It's brutal, my son with a CS degree hasn't been able to get to single live interview ina year. A couple of screens has been it. I've reached out to my network, and the reply is always we're not hiring any juniors.
I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable that I pushed my manager to forego the full-time work experience requirement that we have always had so that new hires don’t even know the old way of working and can just reframe the field in terms of AI.
AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.
Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.
Yeah that's my feeling about it. I don't code much these days so have not used AI very much in that respect, so for me it's basically a superpowered search agent that can formulate relevant answers based on the details I provide, without the "why do you want to do that" or "tell us what you're really trying to achieve" that you'd so often get on tech forums.
But if I had to use AI for coding I don't think that it would take me very much time at all to get into the swing of it. I wrote code by hand for decades, so I know how to judge whether it's producing something that looks reasonable.
Fun note though, my work these days often involves telling AI to solve a problem and me asking it why it wants to do something a certain way.
It often has to patiently explain something like why the bazel rules need to be modified to accomplish my ends goals, and has to reiterate key concepts about a part of the codebase I'm unfamiliar with these days.
Really the only reason I'm there is to make sure it makes the changes as clean and efficient as possible, without unnecessary complexity that's hard to read.
>If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you.
If your questions are sharp, probing for detail, and intelligent. Have you seen how people question AIs? It's as if they can't even conceive of the AI being able to supply specific detail.
Point of order: On the one hand I'm not sure people quoting output from software where relevant is entirely what the 'no ai' rule is about. But it's arguable, fine.
For this kind of task, is linking to pastebin etc acceptable instead?
Either way thank you tstrimple for going in and looking!
There are effectively 2 schools of thought on this.
One states that more junior people will excel. Younger people tend to be more hip to new tech trends, more natively immersed in changing times. And the contemporary AI tools eradicate any knowledge & wisdom gap that the seniors may hold over them. Thus, they'll be faster.
The other school states that the most important thing right now is the wisdom of experience. That the AI tools have made everything *but* the wisdom pretty much an afterthought. Thus, there's no point in having someone who doesn't have deep wisdom.
Which is right? Probably a little bit of both, depending on one's exact needs.
There is a reason why youngest developers are more productive. They accept everything Agent suggests. They don't understand or care. They rely on your review of the Agent output from prompt they copy-pasted from JIRA. So you spent your time reviewing it instead of your own work.
>> Without building this solution, and instead just taking what ChatGPT generated, they had skipped crucial steps in the programming problem solving process, and were now lost
When you skip the problem-solving process and take the LLM's first output, you're not building the cognitive framework needed to debug or maintain that code.
The juniors I have seen don't even try to understand anymore what they are building. They don't understand the product, they don't understand the technology. So everything AI is building for them is nonsense. "Reviewing" it is impossible. Some of them think they are being extra clever having Claude process review comments for them. Even if you hire one, this way they are out the door within the month.
I think the problem is evaluation. They can't tell who the good juniors are with respect to the new skills that they are looking for, so they go for experience instead. It doesn't seem sustainable though for obvious reasons.
> AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.
Same here. The absolute star in my team is the youngest. But! I think what's happening is that the distribution in this age group has shifted. Essentially the absolute best (high IQ, super ambitious, great communicator, cracked builder types) are now even better positioned than ever before. But the majority of mass in this age category now suffers, i.e. everyone that's "good" or "very good" but not exceptional/brilliant.
In my experience in the past year, new hires, juniors or mid-level programmers (probably even "seniors") who use AI to contribute quickly have a big issue of now ownership or understanding of the code and of the issues that we might encounter. They contribute very little during meeting because they have trouble understanding the subject matter.
We are a network tooling team, and now we think our next hire will be a young network engineer who probably will generate code that we will have to review carefully, but we have to do that anyway, because we can't really afford having our engineers stuck on a basic knowledge of networking issues.
