> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand.<p>In the past, a junior would write bad code and you'd work with them to make it better. Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM. Ends up taking more of my time than if I'd done it myself. The whole mentorship thing breaks down when you're basically collaborating with a model through a proxy.<p>I think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are still valuable. But it's hard to get past "why bother mentoring when I could just use AI directly?"<p>I don't have answers here. Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.
> Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM.<p>This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested."<p>Part of the challenge (and I don't have an answer either) is there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to.<p>It is especially frustrating that the second group doesn't become much more than a proxy for an LLM.<p>New juniors can progress in software engineering - but they have to take the road of disciplined use of AI and make sure that they're learning the material rather than delegating all their work to it... and that delegating work is <i>very</i> tempting... especially if that's what they did in college.
> there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to.<p>Hmmm. Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories? Because I agree, if someone is delegating all their work to an LLM or similar tool, cut out the middleman. Same as if someone just copy/pasted from Stackoverflow 5 years ago.<p>I think it is also important to think about incentives. What incentive does the newer developer have to understand the LLM output? There's the long term incentive, but is there a short term one?
Dealing with an intern at work who I suspect is doing exactly this, I discussed this with a colleague. One way seems to be to organize a face to face meeting where you test their problem solving skills without AI use, the other may be to question them about their thought process as you review a PR.<p>Unfortunately, the use of LLMs has brought about a lot of mistrust in the workplace. Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice as they see it as sermonizing when an “easy” process to get “acceptable” results exists.
Just like anything, anyone who did the work themself should be able to speak intelligently about the work and the decisions behind its idiosyncrasies.<p>For software, I can imagine a process where junior developers create a PR and then run through it with another engineer side by side. The short-term incentive would be that they can do it, else they'd get exposed.
> Is there any way to distinguish between these two categories?<p>Yes, it should be obvious. At least at the current state of LLMs.<p>> There's the long term incentive, but is there a short term one?<p>The short term incentive is keeping their job.
> Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand.<p>I keep hearing this and find it utterly perplexing.<p>As a junior, desperate to prove that I could hang in this world, I'd comb over my PRs obsessively. I viewed each one as a showcase of my abilities. If a senior had ever pointed at a line of code and asked "what does this do?" If I'd ever answered "I don't know," I would've been mortified.<p>I don't want to shake my fist at a cloud, but I have to ask genuinely (not rhetorically): do these kids not have any shame at all? Are they not the slightest bit embarrassed to check in a pile of slop? I just want to understand.
<p><pre><code> > embarrassed to check in a pile of slop
</code></pre>
Part of being a true junior, especially nowadays, is not being able to differentiate a pile of slop from useful and elegant code.
I get that. I think that getting to know juniors outside of work, at a recurring meetup or event, in a setting where you can suss out their motivation level and teachability level, is _a_ way of going about it. That way, if your team is hiring juniors, you have people you have already vetted at the ready.
IMO teachability/curiosity is ultimately orthogonal to the more base question of money-motivation.<p>In a previous role I was a principal IC trying to mentor someone who had somehow been promoted up to senior but was still regularly turning in code for review that I wouldn't have expected from an intern— it was an exhausting, mind-numbing process trying to develop some sense of engineering taste in this person, and all of this was before LLMs. This person was definitely not just there for the money; they really looked up to the top-level engineers at our org and <i>aspired</i> to be be there, but everything just came across as extremely shallow, like engineering cosplay: every design review or bit of feedback was soundbites from a how-to-code TED talk or something. Lots of regurgitated phrases about writing code to be "maintainable" or "elegant" but no in-the-bones feeling about what any of that actually meant.<p>Anyway, I think a person like this is probably maximally susceptible to the fawning ego-strokes that an AI companion delivers alongside its suggestions; I think I ultimately fear that combination more than I fear a straight up mercenary for whom it's a clear transaction of money -> code.
I had one fairly-junior teammate at Google (had been promoted once) who was a competent engineer but just refused to make any choices about what to work on. I was his TL and I gave him a choice of 3 different parts of the system to work on, and I was planning to be building the other two. He got his work done adequately, but his lack of interest / curiosity meant that he never really got to know how the rest of the system operated, and got frustrated when he didn't advance further in his career.<p>Very odd. It was like he only had ever worked on school projects assigned to him, and had no actual interest in exploring the problems we were working on.
