What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

> The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead.

A lot of my past employers built their process around requesting additional headcount first, then determining the budget for the role second. It was in every manager’s best interest to maximize the budget for the role so they could hire the best candidate they could find. In practice this meant arguing that you needed someone senior or staff at minimum. Then the job posting got written. There was always a theory that we’d take great juniors but they would get filtered out before getting far enough. When they were told they had to lay off 2 people, they would cut the least experienced and hold on to the most experienced.

At other companies managers were given budgets and left to manage their headcount to fit. This created an inverse situation where they would try to get 3-4 juniors instead of 2-3 seniors or 2 staff level people. When layoffs came you would see teams choose to drop the one highly paid person instead of cutting 2 juniors.

So while your company lost their juniors, I know a lot of people angry that their companies let go of experienced people to keep the cheaper juniors around. Little policy changes can have an outsize effect

ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023.

But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending.

> the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead

This is a huge factor. I’ve seen teams admit that they are too “senior heavy” and then still hire senior engineers over junior when the rare position opens up.

I’ve also seen teams cut college hiring and internships because head count is tight and they don’t expect positions to open up.

I have said the same for a while. And I also think there is an increasing trend of clueless CEOs trying to replace expensive developers with AI token spend. We are still waiting on the long tail of consequences from those decisions, but I suspect it is going to look like a lot of perfectly financially viable companies turning into dumpster fires. Followed by opportunities as their clients churn.

We ended our intern program and so did a ton of other companies.

IMO one of the worst decisions we've ever made because 80% of the time the interns we take on and then hire are absolute superstars.

And even before we ended it we had a couple of years where we stopped competing for talent from Waterloo. I guess Trump made that harder but yeah bad decisions all around.

Which is why junior and senior talent alike are forced back into the office. Except that tenured senior and staff employees from the boom times are in the San Francisco office, but all the new grad hires from the last 2-4 years are in various third world offices. And neither of them can get conference rooms, so everybody's on Zoom at their desk all day, trying to be heard over their neighbors.

So in the 2010s I was working in game development for a company that mostly did Facebook and mobile games. I'm an early bird, I would usually be in the office at 6-6:30am. The next person would show up usually about 10-15 minutes before the 10am standup, so I'd have 3 hours of quiet productivity.

Generally I'd get all my deliverables done by the time that anyone else showed up, so after standup I'd just circulate and see what everyone was working on, and if I saw someone who was frustrated, I'd see if they wanted help. This let me help train and teach the kids, which I really enjoyed.

That's the one reason I don't like fully remote/zoom jobs. I really enjoy the interaction and the ability to teach.

It’s not hard. You give them mentorship and time. Even as a senior engineer, I’ve found it difficult to get assistance at times from team members. Everyone is more focused on knocking at tickets for tomorrow’s standup, and there’s a disincentive to spend time on anything other than doing your own work.

Fully agree. I'm all for remote work. However, in my first 2 years of programming, being able to go the the office, put my laptop and notebook down next to a senior dev, point and say, "Help me," was so valuable.

We hired two junior devs just before Covid lockdowns. The lockdowns were quite strict here in Norway, so even when it opened back up we could only have a fraction of the people in the office.

We did indeed notice it took very long to get them up to speed.

They didn't really get going until the lockdowns were fully lifted and people returned to office.

Hard to tell what would have happened without the two+ years of Covid restrictions, but with a sample size of two I feel like it wasn't a fluke.

> So what ends up happening is seniors become more heads down, getting things done, and juniors struggle to get time with more experienced coworkers.

I just replied further down ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353154 ) about this. You are entirely right, but it is also something that can largely be mitigated if companies and teams are self aware enough. I am not going to rewrite that entire comment but in addition to what I wrote there any self respecting company over a certain size should still have a junior training process in place that spans at least a year possibly two. Letting individual teams or even individuals figure out how to handle juniors always would give you wildly different results, but being in the office this was often hidden because some juniors would organically find other people for support. If you are not physically in the office you need to make sure they have other check-in moments with each other. Allow for moments where they can meet people outside their teams (knowledge presentations, workshops, etc).