In any case, thanks to AI everything have a SDK so we won't have to make in-house library to automate everything (thousand of hours making libraries for cisco, forti, zscalers and other lost, but to be honest, good riddance), so the demand for engineers in my situation will decrease.
> I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest.
It's high variance. A young person can move fast because they lack the accrued assumptions of a senior, but that also means they can quickly move in the wrong direction because they lack the wisdom to identify mistakes before they pile up.
"Use AI" isn't really a skill, getting an implementation is now as easy as google for an answer was for our generation. A senior can trivially learn this. But sniffing out the bullshit and knowing when you're going astray still requires a critical eye that not everybody is going to have.
So it seems reasonable to me that moving more slowly and being more cautious, letting the uncs use their knowledge to keep things from going too far afield, is a really smart idea.
How are the youngest more productive than the seniors? As an aside, I have seen that the newest employees are performing better than those hired during Covid. I think the quality of recent hires are just better because no one is hiring, and so many quality candidates are available.
I didn’t say “most productive”, there was a qualifier attached. A person productive with AI is capable in a different way than the existing folks who are struggling to keep up with their jobs and retool to AI
We can’t find seniors like that yet, even though our pay is nearly top tier, because hiring is so broken right now. Most hires come from referrals so it’s recycling the same people between different companies, and those people don’t have good AI experience.
Right now my company seems to be only hiring people they already know or have worked with before. Every single hire in the last 4 months I've seen get on-boarded has been back-channeled. I've had 4 direct referrals and none of them have gotten in but all made it to the final round just to be surpassed by someone the hiring manager already knew and liked from their previous teams. Even with a strong referral it's hard!
This isn't new. Every job dating back multiple decades was through my network. I had a resume but it was essentially a formality. The last two long-term ones were through very senior folks at the companies.
I think it's trust. If you worked with someone and you know they are awesome and you are running a team you want to hire people who are known entities that you know will hit their deliverables, do a great job and won't be weird or cause friction with cross functional teams. Also of course there's always politics to navigate. I had a candidate I loved for my team who made it through 8 rounds and panel interview with strong hiring recommendations but we got overruled by our skip level who wanted to hire her friend.
The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life. The networking that actually gets people jobs is networks from people you've already worked with before, or your professor is on the board of the company or like.. your parents know the exec team really well etc. So new grads truly are disadvantaged.
>The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life.
I say the are three levels of "networking", and peeling back the layers helps to understand why the term can become so nebulous
1. "Associative" networking where you reach out to people at your old school and work but people you otherwise never met nor worked alongside. They vouch based on what they see and know about your associations. They might refer, but often can't do much about the process but poke at the machine.
2. "familial" networking where you reach out to friends/colleagues you have worked with and can personally vouch on your behalf. They might be able to help churn a bit, but are ultimately still beholden to the process.
3. "Influential" Networking where you do either #1 or #2 but your network evolves into leadership, management, and founders. People who have the ability to actually hire you. Often cutting through the HR cruft itself.
3) is what you want, but fundamentally isn't different from 1) and 2), except in who you know. You invest in 1) and 2) in hopes that they become 3) farther down the line, but for a new grad that investment will take a very long time to occur. Reaching directly out to 3) is hard for many reasons (some professors being an exception. Hence why certain schools can be so impactful), so it's often not an option at the new grad level, since you lack any real leverage to bring to the table. If you have the ability to contact them at all.
I asked that question, expecting this response. I think there's something deeper at play.
E.g. under traditional hiring you only do a background check at the end - this means there are implicit decisions being made that nobody calls out explicitly during the process.
The reality is any person in an org actually has to act in the interest of the shareholders - people who are lower down the totem pole do what their manager says - but the manager of a manager of a manager is held accountable by the shareholders via the board. Shareholders want who is the best person not who is someone's preferred hire (which can be for reasons that have nothing to do with productivity). If there was a way to enforce this - you can bet they would.
Essentially what I'm saying is, because the existing systems suck we fall back on mechanisms like this.
