The Junior Hiring Crisis
(people-work.io)271 points by mooreds 17 hours ago
271 points by mooreds 17 hours ago
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.
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.
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?"
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.
This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested."
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.
It is especially frustrating that the second group doesn't become much more than a proxy for an LLM.
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 very tempting... especially if that's what they did in college.
I must ask once again why we are having these 5+ round interview cycles and we aren't able to filter for qualities that the work requires of its talent. What are all those rounds for if we're getting engineers who aren't as valued for the team's needs at the end of the pipeline?
> 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.
This is not limited to junior devs. I had the displeasure of working with a guy who was hired as a senior dev who heavily delegated any work they did. He failed to even do the faintest review of what the coding agent and of course did zero testing. At one time these stunts resulted in a major incident where one of these glorious PRs pushed code that completely inverted a key business rule and resulted in paying customers being denied access to a paid product.
Sometimes people are slackers with little to no ownership or pride in their craftsmanship, and just stumbled upon a career path they are not very good at. They start at juniors but they can idle long enough to waddle their way to senior positions. This is not a LLM problem, or caused by it.
> there are some juniors who use AI to assist... and some who use it to delegate all of their work to.
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.
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?
> This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested."
And then in the next PR, you have to request the exact same changes
> This is especially annoying when you get back a response in a PR "Yes, you're right. I have pushed the fixes you suggested."
I've learnt that saying this exact phrase does wonders when it comes to advancing your career. I used to argue against stupid ideas but not only did I achieve nothing, but I was also labelled uncooperative and technically incompetent. Then I became a "yes-man" and all problems went away.
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.
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 aspired 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.
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.
> 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.
It's worth considering how aggressively 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.
However I have noticed a shift: while half the juniors I work with are just churning out AI slop, the other half are really interested in the craft of software engineering and understanding computer science better.
We'll need 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.
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.
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?
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 think highly motivated juniors who actually want to learn are still valuable.
But it's hard to know if a candidate is one of those when hiring, which also means that if you are one of those juniors it is hard for you to prove it to a prospective employer.
>Now I just assume they're taking my feedback and feeding it right back to the LLM.
seems like something a work policy can fix quickly. If not something filtered in the interview pipeline. I wouldn't just let juniors go around and try to copy-pasting non-compilable Stackoverflow code, why would I do it here?
> 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.
I keep hearing this and find it utterly perplexing.
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.
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.
> embarrassed to check in a pile of slop
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.
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.
My hottest take on this is that it might be healthy for the business. During the recent boom everyone and their grandmother's dog got a job as software engineers, and some aren't really fit for it.
AI provides a bar. You need to be at least better than AI at coding to become a professional. It'll take genuine interest in the technology to surpass AI and clear that bar. The next generation of software professionals will be smaller, but unencumbered by incompetents. Their smaller number will be compensated by AI that can take care of the mundane tasks, and with any luck it's capabilities will only increase.
Surely I'm not the only one who's had colleagues with 10+years experience who can't manage to check out a new branch in git? We've been hiring people we shouldn't have hired.
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.
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?
> culture of job-hopping
> Why would a company invest money in growing the technical skill set of an employee
I'm unsure about how long your career has been.
At Taos, there was a monthly training session / tech talk on some subject.
At Network Appliance ('98-'09), there was a moderate push to go to trainings and they paid for the devs on the team I was on to go to the perl conference (when it was just down the road one year everyone - even the tech writers - went).
At a retail company that I worked at ('10-'14), they'd occasionally bring in trainers on some thing that... about half a dozen of the more senior developers (who would then be able to spread the knowledge out ... part of that was a formal "do a presentation on the material from the past two weeks for the rest of your team.")
However, as time went on and as juniors would leave sooner the appetite for a company to spend money on training sessions has dissipated. It could be "Here is $1000 training budget if you ask your manager" becoming $500 now. It could be that there aren't any more conferences that the company is willing to spend $20k to send a team to.
If half of the junior devs are going to jump to the next tier of company and the other half aren't going to become much better... why do that training opportunity at all?
Training absolutely used to be a thing that was much more common... but so too were tenures of half a decade or longer.
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.
This! Each time I join a new job, about 1-3 months in the door, there is a sit-down with the new line manager to check-in and give some feedback. I always talk about future compensation expectations at the time. I tell them: The market pays approximately 4-5% increase in total comp per year. That means, up 20% every 4 years. That is my expectation. If they current company is not paying that rate, I will look elsewhere for work. In almost all cases, they nod their heads in agreement. Ironically, when I come to them 3-5 years later with a new job offer in hand with a nice pay raise, 100% of them do not support matching the compensation, and view me as an un-loyal "job hopper". You just can't win with middle managers.
This is why I never do internal job transfers. The total comp doesn't change. If I do an external job change, I will get a pay rise. I say it to my peers in private: "Loyalty is for suckers; you get paid less."
Yeah, companies broke the career structure decades ago. There's no seniority rewards nor pensions to look forward to, and meanwhile companies put more budget in hiring than in promoting. They look at the high turnover rates and executives shrug. Money is being made, no changes.
It's no surprise the market adapts to the new terms and conditions. But companies simply don't care enough to focus on retention.
This has been a thing for a long time and I've thought about it quite a bit, but I still have no solutions.