I still think working hybrid (but one day per week imho is often enough) is the sweet spot for many reasons. But overall I mostly think that the FT (as often) is making excuse for things that boil down to "no, the main reason is actually corporate cost savings and refusal to invest in core processes".

Office work removes corporate friction at the expense of personal friction (commuting, dress codes, etc), while WFH removes personal friction at the expense of corporate fiction in the way you've just described. It's an interesting dichotomy. Given who the power lies with in our society, I think we all know which one will win out in the long run.

It might be because I spent most of my childhood in teamspeak/mumble talking to others, but my first real time job was just a few months prior to the covid lockdowns and I have been (almost) fully remote since then. I personally had no issues adapting and becoming productive even without a senior engineer next to me since I could always reach out via slack anyways.

Of course other persons have other needs though

>Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch

the real glory days were the 70's when we all had to share a single multitasked computer, and the terminals (not enough for everybody) were all connected by wires and formed a sort of hive around the mini in a room called "the bullpen". Senior, junior, multiple unrelated projects sitting shoulder to shoulder, the shared tips and techniques, the humor, man it was so much fun. The day my coworker learned to play Ride of the Valkyries on the VT-100 keyboard due to a bug in the autorepeat function... music! the shared computer disk could not have held a single mp3 had mp3's even been invented yet

BS. Pairing works great over zoom

The narrative "we don't need as many staff because of AI" is a labor disciplining device whether or not it is true. Remaining engineers, loaded up with more projects under the threat of layoffs and with no outside opportunities, work nights and weekends to get them done. Then it is literally true that we accomplished more with less. And in a sense it is even "because of AI." But not in the way that you're supposed to think they mean it.

There is plenty of companies already firing people due because of AI, or at least, that's why they proclaim.

There is also plenty of freelance / artistry type people who would of had work before (i.e creating Halloween, mothers day, Easter, etc) promotional material which is now just outsourced to AI. You see some of the biggest companies on Earth posting AI stuff for special event, etc.

Most aren't at the stage of using full AI "art" for advertisements (except maybe Coke) but some of these companies would already have full time artists, which they've bypassed. Their jobs are not forever and eventually will get killed.

Apparently there has been some AI-caused firing on companies that spent so much on AI that needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break. From the way people are talking, Facebook seems to be in that category.

There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github.

I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.

AI is absolutely responsible for executive suites dumping huge budgets that could be more productively elsewhere. There are extremely helpful tools out there but people are being too gullible when it comes to advertised ROIs and the blame inevitably falls on engineering, not management, when all the devs fail to 10x overnight.

AI is absolutely directly responsible. Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer. Most people are taking credits, and internships are getting cancelled left and right.

> AI is not responsible for anything at the moment, except making existing senior developers reasonably more efficient for sleeve of tasks, but not the tasks that take the most time.

I disagree. AI is often depicted as autonomous agents YOLOing features, but they excel at pattern matching from free form text and examples, and execute feedback loops. This means that they are particularly apt at small maintenance tasks spread across the project following clear high level guidance.

This is your typical junior task, the kind of task that is plausibly very boring and repetitive that is validation-heavy until it stumbles upon an unexpected turn and forces a senior to step in.

Once you offload these tasks to an agent running on a background, what exactly is left for a junior to do?

Juniors can arguably lean on AI coding agents to tackle more complex and more extensive work, but the truth if the matter is that they lack the skill and tools to effectively address this sort of work. They can get things to build but they fail to get things to make sense or be maintainable.

So what is a junior dev to do?

At the moment is the significant part, how long do we expect this to last now that AI is capable of generating novel ideas like solutions to Erdos conjectures?

And this is why people do studies, because anecdotal evidence is a hypothesis at best.

i'm glad reading your comment, because i nearly always get that feeling with FT articles, and very often with Economist patronizing subset of articles.