This sounds much like the civil engineering crisis in my region of the world after the 2008 financial crisis.
There was barely any new construction going on for a couple of years and once it started anew, there was a gap as while people were retiring, new hires weren't replacing them.
I guess we're just going to shrink as a field until the market won't be able to handle it.
Our field started as a niche for geeks. For a long time, CS paid you the average for engineering work - hardly equivalent to six figures today for most with the exception of seniors. It's still like that on most of the world.
Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills/hard work. Big tech was and still is full of these people.
I'm not saying that was a bad thing at all, but it always felt unsustainable. CS salaries will decline and fewer people will want to be software developers, balancing the market. Then it may go back to where it came from with the geeks sticking around. No more coding bros. Maybe that's okay.
When I got my degree, I never expected more than a slightly above average salary. I do this because I love it and can't imagine doing anything else. I was lucky and I'm thankful for the luck I had.
Seconded. The year I graduated from college, the median CS graduate was employed making about $65k/year USD. I got offers for $80k/year and thought that was pretty hot shit.
Civil engineering will keep shrinking unless pay goes up. I know a very good civil engineer with 10+ years of experience who switched to software development and doubled his salary.
We hired one junior out of maybe 10 hires. I don’t really know where to slot them in currently, as they lack the background knowledge of what is good or bad from AI. It’s a shame because years ago, I would have hired them and pointed them at a million small projects. Best of luck to your son. I wish I had advice
Does he do any side projects? Where you can support him most is feed him some problems he can build a solution for. I think working through the pain points of building an end to end product and putting that on his resume will go far. I also would recommend he finds non-SWE jobs at companies for the time being too. I mentioned in another comment but I was a “solutions engineer” aka customer support. It was minimally technical and boring but it had plenty of time to upskill and move laterally.
I am a new father to a 3 month old son. I will be nudging him to be an electrician if he has no obvious career interests. Union, good pay, endless work and lots of opportunities to do your own thing. It’s scary to even consider what the job market will look like in 22 years.
Just curious if there's really no offer at all or offers with lowballs?
I know a 2 of senior devs that got laid off from different times and one is approaching nearly a year of unemployment with no offers and another approaching half a year with few offers but elected to continue looking due the offered salary not matching their expectations.
Been a few years for me. I'm technically "employed" (legally speaking), but I've been trying to find full time work on and off for 3 years, now.
Thousands of applications. Dozens of recruiter calls. Maybe 20 or so processes past that first call. 3-4 that seemed to be going somewhere but went nowhere. One was a ghost after 5 rounds of interviews.
The market isn't just rough, it's downright disrespectful at times.
My opinion is that juniors should be barred from using AI and have a compensation structure heavily based around long-term vesting. This lets you train them properly without wasting a bunch of money if they leave right after getting trained.
Theoretically, I’m with you, but that’s not the reality of anything anymore. Kids are barred from using AI for schoolwork yet they crank it all through Claude anyways. At least with children you can blame impulse control and lack of foresight. Juniors just get trained to do it through college
It took me about 2 years out of college to get a job in my field. This was back in 2014-2015. This is just kind of how it goes nowadays. The trick is to make sure you don't stop learning while you are job hunting. I pretended that I would never get a job and my only hope was to build my own products so I spent my time learning how to build my own stuff and maybe sell it. Meanwhile, my resume started having more and more skills.
Things are changing, so I can't make any guarantees. But don't get too discouraged. Pay attention to what is in demand like Python, PySpark, and PyTorch. Make sure that the next time it rains soup your son has a bucket.
I'd side-eye that list as senior .NET dev full stack.
You're asking one person to do frontend/js/css, backend/databases/Redis/MQ, and Python with all that math behind data-science, but i doubt he can understand and review all of this
Make him do side projects, something he can explain and be proud of. Online communities, some github projects he might be interested, ...anything.
Let him contribute to something, yes for free, so that potential future coworkers can see 1) who he is, 2) what he can do, 3) how he approaches people.