In my experience, curiosity is the #1 predictor of the kind of passionate, high-level engineer that I'm most interested in working with. And it's generally not <i>that</i> hard to evaluate this in a free-form interview context where you listen to how a person talks about their past projects, how they learn a new system or advocated/onboarded a tool at their company.<p>But it can be tricky to evaluate this in the kind of structured, disciplined way that big-company HR departments like to see, where all interviewees get a consistent set of questions and are "scored" on their responses according to a fixed rubric.
I don't know what world you're living in but software development has always been a cut throat business. I've never seen true mentoring. Maybe a code review where some a-hole of a "senior" developer would come in having just read "clean code" and use some stupid stylistic preferences as a cudgel and go to town on the juniors. I'm cynical enough to believe that this, "AI is going to take your programming job!" is just a ploy to thin out the applicant pool.
Wow, you must have worked in some REALLY toxic places. I had one toxic senior teammate when I first started out - he mocked me when I was having trouble with some of the dev environment he had created - but he got fired shortly thereafter for being bad at his job.<p>Everybody else through my 21-year career has almost universally either been helpful or neutral (mostly just busy). If you think code reviews are just for bikeshedding about style minutia, then you're really missing out. I personally have found it extremely rewarding to invest in junior SWEs and see them progress in their careers.
> Just thinking maybe we're not seeing the end of software engineering for those of us already in it—but the door might be closing for anyone trying to come up behind us.<p>It's worth considering how <i>aggressively</i> open the door has been for the last decade. Each new generation of engineers increasingly disappointed me with how much more motivated they were by a big pay check than they were for anything remotely related to engineering. There's nothing wrong with choosing a career for money, but there's also nothing wrong about missing a time when most people chose it because they were interested in it.<p>However I have noticed a shift: while half the juniors I work with are just churning out AI slop, the other half are <i>really</i> interested in the craft of software engineering and understanding computer science better.<p>We'll <i>need</i> new senior engineers in a few years, and I suspect they will come from a smaller pool of truly engaged juniors today.
This is what I see. Less of door slamming completely shut, more like, the door was enormous and maybe a little too open. We forget, the 6 month coding bootcamp to 6 figure salary pipeline was a real thing for a while at the ZIRP apex.<p>There are still junior engineers out there who have experiments on their githubs, who build weird little things because they can. Those people were the best engineers anyway. The last decade of "money falls from the sky and anyone can learn to code" brought in a bunch of people who were interested in it for the money, and those people were hard to work with anyway. I'd lump the sidehustle "ship 30 projects in 30 days" crowd in here too. I think AI will effectively eliminate junior engineers in the second camp, but absolutely will not those in the first camp. It will certainly make it harder for those junior engineers at the margins between those two extremes.<p>There's nothing more discouraging than trying to guide a junior engineer who is just typing what you say into cursor. Like clearly you don't want to absorb this, and I can also type stuff into an AI, so why are you here?<p>The best engineers I've worked with build things because they are truly interested in them, not because they're trying to get rich. This is true of literally all creative pursuits.
I love building software because it's extremely gratifying to a) solve puzzles and b) see things actually working when I've built them from literally nothing. I've never been great at coming up with projects to work on, but I <i>love</i> working on solving problems that other people are passionate about.<p>If software were "just" a job without any of the gratifying aspects, I wouldn't do nearly as good a job.
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Do you mind giving some examples of the work that annoys seniors?
It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation.<p>It's clear why people do it (more pay) but it sets up bad incentives for the companies. Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee, just to have them leave as soon as they can get a better offer?
When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.
One would assume the solution is to simply offer a good package and retain employees with that. I returned to an old company after a few years of floating around because I realized they had the perfect mix of culture and benefits for me, even if the pay isn't massive.<p>You're falling for the exact same fallacy experienced by failed salesmen. "Why would I bother investing time in this customer when they're just going to take my offer to another dealership for a better deal?"<p>Answer: you offer a good deal and work with people honestly, because if you don't, you'll <i>never</i> get a customer.
Funny, I was at my previous company almost exactly two years. They never even gave me a cost of living increase, much less a "raise." So I was effectively earning less each year. Change needs to happen from both sides if extended tenure is the goal.
Why didn't companies just grant raises more aggressively? Was the ease of poaching engineers not a clear market signal?
This will naturally select for the people who are self driven learners. In a sense this is nothing new, just a continued progression of the raising of the bar of who is still able to contribute economic value to the market
My 2 cents: they're too expensive.<p>We had code school grads asking for $110-$130. Meanwhile, I can hire an actual senior engineer for $200 and he/she will be easily 4x as productive and useful, while also not taking a ton of mentorship time.<p>Since even that $110 costs $140, it's tough to understand how companies aren't taking a bath on $700/day.
