the FT right about the cause of weak junior hiring?”
I don’t have time, but you can apply that saying about headlines to my imaginary article.
I wonder if it’d also related to the reduced length of time that people stay in a job now? Why invest in training a junior if they’ll move jobs as soon as they reach mid-level.
I got significantly more work accomplished when I worked remotely. There was tons of work I could not do from the office as people needed the systems I need to work on and could only be done out of hours/remotely.
When in the office I got a lot of people complaining/pissed I was leaving early because I got there an hour or more before everyone so I could get more work done/do the work on systems they needed. The only thing I got while in the office was constant interruptions for things a junior could have handled. Meetings was a bad word, never allowed, so there was really no reason for me to be there constantly (I could have done most of my job remotely and gone into the office once or twice a week)
I hired a junior I was eager to mentor/train to replace me, they proceeded to throw endless things I did at them expecting them to fill the multiple hats I was filling (to the point they pushed them to work on very dangerous equipment and got themselves hurt)
Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't
I absolutely loved the work I did. I GTFO of that misery that was only miserable/got me crucified due to the stupid shit people made up in their head instead of the actual work I did
Why does it have to be one thing? It's likely a whole lot of things that are contributing to this, including education and their parenting.
Companies used to invest in building up their employees and even in retaining them by giving competitive pay. I can hire any junior developer and train them to be a better developer, unless they themselves do not want to be a better developer, I cant fight lack of motivation.
A lot of senior developer roles list things that make it sound like senior devs are supposed to mentor other devs but they never seem to do so.
All companies I worked, big or small, local or remote. All of them stopped hirokg juniors long time ago. I have a guess that Juniors are much weaker today + AI + bad economy + (what I call) immediatism*
I don't agree with remote work arguments because I saw that before with remote companies and totally works
No company is investing for the next 10 years, not even 5 depending on the scale.
From the corner of the industry visible to me, junior hiring was quite weak even prior to the pandemic. It existed but took considerable searching compared to mid-level and senior roles. Most companies wanted someone who could hit the ground running and not need much training or guidance.
In the U.K. youth unemployment was the same level as today back it 2007. Post GFC it shot up to over 20%
Similar high levels in the black Wednesday crash and in the early 80s
https://www.statista.com/statistics/813142/youth-unemploymen...
Surprised none of these comments address the issue from cultural/generational value gap
I increasingly find across different borders that Gen Z simply are not optimal or desirable for hire and its not just "remote coding jobs" but across the spectrum.
In South Korea, there are lot of of 35yo+ getting hired while people in their early 20s struggling.
I see the same outcome in different advanced economies and the answer is quite simple, Gen Z, are simply not equipped to work or put up with grit that is needed. They are too self centered and contradictory to their own interests. They expect others to bend over backwards for them without any merit.
Perhaps the biggest difference I see from millenials and gen z is that the degree in which they realize the difference between having earned the right to expressing your opinion and expressing your opinion.
Unfortunately, from personal anecdotes and others, gen z simply are not aware and thus stuck in a loop. Frankly, I don't have any sympathy. I don't know where this entitlement comes from but its not helpig them and it certainly will not improve outcomes.
It's not AI, it's workers asking to work from home.
Yeah.
I blame the pervasive messaging of "learn to code" and those "day in the life of a software engineer" videos. The number of CS graduates is like double what it was a few years ago. As we transition into a 'bust' cycle for tech with lots of layoffs suddenly you have a tricky situation where mid to senior engineers are looking for any kind of work they can get, while at the same time there is an ocean of junior talent looking to get their foot in the door.
There is no doubt that juniors have much more difficulty starting their careers in tech nowadays.
This might be naive, but isn’t this purely a demographic/saturation effect?
the issue is pay bands, not remote work or ai. Why would you hire a junior instead of a senior, if the senior costs only 20% more?
Hiring was strong a couple years ago during peak remote work.
If my location dictates the type of employees your organisation needs / doesn't need, then yeah, you pretty much over-hired to begin with and just lack accountability. Hence trying to blame it on everyone and everything else except yourself. Respectfully.
Junior hiring was clearly depressed thanks to COVID, but AI has absolutely made that depression worse. We know this because it's what the tech leaders keep saying. They can't fucking shut up about it.
It's as though the only idea any tech CEO has had in the last year is "what if we gave our best engineer 1000 agents and a case of Red Bull and fired everyone else?" Historically you had to hire junior engineers, because you needed the help. Now there's a [theoretical, purely imaginary] world where you don't, because agents will magically do that work for you. Nobody is losing sleep over the effect this has on talent as a whole, because that's a problem for someone else in the future.
Brace yourself, hybrid and return to office propaganda are coming.
If people working in the office leaves less time for child care, doing laundry and house chores, thereby leading to more outsourcing, then indeed working from home reduces GDP. It’s also possible that work from home is more efficient as a societal level, but any company willing to defect gets more efficiency for themselves by externalizing the opportunity cost.
Anything to avoid Peter principle at all costs, I guess. I will spell it out: We have an aging middle manager problem in IT. Those with less desire to catch up on things have mandate and budget to pursue projects with sunken cost fallacies, they overestimate the cost of architectural change and they don't take criticism well.
That's what's causing junior hiring to fail, because they don't want to hire juniors with passion, because especially with AI assisted tooling, these juniors suddenly seem a lot more capable than those aging guys who need their third meeting before lunch. Thus they hire the fresh graduate as an impressionable and yet unreliable junior instead.
I worked at a fully remote company that did the best job hiring juniors in my 20 year career. The talent and enthusiasm in that pool was great and really injected something into teams.
What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.