I'm pretty sure it just comes down to bean-counting: "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $100k" vs "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $120k" is effectively the same thing, and there's a clear "spend money, acquire person" transaction going on. Meanwhile, "we spent $20k on an asset we already have" is.. a hard sell. What are you buying with that $20k exactly? 20% more hours? 20% more output? No? Then why are we spending the money?
It's certainly possible to dance around it talking about reducing risk ("there's a risk this person leaves, which will cause...") but it's bogged down in hypotheticals and kinda a hard sell. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.
> 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.
I've started viewing developers that have never maintained an existing piece of software for over 3 years with skepticism. Obviously, with allowances for people who have very good reasons to be in that situation (just entered the market, bad luck with employers, etc).
There's a subculture of adulation for developers that "get things done fast" which, more often than not, has meant that they wrote stuff that wasn't well thought out, threw it over the wall, and moved on to their next gig. They always had a knack of moving on before management could connect the dots that all the operational problems were related to the person who originally wrote it and not the very-competent people fixing the thing. Your average manager doesn't seem to have the capability to really understand tech debt and how it impacts ability to deliver over time; and in many cases they'll talk about the "rock star" developer that got away with a glimmer in their eye.
Saw a post of someone on Hacker News the other day talking about how they were creating things faster than n-person teams, and then letting the "normies" (their words not mine) maintain it while moving on to the next thing. Thats exactly the kind of person I'd like to weed out.
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.
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?"
Answer: you offer a good deal and work with people honestly, because if you don't, you'll never get a customer.
They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire the people who've got experience.
Everyone's kicking the can down the road and we're very soon going to hit points of "no one has experience (or are already working)". Someone needs to do the training. It doesn't seem like school and bootcamps is enough for what companies need these days.
The game theory here says that such a company will be outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend money+time on retention and training but instead invests that money in poaching.
What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using that saved money to poach your best employees.
You have cause and effect reversed. Companies stopped training workers and giving them significant raises for experience, so we started job hopping.
Some genius MBA determined that people feel more rewarded by recognition and autonomy than pay, which is actually true. But it means that all the recognition and autonomy in the world won't make you stay if you can make 50% more somewhere else.
When I worked at a very small company we were extremely concerned about this, and so we paid people well enough that they didn't want to leave. All I can figure is that the bean counters just don't understand that churn has a cost.
some places like Amazon operate around the churn. Keep everyone anxious and they won't try to collectively bargain nor ask for raises. They won't be around long enough anyways.
Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing.
Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity.
A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.
Good to minimize bus factor, bad when you want to innovate and expand your business. So I guess it's ideal for this slowing economy focused on "maintenance".
40, that's around the time pensions were starting to be removed.
They have this exact problem with scientific glassblowing, and it's been decades in the making. Manufacturing improvements now mean that you can buy almost everything from a factory, and only need experienced glassblowers for fancy, one-off stuff.
But that means there's no need for entry-level glassblowers, and everyone in the field with any significant experience is super old. The pipeline has been dead for a while now.
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
I think the current grads are going to be shafted either way. In 5 years, there might be more opening for "fresh" young grads and the companies will prefer them over the young people who're just graduating.
> mid-level -> senior-level transitions will leave a hole behind that can't be filled internally.
Tech companies are betting that in 5 years, AI should be good enough to replace mid-levels.
Rinse and repeat with seniors 5 years after that.
Hard to say if that bet will pay off, or what the endgame would be; just the CEO commanding an company of AIs?
> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.
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.
> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad
Plenty of skilled work requires a master’s or PhD. CS, for those who want a safe, secure job, looks like it’s going that way.
“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.
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.
Some juniors do figure it out, but my experience has been that the bar for such juniors is a lot higher than pre-AI junior positions, so there is less opportunity for junior engineers overall.
I've been making use of copilot in VSCode to make changes in a codebase that's new to me, in a language that I can read if not necessarily write unaided - it's a dialect of SQL, so I can certainly understand what's happening, but generating new queries is very time-consuming (half of which is just stupid formatting stuff). Copilot seems to understand the style of the code in my project and so I don't have to do much work to make it conform, compared to my hand-written versions.
I've also written a lot of python 2 in my career, and writing python 3 still isn't quite native-level for me - and the AI tools let me make up for my lack of knowledge of modern Python.
It's happening again now 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 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25137
Writing unit tests, manual validation work, manual testing. Automating Deployments of infrastructure, DNS work, tracking down annoying one off bugs, fixing and validating dependency issues.
Basically this type of maintenance work for any sufficiently complex codebase. (Over 20k LOC)
When I was an QA intern / Software Dev Intern. I did all of that junk.
For me the most annoying would be a technically correct solution that completely ignores the “higher-level style” of the surrounding code, at the same time defending the chosen solution by referencing some “best practices” that are not really applicable there for some higher-level reasons, or by insignificant performance concerns. Incidentally, LLMs often produce similar problems, only one doesn’t need to politely argue with them.
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!
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.
There were 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 more 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.
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 could 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.
I'm ignoring AGI/singularity type events, just opining about the current tooling.
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.
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."
So, there are two parts to this:
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.
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.
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.
Yet again, AI is just a cover for mismanagement.
We might need a lot of young adults for war in the near future, according to some.
Larger scale war happens when the lives of young people are more valuable as fodder for the war machine than in a field or behind a desk.