I don't know if that's it. Speaking from outside the tech space: most of my office jobs since 2012 have been "doing the easy/annoying tasks that had to be done, but more senior people didn't want to 'waste time' dealing with."<p>So, there are two parts to this:<p>The first is that a lot of those tasks are non-trivial for someone who isn't a digital native (and occasionally trivial for people who are). That is to say that I often found myself doing tasks that my bosses couldn't do in a reasonable time span; they were tasks which they had ALWAYS delegated, which is another way of saying that they were tasks in which proficiency was not necessary at their level.<p>This leads into the second part, which is that performing these tasks did not help me advance in relevant experience at all. They were not related to higher-level duties, nor did they endear me to the people who could have introduced me to such duties. My seniors had no interest in our growth as workers; anyone who wanted to see that growth had to take it into their own hands, at which point "junior-level" jobs are only worth the paycheck.<p>I don't know if it's a senior problem generally, or something specific to this cohort of Boomer/Gen-X seniors. Gun-to-my-head, I would wager the latter. They give enough examples in other arenas of public life to lend credence to the notion that that they simply don't care what happens to their juniors, or to their companies after they leave, particularly if there is added hassle in caring. This is an accusation often lobbed at my own generation, to which I say, it's one of the few things our forebears actually did teach us.<p>Yet again, AI is just a cover for mismanagement.
I grew up in the 70s. The hand wringing then was calculators. No one was going to be able to do math anymore! And then wrist watches with calculators came out. Everyone is going to cheat on exams, oh no!<p>Everything turned out fine. Turns out you don't really need to be able to perform long division by hand. Sure, you should still understand the algorithm at some level, esp. if you work in STEM, but otherwise, not so much.<p>There <i>were</i> losses. I recall my AP physics professors was one of the old school types (retired from industry to teach). He could find the answer to essentially any problem to about 1-2 digits of precision in his head nearly instantly. Sometimes he'd have to reach for his slide rule for harder things or to get a few more digits. Ain't no one that can do that now (for reasonable values of "no one"). And, it is a loss, in that he could catch errors nearly instantly. Good skill to have. A better skill is to be able to set up a problem for finite element analysis, write kernels for operations, find an analytic solution using Mathematica (we don't need to do integrals by hand anymore for the mot part), unleash R to validate your statistics, and so on. The latter are <i>more</i> valuable than the former, and so we willingly pay the cost. Our ability to crank out integrals isn't what it was, but our ability to crank out better jet engines, efficient cars, computer vision models has exploded. Worth the trade off.<p>Recently watched an Alan Guth interview, and he made a throwaway comment, paraphrased: "I proved X in this book, well, Mathematica proved...". The point being that the proof was multiple pages per step, and while he <i>could</i> keep track of all the sub/superscripts and perform the Einstein sums on all the tensors correctly, why??? I'd rather he use his brain to think up new solutions to problems, not manipulate GR equations by hand.<p>I'm ignoring AGI/singularity type events, just opining about the current tooling.<p>Yah, the transition will be bumpy. But we will learn the skills we need for the new tools, and the old skills just won't matter as much. When they do, yah, it'll be a bit more painful, but so what, we gained so much efficiency we can afford the losses.
> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.<p>Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks. Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.
“automate it away” ironically still requires a human in the chain to determine what to automate, how, and to maintain that automation. Whether it be derived from an ai or a systemd script or an Antikythera mechanism. Now if you leave that to seniors you just ate a big chunk of their day playing shephard to a dozen plus “automated” pipelines while they still have stuff to do outside the weeds. Now you need more seniors and pretty soon they want triple what you could pay a junior and I don’t think they are 3x more prolific if the junior is managed efficiently quite frankly.
I hope juniors will figure out how to use AI to do larger tasks that are still annoying for seniors to do, while seniors take on larger tasks still. I think it's just seniors are learning this stuff faster at the moment and adapting it faster to current work, but as all that changes I would guess juniors reclaim some value back.<p>That said, you hit on something I've been feeling, the thing these models are best at by far is stuff that wasn't worth doing before.
Anyone reccomend an analysis, article or book or video, of this effect on the blue collar industry decades ago?
It's happening again <i>now</i> with robotics, self-driving vehicles and RL. Factory workers, truck drivers, construction work, order fulfillment, machinists, farm work, medical technicians and more are all very much at risk (same thing as OP: mostly junior roles getting automated). Some info at <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137</a>
We might need a lot of young adults for war in the near future, according to some.
