alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023.
But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending.
> the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead
This is a huge factor. I’ve seen teams admit that they are too “senior heavy” and then still hire senior engineers over junior when the rare position opens up.
I’ve also seen teams cut college hiring and internships because head count is tight and they don’t expect positions to open up.
At the end of the day, there are a bunch of different things going on. Higher interest rates, general overhiring during COVID for whatever reasons, and (yes) AI. And probably more macro trends. Maybe at some point we'll see some data-driven analyses but, from what I've seen, it's really hard to tease all the threads apart.
Remote work would seem to have a potential impact on mentoring and future development but that seems like a longer term trend. But, maybe, as the article suggests, some companies that are heavily remote are thinking that entry employees are going to be harder to develop--but that's a problem for the future so better not hire them today.
Ok, but if it was ZIRP, why are people hiring expensive seniors when they could hire 3/5 no name juniors for the same cost?
I have said the same for a while. And I also think there is an increasing trend of clueless CEOs trying to replace expensive developers with AI token spend. We are still waiting on the long tail of consequences from those decisions, but I suspect it is going to look like a lot of perfectly financially viable companies turning into dumpster fires. Followed by opportunities as their clients churn.
We ended our intern program and so did a ton of other companies.
IMO one of the worst decisions we've ever made because 80% of the time the interns we take on and then hire are absolute superstars.
And even before we ended it we had a couple of years where we stopped competing for talent from Waterloo. I guess Trump made that harder but yeah bad decisions all around.
> The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead.
A lot of my past employers built their process around requesting additional headcount first, then determining the budget for the role second. It was in every manager’s best interest to maximize the budget for the role so they could hire the best candidate they could find. In practice this meant arguing that you needed someone senior or staff at minimum. Then the job posting got written. There was always a theory that we’d take great juniors but they would get filtered out before getting far enough. When they were told they had to lay off 2 people, they would cut the least experienced and hold on to the most experienced.
At other companies managers were given budgets and left to manage their headcount to fit. This created an inverse situation where they would try to get 3-4 juniors instead of 2-3 seniors or 2 staff level people. When layoffs came you would see teams choose to drop the one highly paid person instead of cutting 2 juniors.
So while your company lost their juniors, I know a lot of people angry that their companies let go of experienced people to keep the cheaper juniors around. Little policy changes can have an outsize effect