alt Hacker NewsWhat if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
Comments
There's a paywall, so I won't be able to read anything post the title.
But let's not pretend reality enters the decision-making of the large tech company at any point, for any kind of decision.
They lack experience when working within real environments while being mentored, within a virtual environment where they have no skill to know what to do, just make things even more complicated.
AI is not to blame here, but their own lack of experience which does require exposure to real environments.
Didn't Netflix do fine for decades (2?) only hiring senior+?
I don't want to go back to the office, and one of the reasons is dealing with junior devs in a way where I can't pause notifications. I think the article might have a point Well eff them. This will weed out the weak, and we'll all be better off without commuting and open plan offices!
The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.
It simultaneously and conveniently: 1. takes the heat off AI blowback 2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing)
On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis.
Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually don't mind working from the office (which i do 4x a week). Just observing.
I remember when companies would hire fresh out of uni (sometimes not even uni just enthusiastic), without experience, and then build them up brick by brick, into a competent developer. Contrast this to needing to be in the top 5 leetcode just to pass the HR screener, and then throwing into the deep end just so they can PIP you in 3 months because they didn’t give you any time and resources to train you up.
So now we have a gap, and the best fix we collectively came to was give senior developers AI so they didn’t need to hire fresh starts.
Gee… I wonder why we have a problem :shrug:
NVIDIA is hiring wherever the talent is, learn from NVIDIA, stop whining.
Many people in the industry reeeeally want AI not to be the real cause of the layoffs for some reason.
Juniors remotely need a proper setup but can be definitely done.
Juniors require pairing and mentorship if you really want them grow.
I think that AI has put lots of pressure on everybody, juniors included, to deliver more, thus finding time for juniors is hard.
In 2017, I wrote a blog post expressing some scepticism about the stampede toward remote work. This was well before the pandemic and before things hit a watershed with it. It occurred to me, then, that this would disrupt the pipeline for junior employees:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200925070728/https://likewise....
The point isn't to toot my horn, just to say that this seemed like an obvious problem with WFH even before the postpandemic cultural moment.
I feel like there are some really good junior level jobs coming in the pipeline. But we have the flush out the capabilities of AI. The acceleration of AI progress is not increasing so once the roles get adjusted junior jobs will return.
Or how about we make remote work mandatory where possible so the economy lets people live their lives. Getting back unpaid time from commutes and being able to reorganize work time freely makes a huge difference.
> Paywall
> AI hate bait
> Antiunion rhetoric
> Blind to tax recession
You owe us a cat tax, OP. Your content is bad and you are deep in the compensation pocket.
It's mismanagement, a prevalence of PE pushing profit margins as thin as possible, and the inevitable feeling of an oncoming recession. Mismanagement and PE both push to prioritizing short term gains (something you can use to justify your position/investment today) at the cost of long term profitability. No one is getting a bonus for having a great quarter in 2046 when your new project has turned you into a trillion dollar company. Executives tend to be very gullible and believe the department head that will claim it wasn't R&D but the new slick UX that 10x'd the company.
Add to that the economy, especially after the disastrous Trump administration, which we can all plainly see as an oncoming train heading straight towards us, and even those who would optimistically advocate for long term budgeting in good times are in baton down the hatches mode.
Hiring juniors is an excellent long term strategy that takes time to pay off - you're much better off having a mix of labor that can mix bold initiative and raw enthusiasm with prudence and planning - and those junior devs today will turn into highly skilled professionals with a deep understanding of your platform in half a decade or so. But when times are lean that's difficult to justify.
I wouldn't shift all the blame away from AI though, this isn't a singular cause thing - working for a PE owned firm we're now on the hook for 200/mo anthropic seats owing to our overlords making a horrible deal. The current brand of AI is a rent-seeking technology that's pulling funds out of the working areas of the economy to fund its insane R&D concepts while more traditional AI applications that have proven utility are languishing,
Absolutely get in the bin with this ridiculous take from a newspaper with a vested interest in getting people back in to expensive office real estate.
Juniors cost more to train, take more effort, and time from seniors who are otherwise "productive" and so companies don't want to hire them and be responsible for that additional work.
It's not remote working, or AI that's to blame for weak junior hiring. It's short-termism from companies that see no reason to spend their time training up juniors.
I have been working since 2008, in that time the only periods my manager has been within a hundred miles of me has been between 2010-2013 and 2015-2017.
Even if I pretend for a moment that a generation that is younger than Google is somehow unable to collaborate online, remote work has been the mode of operation of most people even before COVID, the only question is whether they are sitting in traffic or not first.
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
In 2026 a Junior Engineer is just Claude Code with a bad UI, higher latency, and extra steps. Literally.
I wouldn't even considering hiring a junior engineer at this point. The ROI was already barely breakeven for any but the top of the top junior engineers as they are likely to move on before they are meaningfully contributing.
With AI in the mix the ROI for Junior Engineers is strongly negative for 2 reasons:
1. (obvious) I can just have Claude Code do the work a junior engineer would have done with faster turnaround and generally better results.
2. (less obvious) Junior engineers are going to just turn around and use Claude Code, so now I'm talking to an AI and playing the telephone game, and the Junior engineer isn't going to learn much if anything in the process.
Most comments are just older commenters confirming what everyone over 50 knows, which is that young people are slow and stupid and not as competent as we were back then nor as competent as we are now.
Every generation ever has known this once it got old enough ...
A lot of people I know have multiple remote jobs. I guess, when you have multiple jobs mentoring juniors is just an unnecessary chore which you want to avoid as much as you can, since it takes precious time from doing “real” work.