This assumes there will still be a demand for software developers in 5 years. I believe we'll be out of jobs much sooner than that.
> I feel the effects of this are going to take a while to be felt (5 years?);<p>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.
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. ;)<p>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.
> Well now you get to read it.<p>Man, I wish this was true. I've given the same feedback on a colleague's clearly LLM-generated PRs. Initially I put effort into explaining why I was flagging the issues, now I just tag them with a sadface and my colleague replies "oh, cursor forgot." Clearly he isn't reading the PRs before they make it to me; so long as it's past lint and our test suite he just sends the PR.<p>I'd worry less if the LLMs weren't prone to modifying the preconditions of the test whenever they fail such that the tests get neutered, rather than correctly resolving the logic issues.
> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output<p>Which stands to reason you'll need less of them. I'm really hoping this somehow leads to an explosion of new companies being built and hiring workers , otherwise - not good for us.
This is what I'm doing, Opus 4.5 for personal projects and to learn the flow and what's needed. Only thing I'll disagree with is how the work takes similar amount of time because I'm finding it unbelievably faster. It's crazy how with smart planning and documentation that we can do with the agents, getting markdown files etc, they can write the code better and faster than I can as a senior dev. No question.<p>I've found Opus 4.5 as a big upgrade compared to any of the other models. Big step up and the minor issues that were annoying and I needed to watch out for with Sonnet and GPT5.1.<p>It's to the point where I'm on the side of, if the models are offline or I run out of tokens for the 5 hour window or the week (with what I'm paying now), there's kind of no use of doing work. I can use other models to do planning or some review, but then wait until I'm back with Opus 4.5 to do the code.<p>It still absolutely requires review from me and planning before writing the code, and this is why there can be some slop that goes by, but it's the same as if you have a junior and they put in weak PRs. Difference is much quicker planning which the models help with, better implementation with basic conventions compared to juniors, and much easier to tell a model to make changes compared to a human.
> This is what I'm doing, Opus 4.5 for personal projects and to learn the flow and what's needed. Only thing I'll disagree with is how the work takes similar amount of time because I'm finding it unbelievably faster.<p>I guess it depends on the project type, in some cases like you're saying way faster. I definitely recognize I've shaved weeks off a project, and I get really nuanced and Claude just updates and adjusts.
> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output<p>which means either devs will take over architectural roles (which already exist and are filled) or architects will take over dev roles. same goes for testing/QA - these are already positions within the industry in addition to being hats that we sometimes put on out of necessity or personal interest.
I've seen Product Manager / Technical Program Manager types leaning into using AI to research what's involved in a solution, or even fix small bugs themselves. Many of these people have significant software experience already.<p>This is <i>mostly</i> a good thing provided you have a clear separation between solution exploration and actually shipping software - as the extra work put into productionizing a solution may not be obvious or familiar to someone who can use AI to identify a bugfix candidate, but might not know how we go about doing pre-release verification.
Can you post a repo so we can see what it's generating?
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> 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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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?
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?<p>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.
Henry Ford for all his faults (and there were MANY) at least understood that you gotta have a customer base for your products, and that paying workers well helps everybody out.
> What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders.<p>You are not wrong, but the contract is/was metaphorical.
For a long time people were able to make a living for themselves by studying hard (usually STEM) and end up with a career which payed off. That was the invisible "contract". Hell I went to university for things which seem like academic navel gazing, but I still got a good tech job on the other side. That's not the reality for a lot of graduates nowdays who take more practical degrees at masters and phd levels.<p>Again even if the literal statement is clearly false, it is the sentiment which matters, and this sentiment does not just apply to graduates. I think many just feel like working hard does not work anymore, especially in the face of housing, cost of living, job competition and social media flaunting the wealth of others.<p>I get the idea from my younger siblings, "Why try if you are already a looser."
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.<p>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.
There's never been any such contract. You guys must not have studied the Great Depression at school.<p>Or more to the point, productivity has consistently outpaced pay for most of the US workforce since the mid-1970s. That's ~50 years that companies have been ripping you off. It's only now you notice, because rent/mortgage/school/medical have finally become so much larger than pay.<p>Well now you get to live through the Great Depression and study it up close.