Yeah "work from home" largely means "work from more affordable real estate". Very very few people do I know who work from home do it for digital nomad type reasons. Everyone else is due to not being able to afford anything near the office.

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Yeah, I've had (and seen) interns and new-hires do fantastically during COVID.

You get what you pay for / put the work in for. If you're just hiring them, saying "read these docs and ship some PRs", and ignoring them, it's not too hard to predict what'll happen.

Engage at least as much as you would in person (more likely more, because you don't have passive hints about struggles), and it works out fine.

I guess we'll know for sure when they come down again

> companies trying to externalize training costs

Why shouldn't they? You're commenting on a website where the common if not overwhelming view is that people should move jobs every 2 years or they are going to lose out.

In contrast, when I worked in office, I found these fabled “lunches with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team” didn’t ever happen. A lot of the mythical spontaneous collaboration that supposedly happens in office seems to be just that: a myth. At least for many.

I don't fully agree. If the only way information and cross-pollination is through in-office water-cooler conversation, that's an organizational smell.

If you have most of the work and conversation is done in public, you're not hiring very curious people.

Yeah, that seems obvious to me, even to me as a programmer who likes to be able to take long stretches of solitude to really nail the solution to a problem. The indirect transfer of knowledge, understanding and alignment that happens when you're not just sitting at your desk working on your things, seems invaluable once you've had the experience of a workplace where that happens naturally and seems to be able to "steer the entire ship".

Finding a way to make this happen in a remote environment feels like what's missing right now. I know there been some Slack/chat apps that kind of force those kind of meetings, but it's very different from what happens with real humans in real places in close proximity to each other.

I absolutely agree with this point. I fit in as an interdepartmental communicator for engineering and while it took time to accumulate the deficit of gossip[1] since we had a very solid understanding of the system at the beginning of the pandemic. Eventually the gap of understanding from that casual interdepartmental communication became too wide, however, so now I take active steps to have check-ins with people on different teams to make sure we've got a good comprehension of where our shortfalls actually are. Probably owing to my own negligence, I've been burned a few times now by being told by executive that X is really critical only to find out that no one outside that executive actually cares about it. There is a lot of "wasted" office time chatting and being friendly, when you go full remote you, or someone on your behalf, needs to keep some of that chatter going to make sure there's still an understanding of where the product shortfalls are.

1. Work gossip like "Gosh, it'd be great if I could make a widget on this page instead of needing to click into that modal and then toggle the "Yes I do" checkbox - I do that twenty times a day" - whether UX based or generally feature based.

Maybe in a small office, but certainly not one with a few hundred.

I call bullshit on these social interactions having any meaningful impact on work. I've been in very social offices of a large company where we all lunched together, spent a lot of time at the coffee machine, went out together during and after work. Lots of fun. I didn't once see, hear or participate in cross team discoveries as a result that improved work. And in smaller orgs that were also social, the social part is extremely inefficient at moving work information.

My current remote employer does as good a job at building trust between employees with 6 monthly on-sites. But they also do things that expose cross team productivity issue: rotate people in leadership roles between all the different company meetings, so the CEO might be in the planning meeting this week. Get different people in different roles to join customer calls. Not just anecdote at the coffee machine, actually see what's happening across the company.

I disagree, working remotely has required my org to do more in the open internally... so I learn more because I can almost read whatever I want.

Of course if everyone is working remotely via email this isn't going to happen.

I've had the same problem in person too (silos, no one talking) so I think it's more about structure than remote/in-person.

This is complete bullshit. I worked in an office for many years. The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team" or even anyone in our so-called People team was precisely zero. They would keep to themselves at lunch, and reach out to Engineering only with tickets, or when they needed help with something computer-related.

Engineers have a reputation for being loners, but marketing, sales, and other "soft skills" or "people oriented" functions are super cliquey as well and rarely contribute to this supposed "knowledge transfer" that higher-ups keep talking about. I did notice that this cliquishness gets better at their level; the VP of Sales and the VP of Engineering did have lunch a lot. But expecting it to translate to the lower ranks is naive or fake.