I entered the job market in late 2000. There was no reason to hire a junior engineer when every hiring manager and senior engineer knew 10 friends who recently lost their jobs. I found work on less desirable projects and yes it affected my career trajectory and it sucked. Starting out has always sucked for most people.
My 2 cents: they're too expensive.
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.
Since even that $110 costs $140, it's tough to understand how companies aren't taking a bath on $700/day.
Good new-grads in expensive areas are going to cost $100-$130k. This is a bargain considering a few years back they could get $200-$350k.
Bear in mind these types can explain things like why word-alignment matters and train themselves into being net productive within a few weeks.
If you're hiring in SF or NY, then the problem explains itself. Even a single young new grad needs that much to so live.
you can't have rent at 3.5k a month and not expect 6 figures when requiring in-office work. old wisdom of "30% of salary goes to rent" suggest that that kind of housing should only be rented if you're making 140k. Anyone complaining about junior costs in these areas needs to join in bringing housing prices down.
Yep, the value isn't there. I'm on a very lopsided team, about 5 juniors to 1 senior. Almost all of the senior time is being consumed in "mentorship", mostly slogging through AI slop laden code reviews. There have been improvements, but it's taking a long time.
Have you considered regulting AI use, or is it just easier to be mad at the workers and do nothing?
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?);
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. ;)
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.
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.
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
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.
> Which stands to reason you'll need less of them.
Depends on how much demand there would be for somewhat-cheaper software. Human hours taken could well remain the same.
Also depends on whether this approach leads to a whole lot of badly-fucked projects that companies can’t do without and have to hire human teams to fix…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you post a repo so we can see what it's generating?
> I feel like most devs will become moreso architects and testers of the output
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.
This is mostly 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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?
Those of us familiar with the Dilbert comic strip of the '90s-'00s are having a good chuckle at the idea that there was ever a social contract. What you think of as a social contract was a fiction enabled only by the explosive growth of the software industry during the Internet and mobile web of the last twenty years. It's easy to be generous to employees when the profits just keep growing on their own. It's easy to overlook mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) when as many warm bodies are possible are needed to fulfill business objectives.
That's all over now; the growth spurt of a young software industry has given way to maturity. We'll be navigating an employment environment much like what the norm is in other technical professions with tougher standards and fiercer competition for good jobs.
>It's easy to overlook mediocrity (and sub-mediocrity) when as many warm bodies are possible are needed to fulfill business objectives.
dismissing technical talent as "warm bodies" is exactly how the old guard of IBM/AT&T/Oracle fell to the new scrappy talent. I'm sure history will repeat itself again in due time.
> We'll be navigating an employment environment much like what the norm is in other technical professions with tougher standards and fiercer competition for good jobs.
if every other sector except healthcare wasn't experiencing the same thing, you may have a point. This clearly isn't a problem limited to tech, though.
The last social contract between companies and employees was during the New Deal era. It's been downhill ever since.
I think a lot of this has to do with the explosion of CEO (and by extension CxO) pay over the past 30 years.
Today, a CEO can turn in a few quarters of really solid earnings growth, they can earn enough to retire to a life a private jets. Back when CxO pay was lower, the only way to make that kind of bank was to claw your way into the top job and stay there for a decade or more.
The current situation strongly incentivizes short-term thinking.
With today's very high, option-heavy compensation a CEO making long-term investments in the company rather than cutting staff and doing stock buybacks is taking money out of his own pocket.
It's a perverse incentive.
I wish I could find the article about it that I read a few years back. But CEOS needs skin in the game again. the incentives are all broken. running a good business doesn't matter anymore (at least in the US).
While I definitely agree CEO pay is quite egregious, in theory, to mitigate short-sighted quarterly earnings hyperoptimization, couldn't a board simply tie equity incentives to performance targets and timeframes though?
Lip Bu Tan, for instance, has performance targets on a five year timeline, which are all negated if the stock falls below a certain threshhold in 3 years. [1]
Or, ever controversial Elon Musk, certainly has an (also egregious) $1 Trillion dollar pay package, but it has some pretty extreme goals over 10 years, such as shipping 1 million Optimus robots [2].
All in all, we can debate about the Goodharting of these metrics (as Musk is keen to do), but I feel boards of these public companies are trying to make more long-term plans, or at least moving away from tying goals to pure quarterly metrics. Perhaps we can argue about the execution of them.
Note: I own neither of these stocks and my only vested interest is buying the S&P.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/14/new-intel-ceo-lip-bu-tan-to-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo
IMO it's not risk so much as foregone conclusion. You can see the hopelessness in GenZ and (to a lesser extent) millennials.
But we only care about short term metrics now, so no one cares. They don't even care to develop the tools to understand it. It might as well not exist. Blame the young people and move on.
> This is not the only company that I know of acting in this way
At this point in the tech industry, it'd be easier to name companies not doing this. Maybe Apple? I think they got aroudn it by not renewing contractors. But I might have missed something.
>To me the societal risk is that an entire generation of employees becomes extremely jaded and unmotivated, and fairly so.
I sure am jaded. But more motivated than now in my goals. They used to be to be this knowledgeable IC who can dig deep into a domain, but it's definitely been shifting to being able to sustain myself off my talents. I'll grab short term contracts and let my own products be the steady income.
(yeah, a lot easier said than done. But I have time to prepare for that).
>Who can really blame people for putting in minimal effort when they have so much evidence that it will not be rewarded?