Socialism is when the state (ie: the government) _owns_ industries.<p>A social contract is an implicit agreement that everyone more or less accepts without anything being necessarily legally binding.<p>For example, the courtesy of two weeks notice in the US is a social contract: there’s nothing legally requiring it, but there are _social_ consequences (ie: your reference might be less positive) if you don’t follow it.<p>Everything that’s kind of in an employee’s favor is not socialism. You don’t have to like the idea of “work hard, help the company do well, get rewarded,” but that isn’t socialism. It’s just a thing you don’t like.
It's not that I don't like it. It's more that I think you're being lied to. Inequality has been going up in the US for a very long time, which means a lot of people are not being rewarded as much as they should. But they still buy into the system that is impoverishing them.<p>The top 10% of income earners in the US account for 50% of consumer spending. LMK if you think that's part of the contract. <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/24/higher-income-americans-drive-bigger-share-of-consumer-spending" rel="nofollow">https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/24/higher-income-a...</a>
When billionaires own the media companies that influence public opinion and have legal avenues to essentially bribe elected officials, does the public have a meaningful avenue to vote anti-billionaire?
I suspect this junior hiring crisis thing is linked to the ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I was convinced he was simply overly nervous about his prospects, because I'd never met someone so well prepared.<p>Didn't get the job.<p>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.<p>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.<p>All things that I managed to learn while being paid.<p>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).
I've found that this phenomenon exacerbates inequality too:<p>If you attend a well-known college that bigco's hire from frequently, there's a lot of knowledge floating around about interview prep, hiring schedules, which companies pay the best, etc. Clubs host "interview prep workshops" where they'd teach the subject matter of interviews, host events(hackathons, case competitions, etc.) to help you bolster your resume for applying to these bigco's. So just by attending a better/fancier school, you'd have pretty decent odds of eventually getting a job at one of these prestigious places.<p>If you were to attend a less prestigious school, regardless of your aptitude or capability, the information asymmetry is so bad that you'll never learn of the prerequisites for even being considered for some of these roles. Not many upperclassmen will have interned at fancy employers, so they won't be there to help you drill dynamic programming/black-scholes/lbo models, and won't tell you that you need to have your applications prepped by a certain date, and won't tell you that you should be working on side projects/clubs, etc.<p>I suppose that the apprenticeship model biases towards people that already have connections, so perhaps inequality was already bad, whereas now we just have an information asymmetry that's more easily solvable.
> 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).<p>With the way higher-ed works in the US, and the way certain schools opportunity hoard to an insane degree, that is effectively already the case for whole industries and has been so for decades at this point. It's practically an open secret that getting <i>into</i> some schools is the golden ticket rather than the grades you earn while there. Many top schools are just networking and finishing schools for whole "elite" industries.
I feel like only the biggest companies can afford to put up all these roadblocks to employment.<p>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.
I think AI clouds the real issues around Junior hiring. Defective companies.<p>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!<p>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.<p>So, managers figure out fresh out of college == training employees for other people, so why bother? The company may not even break even!<p>That is the REAL catch 22. Not AI. It is how the value of people changes early in their career.
I actually got a major raise after 6m, and then another major raise 1y into my career, because my boss recognized my value.<p>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.
It's not obvious to me that AI is the reason for the hiring slowdown.<p>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.<p>Basically:<p>- the junior hiring slowdown started in 2022.<p>- but LLM's have only really been useful in a work context starting around 2024.<p>As for this point:<p>> 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<p>The same point stands. The junior hiring slowdown existed before the AI spend.
Ask HN:<p>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.<p>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:<p>> “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.”<p>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?<p>Is coding the new poetry?<p>What do I tell this guy?
This is truly heartbreaking, programming was the last profession beside medicine doctor that guaranteed young people good start in life in my country.<p>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.
There are two problems here.<p>1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior.<p>2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume.<p>The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
You're not wrong! I'm the original author of the post, and yes, I've seen this trend for years now, too, but I was using those two research studies that I cited as the basis of the article, so I started looking at it from that lens. I think the problems go deeper than AI, too, which is why I touched on corporate incentives. Ultimately, my goal was just for teams to think about how it could benefit them to invest in juniors and for college students to know that they need to prepare for a challenging ride if they're majoring in an AI-adopting field.
We may have some things in common. I'm not a mom, but I am a woman. And I don't want to assume the same is true for you, but breaking into this industry was difficult for me, so even without children, I'm really invested in the ability for juniors to succeed too. I wish I had responded more directly to your article rather than my general ennui. I really admire your willingness to write this. I hope it gets broad engagement, because I think these problems seem obvious to us but based on private conversations I've had with some industry peers in very senior director roles the drying of junior opportunities for growth is not readily obvious to them. I'm going to have to think more about the corporate incentives you mentioned, because reading that in the article, it feels deeper to me, and I think that's what I was trying to get at by sharing my past company details.<p>I think you succeeded overall at your goal! Thanks for replying. You encouraged me to go back and read your article more closely.