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If any actual leaders who have already mandated in-office time and happen to be reading this, see what happens if you mandate that everyone in the non-tech parts of your org is required to have lunch with the tech people every single day of in-office work.

dTrack this as a metric and be honest with yourself whether it's going up; and most importantly whether that is actually helping the company.

lol. Apparently folks where I work don’t ever talk at lunch. I work remotely, and over the course of about 20 meetings I discovered that what everyone “knew” was wrong because none of them talked to each other and each assumed they knew how it worked. Each person knew their own piece and had an incorrect idea of everyone else’s. There were twenty different systems in twenty different heads. These people all shared an office and lunch space. I work remotely.

Any large scale engineering product where “who you’ve talked to” is how things “get done” is going to fail.

Really you are just outing yourself as a member of the political class: someone who believes feelings and opinions matter to the behavior of CPUs.

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Yeah it's awful and the lack of any sympathy from people further along in their career with kids made it even worse. Everyone thinks it's great but I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation.

It's hard to really compare when we(the pre-internet generation) were raised in an offline environment from the start.

At my current job we see "junior" devs with 3 years of GitHub contributions and fully in production personal projects. Those obviously learned through a different path that what most had 20 years ago, but they're definitely not an exception either, and I genuinely think there is an adaptation process that many are missing.

Perhaps everyone can't follow that path. but not everyone could follow the previous one either. We'll probably only know when the dust fully settles.

I did that and it was rough at first. Turned down the internship -> full-time option in favor of freelancing so I could do the level of work I wished.

15 years later...there are good parts and bad parts. Great for focus and getting real work done, terrible for feeling like you have any real connection to your peers (even if/when I went to meetups, conferences, etc, you always feel like an "outsider"). Eventually embraced the "lone wolf" aspects and learned alternatives to socializing, but yeah, that first lap around the track was brutal.

The first handful of sentences from the abstract were a rather convincing case against the paper to me.

The one glaring omission the jumps out to me is Holmström's theorem like effects of incentives.

There has been a huge shift towards metrics, to the point that managers are often forced to or at least commonly believe they are forced to game those metrics.

It is challenging to take strategic risks when you have to focus on metrics which cannot measure let alone value those choices.

This kind of company does not want "juniors who could independently own products end to end without handholding", they want do-it-all people on the cheap. They just don't know what it takes to do things the right way. It's not unusual that the organization is a mess as well, because management is unable to organize it.

Get out of it, this kind of companies have a dysfunctional management. After the initial learning, they will be unable to recognize your value and contribution.

Also, don't feel guilty about getting burnt out. It's not your fault and you got tougher.

Counter point: If it had been onsite, there would be a full layer of social sensibilities and grace from the colleagues you work with every day, helping you out.

Conversely, it is much easier, on several levels, to support and guide someone you spend your whole day and go to lunch with.

The role you've described is a senior one, not a junior one :)

They're demanding you evolve beyond your capabilities without time, experience, or mentorship.

Expecting domain knowledge at the junior level is weird. It's like being an expert at entry level.

I know it doesn't help all that much to hear, but here's a sign so you at least know you're not crazy. That's not okay and that's not a healthy org.

I'm between junior and medior right now.

This might be egotistical so take it with a grain of salt, but I've started realizing that there's no compensation for me anymore if I do well. Tldr the company im working for has a lot of gaps I could put effort in and make it perform well, but it's not my company, so I don't.

Why would I? what's in it for me? Will I stay there after 5 years?

This isn't even limited to me. I talk to colleagues that could improve our current position if they were being put on the issues at hand. They're not being utilized, so they just do whatever.

Companies expect us to do this proactively, because we're such good workers.

I've done my fair share of overworking myself for a company that ditched me once I'm burnt out. It's kind of like ego-death, but for validation. You realize that all this effort is futile. The company grew, you didn't. In one year all the higher-ups have a fancier title and you're still the dev.