Worse than that. Why put in effort when your reward for providing all that value is still getting the axe?
My industry is finally starting to see real moves at unionizing, but I hope tech as a whole is starting to wake up to this fact?
It's more like "this product is underperforming, let go of the team". Regardless of the reasons the product is underperforming. Could be that it was still in development and money dried, could be that they want to pull out of a region and need a product as an excuse.
You can't outwork corporate greed, unless you're working for peanuts in a 3rd world country. Then you're truly irreplacable (and still broke).
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?
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.
> What social contract? Companies have always been for shareholders.
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.
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.
I get the idea from my younger siblings, "Why try if you are already a looser."
> 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
Recessions like the GFC, the Dot Bomb, the early 90s, the Asian Financial Crisis, the early 80s, Stagflation, and others show otherwise.
The extended bull run that SWEs had from the early 2010s to 2022 was an outlier, and the whiplash being felt today is comparable to what law and finance grads faced in the 2010s, accounting majors in the 2000s, and Aerospace/MechE majors in the 1990s.
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.
Henry Ford wanted to raise salaries of his employees but the Dodge brothers (who owned only 10% of the company) successfully sued and "As of 2025, in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled, shareholder primacy is still upheld."
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.
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.
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.
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.
A social contract is an implicit agreement that everyone more or less accepts without anything being necessarily legally binding.
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.
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.
There has never been an understanding that rising profits = no layoffs. Zero idea where that came from. Companies will reduce workforce when they dont think those workers are providing value, that has always been the case.
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.
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. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/02/24/higher-income-a...
>Companies have always been for shareholders.
well we can trace that back to the 1920's, for one example.
>Do you people have some kind of contract with Tesla that I don't know about?
Are you aware of what a "social contract" is? There's nothing wrong with seeking to fill in gaps of knowledge.
>This entire discussion sounds crazy to me. If you want socialism, vote for socialism.
I'd be down for it, but this is almost orthogonal to the main point of the discussion. Social contracts exist in all forms of governing. Even rampant capitism has the bare bones social contract of "don't make your customers TOO angry so you can maximize extraction".
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.
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.
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.
I was convinced he was simply overly nervous about his prospects, because I'd never met someone so well prepared.
Didn't get the job.
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.
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.
All things that I managed to learn while being paid.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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 into 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.
Currently, it is not just juniors. It is people of all seniorities, who have to jump through ridiculous hoops, to be believed, that they are any good.
Built most of the software of a company where I worked for 7y from humble beginnings to >80 people. Still gotta line up for a 4h on-site assessment! Built tons of free time projects, some more complex than anything one would usually build on the job. Still gotta have live coding interviews and no one can be arsed to even check my publicly available repos...
>You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where people have to already know the job before they get their first job
That'd be fine... meanwhile, the new loop we come into:
- okay, so what does your company need and do
Company: "that's under NDA/trade secrets, we can't tell you"
- okay. we can't see what you want to you'll have to train them
Company: "we don't want to train people, they just need to hit the ground running"
- okay. we'll just let colleges train the fundamentals and have others figure it out
Company: "no one's training anyone anymore. Where did the juniors go?"
Even doctors have apprenticeship programs. An industry where no one wants to train the next generation is a doomed one. If the US doesn't do it, some other country will gladly take it up.
I feel like only the biggest companies can afford to put up all these roadblocks to employment.
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.
Sadly, tarriffs are making those companies scared at best and defunct at worst, so they also aren't hiring.
I'm pretty sure that if I was interviewing for my current job at my current company now, I wouldn't get it.
This is the replacement for credentialism, love it or hate it.
You don't need a fancy school to get into a top firm anymore. You have to master the hell out of the interview.
no point mastering an interview you're never even invited to because you lack connections or can't get past the ATS.
>ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days
I'm sure that's true in some areas, but our last hire I was shocked at the ridiculous lengths the applications would go to to avoid putting in even a minimum effort to apply for the job. Like the Van Halen brown M&M test, we put a line in the middle of the job advert saying "If you've read this, put your favorite color in at the top of your job application message. We had low double digits % of people who would do that.
Honestly, on our next hiring round, I think I'm going to make people fill out a google form to apply, and have any of our job posts say "Apply at <URL>" and completely ignoring any apps we get through Indeed or the like. We had a team of 3 people reviewing applications for an hour or two a day for a month and most of the responses were just human slop.
As a new college grad I might be able to add some insight.
We're stuck in a stalemate where the sheer volume of applications for employers to handle and applicants to send makes them take shortcuts, leaving both sides wonder why people aren't trying.
If somebody has to send in 300-500 applications (which is not unheard of) and answer the same questions till they go blind, it's not surprising that certain things are missing or people don't care. Applicants don't have any reason to believe their info isn't thrown in the trash by an LLM as soon as it is sent.
Lazy people will always be a problem but until there is transparency or trust developed I doubt we will see meaningful change.
>Applicants don't have any reason to believe their info isn't thrown in the trash by an LLM as soon as it is sent.
That's leading to an escalation where because applicants believe their apps are just getting fed to the LLMs, employers have to use an LLM. ;-/
Look at the power dynamics then. Who has more power in this situation: people with rent and mortgages? Or companies with more money than God? Companies could simply stop using LLMs and tomorrow and be fine. They brag about laying off thousands while turning record profits; they can turn off the slop machines.