I appreciate the positive feedback. :) And yes, I was a career changer, so it was difficult for me to break into tech, too, so it feels a bit personal for that reason, as well.
I agree. I wonder if it's a mix of fully remote work being popular some time ago and the amount of tech one has to know now increasing (DBs, backend, frontend, cloud, observability, security, etc.). When hiring remotely, people naturally try to find candidates who are very communicative, have a high level of ownership, and can work with or without clear requirements and without oversight. That latter set of traits is often associated with senior developers rather than juniors.
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.
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.
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.
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.<p>That opportunity is now lost. In a few years we will lack senior engineers because right now we lack junior engineers.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Over the timeline in this post, ZIRP and the pandemic seem like equally important factors to LLMs in explaining hiring trends.
Instead the: Come up with you new job instead of doing old peoples job opportunity
> the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.<p>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.
We're still in the early days. It's gonna get a lot worse, if the LLM scaling laws are to be believed.<p><a href="https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/" rel="nofollow">https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...</a>
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).<p><i>> 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.</i><p>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.<p>For myself, I'm happily retired from the Rodent Rally, and find that LLMs have been a <i>huge</i> help, when learning new stuff.
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.<p>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.<p>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".
> young folk these days<p>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.<p>But if I guess right, hiring is not seen as the responsibility of your company. And that's the core of the problem.
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.
People skills are so important, I agree. Intergenerational people skills are <i>especially</i> 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.
> especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors<p>What world is this? This not match my experiences at all. Is this a common sentiment among your peers?
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.<p>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.<p>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...
> where we are taught to despise older folks<p>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.
<i>> The current young generation is very respectful towards older people.</i><p>This has not been my experience.<p>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 <i>awesome</i>.<p>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).<p>My fave, is when we have a really promising text-only relationship, then, the minute they see me, it goes south.
Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first?<p>Single-Payer health care would help our industry immensely if it came to pass.<p>Imagine having no fear any more.
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.
> "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"<p>They forgot to add in "Aging billionaires spend a trillion dollars on longevity research" which results in "110 year old Senior engineers still working"
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..
> My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1<p>80% of the candidate I interview pass (leetcode style coding interview, as mandated by the company). This is actually annoying because I'll probably have to raise the bar and start rejecting very good candidates.
I feel this pain.<p>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.<p>I find it profoundly depressing to try and teach someone who has no interest in the craft.
> 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.<p>I'm sorry but to me this part reads like a humorous phrase that's popular in some circles in my region which goes:<p>"Maybe <list of negative things, usually correct characterizations of the speaker>, but at least <something even worse>"<p>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.<p>How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?
> How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?<p>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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.jordan.matelsky.com/AI-doctors-bum-me-out/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.jordan.matelsky.com/AI-doctors-bum-me-out/</a>
The most frustrating thing about this whole junior position drought is how it simultaneously affects those who are passionate and <i>get it</i>, not only the opportunist bootcamp alumni who were lured by the prospect of high earnings.<p>If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.
/r/cscareerquestions the horror eg. applied to 2000 jobs got 1 offer
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.
Even <i>with</i> 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.<p>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.
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<p>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
> If I were to graduate today, I'd be royally screwed.<p>I feel that too. I am a self-taught dev. Got a degree, but not in CS. I don't know if I could get hired today.<p>Not sure how to fix it; feels like the entire industry is eating the seed corn.
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<p>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<p>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<p>they must escape the permanent underclass, nothing else matters
Nothing has changed. The problem is the same as it always was.<p>There is an unbounded amount of opportunity available for those who want to grab hold of it.<p>If you want to rely on school and get the approval of the corporate machine, you are subject to the whims of their circumstance.<p>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.<p>Put. In. The. Work.
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.<p>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.<p>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, <i>should</i> be good enough.
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.
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 <i>any</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> The social contract between large companies and employees has been broken for years now. US companies are optimized for quarterly earnings<p>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.
This isn't the first time that the industry has foot-gunned itself.<p>The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.<p>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.<p>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.
> The continued reliance on say, COBOL, and the complete lack of those developers comes to mind.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> The economics of providing every new grad a $150k TC offer<p>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...
My fear is that isn't low enough.
Not really.<p>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).