> Perhaps the biggest difference I see from millenials and gen z is that the degree in which they realize the difference between having earned the right to expressing your opinion and expressing your opinion.

This reads like the classic case of "I had it bad therefore everybody else should too"

https://www.instagram.com/p/DOLfbRGjjcy/

If remote work is to blame, wouldn't that also indicate that you couldn't outsource part of your work to lower salaried countries. A lot of companies have their senior staff at the home office, then outsource the more trivial tasks to e.g. India.

Managing people is hard, managing remote people makes it hard to hide that you're a poor manager. If you want to allow for remote work, you need to invest in management training. You should do that for onsite as well, but it will be less visible that you if you skip that step.

What if unrealistic economical growth is to blame for weak junior hiring?

No, that's not the reason they claim. From the paper:

> WFH has been shown to raise the cost of supervising and monitoring workers, and can slow on-the-job learning

What? You mean 20 year olds who have never used a computer shouldn’t be in charge of hiring the CTO? That’s crazy. They’re far more qualified than the people with real jobs. They did an e-learning course!

Yeah. Capitalism has never been less about actual profits and efficiency than it is right now. They just tout whatever random thing they're currently doing, regardless of why they're doing it or whether it was voluntary or not, is great and producing amazing results.

Would have Netflix had much of a senior+ applicant pool without the entire industry around it hiring and training the juniors they didn't?

It also doesn't really sit well with what I have observed in over 25 years of working for remote companies. We hired juniors and grew engineers up just fine. The problem, at least at orgs I have worked at in the last decade, is companies no longer want to invest in junior hires.

I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentoring, but not enough companies around me are doing this.

> The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.

If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.

This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

It's not reasonable for us to frame 'return to office' as a class issue, it's a productivity issue - moreover, the general point is not implausible but a bit conspiratorial.

It's odd that we conflate that somehow 'return to office' is inherently more productive and that somehow 'dumb corporations acting against their interest'.

I don't think that's true, and if it were, well, we should all be in a position to take advantage of it.

Sure, FT is part of the 'corporatocracy' for sure but they're not working to 'create narratives'. Individual journalists are actually writing about things they see.

My bet is the real reason is that companies just don't want to hire juniors, and that's it.

It is sane and inevitably correct to treat with extreme skepticism any explanation for an economic effect that reduces the cause to a singular source. AI is to blame, to an extent, so is remote working (it is excellent for older folks who have lives to support but is a rug pull on the social aspects of office working), but the economy is the big looming threat here. We still hadn't recovered fully from the pandemic and then we got Trump 2: Electric Tariffoo which has wrought absolute havoc on business stability. All these combine (with other factors like the ever growing PE investment) to discourage innovation and long term investment.

Junior employees are a long term investment - if the R&D budget is frozen, you're sure as heck not going to dump 60% of your budget into onboarding.

RTO mandates are primarily pushed by the managerial class, not the capitalist class. Both want to blame AI so its not clear they want to avoid doing so.

Their next post's gonna be how building new datacenters is clearly great for everyone based on trickle down economics.

Haha, Your still supposed to actually work when you're at home.

Can I add:

1a. If you train it enough, one day you'll be able to trust that it's going to be able to execute what you want correctly, and you don't have to meticulously go through each line to find any issues.

to your list of arguments?

Because just like a junior human, training Claude will make it a capable senior developer, right...?

/S because this is the Internet.

People don't want to hear this, but it's true, especially the part about the junior developer just using Claude Code themselves.

We may still be too early on the curve of AI usage for AI to be the major driver of the labor market changes, but we also have no clue about what to do about it.

Often the conversation puts "Using AI ourself" at odds with "Delegating to a junior developer", but the junior developer is going to be using AI just like the rest of us further bringing into question the value of junior developers (and eventually senior engineers).

What really is the next step? (Rhetorical question since nobody knows)

The 2nd is very true