Let's not blame the people with no power in this situation.
> Like the Van Halen brown M&M test, we put a line in the middle of the job advert saying "If you've read this, put your favorite color in at the top of your job application message.
TBH I can't blame them. you're applying to hundreds of applications repetitively with qualifications that barely matter because you're encouraged to apply anyway. You can only spend so many hours reading HR-drivel (that at this point may or may not be ai-generated) before you focus on just finding "job title, salary , location), and then slamming apply. It's just not worth editing my resume to add some weird qualifier if I don't even think I'm going to get a reply. It's another hoop.
It's the complete inverse of hosting Van Helen at your show. It'd be more like trying to make a cashier recite their company motto. They are not that dedicated to any one role. They can't afford to be.
---
I don't know if it's feasible for your situation, but smaller teams tend to have candidates email their resume. It can still be LLM'd, but I will tend to pay more attention if I feel like I have a direct communication channel. Not yet another greenhouse application form. It leaves room to be more free form with my pitch as well.
It's not obvious to me that AI is the reason for the hiring slowdown.
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.
Basically:
- the junior hiring slowdown started in 2022.
- but LLM's have only really been useful in a work context starting around 2024.
As for this point:
> 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
The same point stands. The junior hiring slowdown existed before the AI spend.
No one wants to say we're in a recession yet, so we gotta deal with beating around the bush for another few years.
But yeah, it's bad in general. seniors are struggling too. This was cooking for even longer, but more mess got added to the stack.
Tend to agree here. The slowdown here has more to do with the financial ecosystem. IE less capital available for some companies, higher salaries and a changed approach to work.
The AI wave didn't start yet. Will hit in 26/27
I think AI clouds the real issues around Junior hiring. Defective companies.
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!
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.
So, managers figure out fresh out of college == training employees for other people, so why bother? The company may not even break even!
That is the REAL catch 22. Not AI. It is how the value of people changes early in their career.
I think this is the crux of it. When i got my first job I probably made half the salary of the senior engineer in our division. I am 100% sure I was not half as productive. Juniors take a lot of training and time and aren't very productive, but their salaries are actually not reflective of that. The first few months at your first job you're probably a net loss in productivity.
If salaries reflected productivity, you'd probably start out at near minimum wage and rapidly get raises of 100% every half year.
On top of that, if the junior is successful he'll probably leave soon after he's up-and-running b/c the culture encourages changing jobs every 1-2 years. So then you need to lock people down with vesting stock or something..
It seems not easy at all. Even if you give aggressive raises, at the next interview they can fake/inflate their experience and jump in to a higher salary bracket
Hiring and training junior developers seems incredibly difficult and like a total waste of energy. The only time I've seen it work is when you get a timid autistic-savant-type who is too intimidated with interviewing and changing jobs. These people end up pumping out tons of code for small salaries and stay of for years and years. This is hitting the jackpot for a company
> Juniors take a lot of training and time and aren't very productive, but their salaries are actually not reflective of that
In the current economic situation you can offer a junior 2x may be even 3x less and still get candidates to choose from.
Also there juniors who are ready to compensate for lack of experience by working longer hours (though that's not something you would learn during hiring).
> The first few months at your first job you're probably a net loss in productivity.
It's true for a senior too, each company is different and it takes time to learn company's specific stuff.
>Even if you give aggressive raises, at the next interview they can fake/inflate their experience and jump in to a higher salary bracket
I don't think the kinds of people who see a 50% raise and complain that it's not 100% are the kinds of candidates you want to hire anyway. I'd like to see more of that before deciding we tried nothing and ran out of ideas.
I didn't leave my first job because I was non-autistic. I left because I was paid 50k and the next job literally tripled my total comp. Oh, and because I was laid off. but tbf I was already out the door mentally around that time after 2 years of nothing but chastising and looking at the next opportunity.
I would have (outside of said chastising) gladly stayed if I got boosted to 75k. I was still living within my means on 50k.
>Hiring and training junior developers seems incredibly difficult and like a total waste of energy
If that's the attitude at large, we're all falling into a tragedy of the commons.
I actually got a major raise after 6m, and then another major raise 1y into my career, because my boss recognized my value.
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.
>not very hard to attain if you're in the top quartile.
No biggie, just be the best in the interview stage and continue to be the best for years after that. It's that simple.
Dumping our apprenticeship programs onto academia is exacly how we got into this mess to begin with. It has historically not been the job of a college to produce junior talent. They teach a best for T shaped individual and setup for more of their pipeline in research should students want to delve deeper
If industry doesn't want to pay for training, they better pay bootcamps to overhaul themselves and teach what they actually need. I don't think universities will bend much more since they have their own bubble on their hands.
One of the critical flaws in the article is that the first chart only looks back 5 years, and the second only looks back 10.
The boom-bust recession cycle is roughly every 10 years. You can't say that AI is impacting hiring when your data just looks like the typical 10 year cycle. Your data needs to go back further.
That being said, what's more likely going on:
1: There are always periods where it's hard for recent college grads to get jobs. I graduated into one. Ignoring AI, how different is it now from 10, 20, and 30 years ago?
2: There are a lot of recent college grads who, to be quite frank, don't work out and end up leaving the field. (Many comments in this thread point out how many junior developers just shouldn't be hired.) Perhaps we're just seeing many companies realize it's easier to be stricter about who they hire?