> 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.<p>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.
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).<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Bear in mind that the old system produced cultural touchstones and absolute cash cows eg Seinfeld, Friends, ER.<p>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.<p>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.
The companies that are abandoning junior roles are making a life-or-death bet that AI will eventually replace ALL work.<p>Because those senior people will NOT be around forever. And they have killed their talent development and knowledge transfer pipelines.<p>Either direction you take it, this feels like a lose-lose situation for everyone.
Maybe... that's fine?<p>We're not hiring a lot of rotary phone makers these days.<p>Who is hiring their own shoe-smith? It's been 30-ish years since my carpenter father last had work boots resoled.<p>It's almost as if... technology and economy evolve over time.<p>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.<p>What's so high tech about configuration of machines with lexical constructs as was the norm 60+ years ago? Seems a bit old fashioned.<p>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.
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.
This topic requires analysis to a greater depth than most comments I've seen so far.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>If you are thinking that certain CS-degree-granting universities could be classified as scams, you might be right.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Want to stand out in a world where all the job applications are AI slop? Network. The original kind.<p>Furthermore, this is why the humanities matter: because human relationships matter.
genuinely asking, how do you network to get a job? esp. if you’re a new grad<p>where do you network? what do you network with these other humans on?<p>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
Full disclosure, I'm the original author of the post.<p>Unfortunately, if you network to get a job, you're already months behind.<p>As I talk to college kids, I try to get them to find opportunities to network while they're in school, before they're desperate to get that first internship or job. They want to come at their search from a place of confidence, not anxiety.<p>There are so many meetups at universities (at least at the one near me) that they can mingle with the working world, and they stand out because they're there when it's mostly professionals.<p>Student or not, networking works best in-person when possible (conferences, meetups, professional events) where you get to know people and get truly curious about them. But after that, it involves following up and keeping the relationships warm, showing that you are interested in people professionally and can possibly help them with their problems, and that's no trivial investment.<p>If you do that enough, then you will build trust and rapport to create some opportunities, but it's admittedly a long game. It also has to be genuine or else people end up feeling used.<p>I think that there is a blocker that a lot of people have against networking in general because it feels gross and insincere. We've all seen people do it poorly, and so we avoid it, but it can be really fulfilling if done well.
People are free to network right here on HN, and they do. I placed a friend I found here with another friend, so it does work.<p>However, it takes time.<p>If you need a job right now, it won't happen via ordinary networking, by which I mean networking with people whose job isn't recruitment.<p>If you think of networking as a pleasant way to keep some interesting ideas flowing and making some friends, circulation will get you things that you never even thought of.<p>(The best professional recruiters actually stir the pot for years and years before getting a return. Constantly keeping up with what various people are doing, just in case the time is right for someone to move on.)<p>I'm actually a bit surprised, because as a young guy I didn't do any networking beyond connecting with colleagues, which certainly helped. But I'm finding lots of young guys will reach out to me for advice. It's a good habit, but one I suspect more than half the population doesn't practice.
For anyone still in school, networking is easy for students <i>who take initiative</i>. 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.
Stop applying for jobs and get involved in Greek life, sports, arts and working part time in the cafe serving food? You will meet so many people who are involved in your field and you get labelled as something other than a programmer.<p>This is terrible advice. Apply, cold call, create projects, job fairs, get co-op opportunties and ambush are better ways. Hackathons, github projects or small businesses can help. 9/10 CEOs will ignore your cold outreach but some won't.<p>Getting too busy making friends at the Greek houses will land you a marketing role if you are lucky. People need to associate you wish your craft. If they know you as a social guy you will get social roles. Any developer too social is suspect for many and ends up at best a pm.<p>When I was coming up people went into hardware/certifications to bridge the gap but moving from hardware to software was a gap too big for many as they became typecast.
