Comment by mghackerlady
3 days ago
I feel like the junior problem contributes more heavily than people might think. The people on top see juniors as replaceable since they view them as cheap menial labor, whereas most seniors at least acknowledge the human element as part of the benefit
Today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors, or more importantly today's seniors' yesterday.
They do the dirty, repetitive work, learn the systems inside out, take note of the flaws, and fix them if they are motivated and the system/process allows.
Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gears is allowing your organization rot from inside. I can't believe people can't see it.
Plenty of people see it - but, to a hiring team, a junior is an extremely risky investment. They demand a high cost relative to when they can start contributing actual value, may not work out, or may hop ship the moment they become competent. It is rational for a business to want to eliminate this risk. It's possible that everyone is acting rationally here, knowing it will lead to a result that is not favorable down the line - because the immediate benefit is too great to consider the latter.
In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line. And that risk may be overblown - people are still hiring some juniors, it's not like it has stopped entirely - so future seniors will likely just be worth more than they are currently. To some, that may be worth the risk, especially if you believe AI will continue to get stronger.
I am not saying I agree with this decision making, more pointing out the thought process. We have had to have similar discussions where I am but are still hiring juniors, FYI. That's basically all we're hiring right now, actually, because the market for strong juniors is very good right now.
It's not an economic decision, it's a cultural one. Are you investing to build something useful and sustainable? Or are you exploiting for a profitable quarter?
I read someone compare the mindset to that of a drug-dealer. In any given neighborhood, a handful of people get very wealthy, at the expense of the stability and potential of everyone else. Our elite are drug-dealers - literally, in some cases. And conditions are deteriorating about how you'd expect.
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and what happens in half a generation or so when those seniors start retiring? the only way software production will meet demand is if the fewer seniors out there are propped up by way more competent ai than we have now. that also means the work will fundamentally change from being massively nerdy to moderately nerdy with the ability to work with ai. many of the people in the computer industry now just wont be attracted to that type of work.. what will they do? become physicists or mathematicians? and what type of person is tomorrows senior software developer?
edit: maybe todays computer nerds will become tomorrows backyard hackers, the only ones able to beat the ai.
> In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line.
I mean, writing the code which makes mon^H^H^H^H provides value for minimum cost is the ultimate goal of a software company, but any competent CS grad or anyone with basic algorithms knowledge knows that greedy algorithms can't solve all problems. Sometimes the company needs to look ahead, try, fail and backtrack.
Nerdy analogies aside, self-sabotaging whole sector with greedy shortsightedness is a pretty monumental misstep. It's painful yet unbelievably hilarious at the same time. Pure dark comedy.
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If people need to be retained for many years, is the solution to give a bunch of stock that vests over many years? It would be interesting if such incentives (the need to hang onto talent that has been incubated for many years) could bring about a return to one-company careers.
> Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gears
This is how companies see all of us though, for all ic levels
For today's fast and loose companies that's true, but not all companies are greedy and grind people for money.
Yes, they're not the norm, many of them are not glamorous, but it's not all black and white.
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This would have been a great revelation for decision-makers across the economy to have had about 20 years ago. Instead, they took every opportunity to turn the job market into the Hunger Games. Congrats to the people who survived the Cornucopia; the rest of us have been bleeding out for well over a decade.
It's not that juniors are replaceable, but that hiring them is a high variance move. Few, if any, know whether a candidate is just memorizing leetcode and is going to be a dud, costing you effort before they get a PIP, or you are hiring a very talented individual that will be contributing in 2 weeks . With seniors, you risk less, just because the track record makes the very worst candidates unlikely.
maybe they should have seniors choose juniors, they tend to be good at recognizing the worth someone could bring