>Ignoring AI, how different is it now from 10, 20, and 30 years ago?
Ignoring AI, there is simply more competition and less human interface in the process to begin with. 10 years ago, you'd throw maybe dozens of apps and study interview trivia (this was right before the "leetcdoe era" so not even that). 20 years ago you'd probably just wander around a career fair and stumble into your career. 30 years ago you were as close to shaking your managers' hand for a job as you'd ever be in the modern tech industry.
10 years ago, a reference from nearly anyone in the pipeline to the hiring manager guaranteed at least a look see at you. Now it's a 50/50 at best. "who you know" may not be enough anymore.And now career fairs are 90% advertising firms instead of actual talent aquisition.
>Perhaps we're just seeing many companies realize it's easier to be stricter about who they hire?
if you look at the hiring numbers, you see that hiring globally is in fact not slowing down. That's a bit of a tangent, but that may give a clue to the whole situation here.
Today you may not even get a human to see your resume after 100 job apps. It's not just brutal but a solitary experince. No feedback to improve upon, no advice to take.
It's like the whole idea of a company has inverted. Instead of "We'll assemble a team, then use that capability to make things, and solve problems" the idea is "the machine basically runs itself, how much can we get away with minimizing upkeep?"
Default "people have value because human attention solves problems", has become default "existing org structure has value because existing revenue streams are stable."
The idea of a company used to contain an implied optimism. "If we get capable people together, we can accomplish great things!" Now that optimism has been offloaded to the individual, to prove their worth before they can take part.
The problem is "Seniors" started becoming worse a decade ago. Not only wouldn't they mentor, but they wouldn't lead by example. Problem-solving on their own, collaborating with peers, sharing information/communication, doing proper due diligence, organizing and improving themselves and their team/product/business. This was around the same time bootcamps started flooding the industry with amateurs with no experience. These neophytes were then competing with more experienced people for the same jobs, because hiring in tech is more Ouija board than accurate assessment of professional engineering.
Amidst this influx of applicants, junior and intermediate staff began getting Senior titles to justify pay raises. Soon those exact same people were moving from job to job as a "Senior", but without the relevant criteria that would've qualified for that title a decade before. You can still see people get promotions without having accomplished anything, much less learned anything, but they did keep the lights on. Today there's a sea of "Senior" engineers that can basically write code (and not especially well), but lack all the other "non-coding" skills that Seniors should have.
Even if you hired 100K new Juniors tomorrow, there's nobody to train them, because most of the people working today are practically Juniors themselves. Each "generation" is getting worse than the one before, because they're learning less from the generation before, and not being required to improve. There's still good engineers around, but finding them is like playing Where's Waldo? - and you have to know what Waldo looks like, which you won't if you're not experienced!
The fix isn't going to be learning to network ("relational intelligence") and mentoring more. The fix is for us to stop letting the industry devolve. Treat it like the real engineering professions, with real school requirements, real qualifications, real apprenticeships, real achievements (and titles that aren't meaningless). Otherwise it'll continue to get worse.
>The fix is for us to stop letting the industry devolve.
Sadly not in "our" hands. At best, some director/product owner brings it up. Executives have a nice chuckle, and they continue to outsource to anywhere else. This US industry barely wants to hire Americans to begin with at this point.
We're gonna have to divorce from big tech and push more businesses that reflect our desires if we want true change. Or collectively bargain while we have the chance. I don't know what is more likely in this community.
God, thank you for writing this. I agree 100%. We are rapidly losing all of our "low-background" programmers in this industry. Even ten years ago, I encountered developers who could not debug a stack trace, of the application they were hired to develop. People would send me screenshots of Python errors and ask me how to fix them. I was shocked. I was a junior myself, but surely a programmer would know how to read a compiler error. I mean, that's the entire point of the computer telling you what went wrong...
I saw the title inflation happen in real time. When the boot camp floodgates opened, that was the beginning of the end of my faith in this field. I saw people with three months of create-react-app tutorials churning out garbage, while I was called upon to put out fires and fix things when they broke. I "did devops", and rapidly became shadow developer IT, helping incapable programmers fix bugs in codebases I wasn't even familiar with, better than they could. And I am truly not that great of a programmer! I just know how to read, reason, and use grep a lot. These aren't superpowers, but finding someone who can even reason through how to debug something is impossible these days.
I would love some sort of licensure or guild or standards, but I have no idea how we even begin to change that. Part of the problem is that companies don't want to change. It's cheaper to pay a few people nothing than it is to pay a lot of people a lot, and that shows no sign of changing. Maybe more planes have to fall out of the sky, I don't know. Maybe Windows has to become so buggy and unusable that multiple hospitals shut down for months on end. We don't just need a reckoning, we need a reckoning where we all wind up better on the other side.
I am squinting at the horizon, but still, all I see is darkness.
There are two problems here.
1. The industry cannot define the terms junior or senior.
2. Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities, just more years on a resume.
The article asks about what happens when today’s seniors retire in the future. I would argue we are at that critical juncture now.
>Most seniors today are the prior generation’s juniors with almost no increase of capabilities
I highly doubt throwing even a 3YOE "senior" of 2012 at a modern junior interview would turn out as well as you'd expect. the standards have gotten sky high. That doesn't mean they can't do the job, it means the industry created more hoops to jump through.