IMO, the first thing to recognize with networking is that there are at least 3 tiers of people you know, with regards to their ability to help in your job hunt. Tier 1 are the people who know your technical ability, and can directly vouch for you being a good contributor in your role. These people are great to have, but new grads simply don't have them, for the most part. Most of the people able to directly vouch for their competency are their equally looking-for-work peers, or pretty distant from industry professors. Tier 2 are the people who know <i>you</i> well enough to assert that you're not an absolute pain to be around. They don't necessarily know whether you're a genius double-stack 12x developer or a codemonkey, but they know you're reasonably likeable. Then there's Tier 3, who don't know anything about you personally, but they know people who know you.<p>New grads (myself included, back then), tend to discount Tier 2, because in their head the hiring process is looking for the single applicant with the best technical skills. When in reality, it's a lot more of a "who can we get quickly, who won't have a negative impact on team output or morale". Parents, Parent's friends, friends, and friend's parents all can fall into Tier 2, and absolutely should asked about whether their workplaces are hiring, and if so, if they could provide a recommendation.<p>Tier 3 is mostly useful for finding out about positions that don't necessarily get publicized, but depending on mutual connection to the shared acquaintance, might be willing to offer a recommendation.<p>With regards to where to network, that comes down to engaging with social gatherings that bring together a spread of people <i>that aren't exclusively your direct peers</i>. That's the stumbling block a lot of new grads find themselves in, which is that all their social time is spent with other new grads (or worse still, nobody at all). Clubs, parties thrown by friends' parents, university alumni events, hell, join the Oddfellows (YMMV, some lodges stopped recruiting after Vietnam). Conferences, <i>whether technical or not</i>. Hell, a step I recommend for everyone is going to bars and talking to strangers. Not highest density networking opportunity (except some gay bars in SF), but it's a pretty good environment to practice casual communication with people you have approximately nothing in common with, with very low stakes.
- 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?)<p>- go to events/conventions/join clubs related to programming (need to be located near a large city for this)<p>- talk to other students/self-learners and wait for them to get to the next step<p>I’ve been unemployed a long time and have been thinking of improving at networking. These are what I came up with.
your professors. your classmates who got a job. your family and friends of family. anyone else you know that respects you.
If you're a junior, develop connections with a few seniors.<p>If you're a senior, maintain relations with last year's graduating class (and with your placement services people).<p>If you get an internship, keep in touch with people there.
The other responders have it: forego the "networking" apps like LinkeIn. (It's really just a graph analysis tool for salespeople.). Do thinks with actual face-to-face connection. That's what will make you stand out.<p>If you are a new grad: go to alumni events. Go to alumni events! GO TO ALUMNI EVENTS.<p>If you are still in school: talk to your alumni and career office; they will be able to connect you better.<p>If you are in High School: consider a university with a co-op program.<p>The value of fact-to-face connection should not be underestimated.<p>Again: this may be uncomfortable for some people, but it is the way of the world.
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.<p>Good luck with causation/correlation vs the rise of LLM.
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<p>new grads will be fed to the meat grinder with no regards, its a closed shop unless you know someone
This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a networking service, something which is not really made clear until near the end.<p>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.<p>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].<p>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.<p>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.<p>[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.
Hey there, I'm the developer of the app along with my wife, the author of the post. We quit our jobs over a year ago to work on a problem we care about and helping people connect to their goals through people is what we landed on. That being said, we spend most of our time on the tech! And I think your advice is spot on, that a portfolio of projects really is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. It's where I would tell people to start. But from there, connecting people to others who care about that portfolio, is also important. I think a lot of technical people pay attention to the former, and tend to ignore the latter. Which is me too! So rather than "this is the only true way" I hope it comes across like a potential piece of the puzzle to some people.<p>Thanks for giving it some thought and for your perspectives, they really help.
The problem is that praying that someone stumbles upon your brilliant hobby projects and offers you a job is a <i>terrible</i> bet. Yes, you have to be good a software development, but being good at software development doesn't land you job. Being good at software development, <i>and cutting through the noise</i> gets you a job. Because even if all those laid off people are incompetent, they're still applying for the same jobs you are, and it is very difficult to identify who's who.<p>So, from a individual's perspective, figuring out how to meet people who will help you sidestep the "unwashed masses" pile of applications is probably the next most important thing after technical competence (and yeah, ranking above technical excellence).
> and it is very difficult to identify who's who.<p>That's exactly what the portfolio is for. Having an actual body of work people can look at and within a couple of minutes of looking think "wow, this person will definitely be able to contribute something valuable to our project" will immediately set you apart from every applicant who has vague, unreliable credentials that are only extremely loosely correlated with competence, like university trivia. You do need to get as far as a human looking at your portfolio, which isn't a guarantee on any given application, but once you get that far your odds will skyrocket next to University Graduate #130128154 who may have happened to get human eyes on their application but has nothing else to set them apart.
> This article is an advertisement for what appears to be a networking service, something which is not really made clear until near the end.<p>I have been seeing an uptick of articles on HN where someone identifies a problem, then amps it up a bit more and then tells you that they are the right ones to solve it for a fee.<p>These things should not be taken seriously and upvoted.
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