I agree to an extent with title inflation (and where the hell is the mid level?), but I don't think peple are confusing "juniors" here. It's new grads to at best 2 years of experience. not much controversy there. I also don' think the idea that the 2014 graduating CS class is smarter than the 2024 class would pass the sniff test.
It’s not that people from 10, 15, 20 years ago were smarter. It’s that they were expected to do more. The business goal, even then, was not higher quality output but was commoditization of hiring/firing and this has been fulfilled more efficiently over time. Title inflation is often the result of retention, which is another aspect of hiring/firing.
Is that a monetary future unfulfilled, or something else?
To try and add in some anecdotes without injecting too much baggage:
I am an older gen-z and launching my career has felt nigh on impossible. At my first job, the allergy toward mentorship this article mentions was incredibly palpable. None of my several managers had management experience, and one of them openly told me they didn't want to be managing me. The one annual review I got was from someone who worked alongside me for a week.
Follow that experience up with a layoff and a literally futile job search, and its hard to be optimistic about building much of a career.
I'm really sorry you went through that. For what it's worth, I'm a millennial, and then best shot I had at mentorship was an extremely overworked engineer who oversaw my work for like... a few weeks, maybe? And that was at the very beginning of my career about a decade ago. Then my mentor kinda disappeared to put out a bunch of fires all the time (I eventually became the "put the fires out all the time" guy.) Basically, the experience was neither long nor formal. After that, and at every job since, I basically had to fend for myself. This industry is outright allergic to training people, and it sounds like it's reached a fever pitch. I'm praying I don't get laid off, because on top of having no desire to job hunt in this economy, I don't really know if I care to work anywhere near this industry ever again. I can't wait until it collapses.
This is truly heartbreaking, programming was the last profession beside medicine doctor that guaranteed young people good start in life in my country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you succeeded overall at your goal! Thanks for replying. You encouraged me to go back and read your article more closely.
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.
>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
Well that explains why AI excacerbates this. It's all they ever wished for and they don't need to make do with that facsimile of "human interaction" anymore. It's not perfect but that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.
Or you know, they just really want to be as cheap as possible in production (hence, outsourcing).
>It seems silly to deny that it's directly related to why it's so hard to mentor or hire juniors.
I'll give a slight BOTD here after my disdain above and admit tha a small team probably isn't the best enviroment to train a junior. Not unless you either
a) truly believe that the skillet you need isn't out there, and you are willing to train it yourself to alleviate your workload, or
b) you are thinking long term efficiency and are willing to lose early productivity to power the future prosperity. Which, to be frank, is not how modern businesses operate.
And yes. Any teacher in any field (but especially education) will tell you that the star players make their day, week, and year. But the worst cases make you question your career. Our natural negativity bias makes the latter stick out more. Those in industry won't get star players as they are either filtered out by these stupid hoops or gobbled up for 100k above your budget by the big players. It's rough.
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.
Ask HN:
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.
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:
> “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.”
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?
Is coding the new poetry?
What do I tell this guy?
given that quote, I'll tell you right now that your burning passion and calling in life will not be answered by being a corporate cog that is ultimately performing jira tasks for some project that is not your own. I made that mistake in my mid 20's. I wouldn't call my experience a waste either, but it did have me doing some soul searching on what my true "endgame" is.
I don't know what the disposition of your friend is, but I don't think many of us are ready to die cold on the streets scaping towards our goal. Survive first and then figure out how to climb from there. Don't see setbacks as a sign of weakness, but a part of life.
Having a data science degree doesn't really mean much by itself. There's a lot of graduates that come out of it with no marketable skills.
And no, coding is not the new poetry. I wish people would stop spamming this website with doomer nonsense like this.
99% of us can't live like that.
The other place you will meet struggling artists is sports. Train several times a week, neglect your social life, your studies, just learn how to chase after a ball.
Only people who are crazy driven will actually do this. The ones who don't make it, they try to climb up from lower league clubs. They go on and on, carving out a career.
But most kids do not have a burning passion for anything. They are curious, they're smart, they want to explore the world. But they haven't found a calling. If they try to go through the eye of the needle, they find it's quite hard, because those paths are taken by guys with a mental lock on a certain career.
What to tell the guy? He's picked the subject that is the most useful for learning about the world. Go around and look at things. There's so much that a person who can code and can deal with statistics can apply himself do.
> There's so much that a person who can code and can deal with statistics can apply himself do.
Can you give a few examples please?
Yeah, it makes sense that going from a decade or so where SWE was one of the best possible career paths if you have any aptitude to a period where tech cos were staffing up aggressively (I recall reading ~60% growth), there's gonna be a hangover. The educational pipeline probably still has a few years of oversupply to work through, and all of the people laid off post covid still need to work. Even in a world where AI being able to automate some of the key skills required for SWE has no negative impact on employment, we'd expect a few more years of rough job prospects.
> “I’m an IC not a manager,” became an acceptable argument to avoid this work
Has anyone ever seen a manager mentoring ICs? I haven't. This is a senior/staff/principal responsibility.
I personally think - Juniors will be okay, if they stick to *fundamentals*
lots of "seniors" via title inflation dont have fundamentals anyways - hence a lot of broken software in the wild & also perverse incentives like Resume driven development. A.I is built on badly written open source code.
because once you have the fundamentals, built a few things - you would've battle scars which makes someone a senior
not the 'senior' we see in big corps or places cosplaying where promos are based on playing politics.
you gotta go resume driven because that's what gets the job. but that distracts from proper engineering skills because the interview process isn't actually testing for engineers. It's all broken.
> That’s not to say that there aren’t people within those companies who care about employee development, but the system isn’t set up for that to be the companies’ top priority.
There has been a cultural shift too. I don't know when it got started, but at least employees in the tech companies started to get more and more obsessed with promotions. The so-called career development is nothing but a coded phrase for getting promoted. Managers use promotion as a tool to retain talent and to expand their territories. Companies adopted to this culture too. As a result, people development increasingly became a lip service.
>> we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.
This seems like a deeply flawed take on the dual track IC-management ladder. Senior ICs don't keep plugging away by themselves because they're not managers, they just don't get people-management tasks. I think the leadership & mentorship they provide is harder than for me (a manager) because they don't have the hammer of a "manager" job title, and need to earn all their credibility. I have not had a senior IC and above in more than 10 years that didn't have a significant amount of junior & int development explicitly defined in their role, and the easiest way to get promoted is with leverage. Try and be 20% better than your peers with your contribution (hard). Make 10 people 3% better (much easier)
Yes! Had the same instant reaction to that line. A lead engineer doesn’t get to lock himself or herself in a closet and ignore the team, and any team/company allowing that is failing its team as a result. They should be out there helping level up tech skills, and influencing code/behavior just as much as a people manager should be guiding career trajectory.
> the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.
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.
Many companies have different career tracks for managers than for individual contributors (even tech leads are considered ICs). Mentoring junior engineers is absolutely in scope for what senior ICs can be recognized for.
> When tech companies started giving engineers an alternative career path to management by letting them climb the ranks as individual contributors instead of having to be managers, I thought that was definitely the right move. Still do. However, the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.
Interesting observation. I have personally tried to avoid getting into people manager positions (as I believed I'd be Peter Principled) but always took it as my duty to share knowledge and mentor the curious and the hungry (and even the ones that are not so). It's actually a very rewarding feeling when I hear good things about people who learned with me.
My team wrote about this same phenomenon in marketing: https://www.behindthecmo.com/p/the-seniorification-of-market...
Its a double edged sword too. I see it in my biz -- its easier to spend 40 hours training a model how to do things the way we like rather than hire someone junior and spend a month+ on onboarding. We are noticing hitting a wall to a certain point with clients still wanting to talk to a real person, but I can see that changing in the next ~5 years. Zero idea what happens to those junior folks that used to get trained (me being one that sat through a 3mo onboarding program!).
>. We are noticing hitting a wall to a certain point with clients still wanting to talk to a real person, but I can see that changing in the next ~5 years
I don't know. if we simply defer talks to LLM's, then companies will take out the middlemen. which means less clients. We'll have our own little filter bubbble of tech where everyone is talking to their black box to try and push out their ideas instead of within the industry.
Not exactly an industry I want to be in. But I don't think it'll get to that point.
I'm not sure how much is about LLMs directly. But as I've written elsewhere, there's definitely a circular pattern where a lot of junior employees think this is going to be an 18 month thing and companies allocate training and mentoring budgets accordingly.
There is a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that junior hiring--at least in the software space--is fairly difficult currently. Via internships at good schools etc. may be better but I have to believe that off the street from bootcamps and the like is pretty tough.
We're still in the early days. It's gonna get a lot worse, if the LLM scaling laws are to be believed.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
Annie! Good to see you hit front on here!
You're totally right. 10 minutes on /r/cscareerquestions (without even sorting by `top`, though it's more brutal if you do) is enough to confirm it.
I normally wouldn't cite Reddit as a source, but this same subreddit was overflowing with posts on fending off recruiters and negotiating already-sky-high comp packages just two years ago. Seeing how quickly the tables turned is sobering.
Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first?
Single-Payer health care would help our industry immensely if it came to pass.
Imagine having no fear any more.
I don't really like the idea of "what if we get more desperate and lower our standards while billionaires continue to make record profits?" as a solution to our problem. We'll just go the way of Electrical Enineering and lose most of our talent to China.
> Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first
It actually might help.
This is the model used in Eastern Europe and India - the vast majority of new grads are hired by mass recruiters like EPAM, WITCH, Deloitte, and Accenture at low base salaries but also the expectation that they self train and learn how to become productive SWEs, or they just stagnate at the low rungs. Japan, Korea, and China use a similar model as well.
But honestly, even FTE isn't much of a headache if I can hire a junior SWE for $60k-80k, invest in training them, and then bumping salaries to market rate after they have matured. This is what a number of traditional F500s like Danaher [0], AbbVie [1], and Capital One [2] do via Leadership and Trainee Development Programs, and honestly, it's much easier to make a case to hire someone if they have a couple of years of real world work experience.
[0] - https://jobsblog.danaher.com/blog/leadership-development-pro...
[1] - https://www.abbvie.com/join-us/student-programs.html
[2] - https://www.capitalonecareers.com/get-ahead-with-early-caree...
>if I can hire a junior SWE for $60k-80k, invest in training them, and then bumping salaries to market rate after they have matured.
1. if you're in a high CoL area, how are they living off of 60k?
2. the big gamble is trusting companies to give a salary bump after that point and not instead cut them off. trust in corporate isn't exactly high right now.
> 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.
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.
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.