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

I worked at a fully remote company that did the best job hiring juniors in my 20 year career. The talent and enthusiasm in that pool was great and really injected something into teams.

What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.

The trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So what ends up happening is seniors become more heads down, getting things done, and juniors struggle to get time with more experienced coworkers.

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.

Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on the mismanagement and/or ridiculously over-engineered/over-complicated custom tech stacks companies run if they say "AI" anywhere in their reports.

In my anecdotal experience in a FAANG, weak junior hiring started during the hiring freezes in mid 2022, and was made worse by the layoff cycles that began soon after. Once you know headcount is going to be extremely tight indefinitely, you want to use your precious few slots to hire someone that can deliver value pretty quickly, rather than take years to coach up.

It personally seems hard to connect that to remote work as that had been going for 2 years and in between was the largest hiring burst we'd done, which included many junior folks. Though admittedly I'm biased as a remote worker.

What if Financial Times has a vested interest in the real estate industry, and therefore wants RTO mandates? Something something AI I mean.

Weak junior hiring is due to:

- Longtime trends of companies trying to externalize training costs.

- Avoiding hiring in general due to uncertainty in the economy.

- Companies dumping tons of money into AI thus having to cut money from other places, particularly ones that don't add much value in the quarter (internships).

I have worked with graduates joining remotely during the pandemic, like most graduates they also lacked the skill to work in a real environment, but we can teach them, it's easy. But during the AI boom, the people who could teach the graduates were let go, leaving only a handful of senior engineers that had to "increase their productivity" while also mentoring the juniors. Guess where people cut corners to keep their job longer?

I have found working with remote first natives that the narrowness of their knowledge is also very high. When you work in an office there is a some knowledge transfer happening having lunch with the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team. This non structured learning is missed in remote work.

A lot of people I know have multiple remote jobs. I guess, when you have multiple jobs mentoring juniors is just an unnecessary chore which you want to avoid as much as you can, since it takes precious time from doing “real” work.

I couldn't imagine working remote straight out of college. I'm very glad I work remote now though.

The paper:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6787638

Unclear if it's been peer reviewed. The abstract looks fairly convincing. But it is argued against by the majority of research on this topic.

Now tell me which executives ever did the math on how remote working makes juniors take longer to learn and then took hiring decisions based on that math. This all seems good in theory, but doesn’t seem to hold out in the real world if you’ve ever worked with higher ups in your life

For those without a FT subscription: https://archive.ph/DrFSW

we hired a few juniors at our fully remote company - no issue

this is ft trying to help their real estate portfolio

Intial folks in gold rush benefits. Later folks don't. It happens everywhere. This weak junior hiring was seen by everyone 10 years ago when our politicians were asking coal miners to learn to code.

Anything to avoid Peter principle at all costs, I guess. I will spell it out: We have an aging middle manager problem in IT. Those with less desire to catch up on things have mandate and budget to pursue projects with sunken cost fallacies, they overestimate the cost of architectural change and they don't take criticism well.

That's what's causing junior hiring to fail, because they don't want to hire juniors with passion, because especially with AI assisted tooling, these juniors suddenly seem a lot more capable than those aging guys who need their third meeting before lunch. Thus they hire the fresh graduate as an impressionable and yet unreliable junior instead.

What if hiring offshore developers is to blame for not hiring onshore ones?

From the corner of the industry visible to me, junior hiring was quite weak even prior to the pandemic. It existed but took considerable searching compared to mid-level and senior roles. Most companies wanted someone who could hit the ground running and not need much training or guidance.

Large companies opting to hire several overseas engineers into their GCC for way less pay than a single domestic junior is a factor as well.

What if is, and always was, having people with no discernible skills or expertise being in charge of filling the hiring pipeline?

Companies used to invest in building up their employees and even in retaining them by giving competitive pay. I can hire any junior developer and train them to be a better developer, unless they themselves do not want to be a better developer, I cant fight lack of motivation.

A lot of senior developer roles list things that make it sound like senior devs are supposed to mentor other devs but they never seem to do so.

Many people in the industry reeeeally want AI not to be the real cause of the layoffs for some reason.

Hiring was strong a couple years ago during peak remote work.

If my location dictates the type of employees your organisation needs / doesn't need, then yeah, you pretty much over-hired to begin with and just lack accountability. Hence trying to blame it on everyone and everything else except yourself. Respectfully.

It's not AI, it's workers asking to work from home.

Yeah.

Junior hiring was clearly depressed thanks to COVID, but AI has absolutely made that depression worse. We know this because it's what the tech leaders keep saying. They can't fucking shut up about it.

It's as though the only idea any tech CEO has had in the last year is "what if we gave our best engineer 1000 agents and a case of Red Bull and fired everyone else?" Historically you had to hire junior engineers, because you needed the help. Now there's a [theoretical, purely imaginary] world where you don't, because agents will magically do that work for you. Nobody is losing sleep over the effect this has on talent as a whole, because that's a problem for someone else in the future.

It's telling how rhetoric and conjecture are now normalized in company and business culture. When we were at the peak of remote work, companies were reporting record high revenues.

If people working in the office leaves less time for child care, doing laundry and house chores, thereby leading to more outsourcing, then indeed working from home reduces GDP. It’s also possible that work from home is more efficient as a societal level, but any company willing to defect gets more efficiency for themselves by externalizing the opportunity cost.

I got significantly more work accomplished when I worked remotely. There was tons of work I could not do from the office as people needed the systems I need to work on and could only be done out of hours/remotely.

When in the office I got a lot of people complaining/pissed I was leaving early because I got there an hour or more before everyone so I could get more work done/do the work on systems they needed. The only thing I got while in the office was constant interruptions for things a junior could have handled. Meetings was a bad word, never allowed, so there was really no reason for me to be there constantly (I could have done most of my job remotely and gone into the office once or twice a week)

I hired a junior I was eager to mentor/train to replace me, they proceeded to throw endless things I did at them expecting them to fill the multiple hats I was filling (to the point they pushed them to work on very dangerous equipment and got themselves hurt)

Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't

I absolutely loved the work I did. I GTFO of that misery that was only miserable/got me crucified due to the stupid shit people made up in their head instead of the actual work I did

In 2017, I wrote a blog post expressing some scepticism about the stampede toward remote work. This was well before the pandemic and before things hit a watershed with it. It occurred to me, then, that this would disrupt the pipeline for junior employees:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200925070728/https://likewise....

The point isn't to toot my horn, just to say that this seemed like an obvious problem with WFH even before the postpandemic cultural moment.

Didn't Netflix do fine for decades (2?) only hiring senior+?

They lack experience when working within real environments while being mentored, within a virtual environment where they have no skill to know what to do, just make things even more complicated.

AI is not to blame here, but their own lack of experience which does require exposure to real environments.

I don't want to go back to the office, and one of the reasons is dealing with junior devs in a way where I can't pause notifications. I think the article might have a point Well eff them. This will weed out the weak, and we'll all be better off without commuting and open plan offices!

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

It simultaneously and conveniently: 1. takes the heat off AI blowback 2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing)

On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis.

Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually don't mind working from the office (which i do 4x a week). Just observing.

There's a paywall, so I won't be able to read anything post the title.

But let's not pretend reality enters the decision-making of the large tech company at any point, for any kind of decision.

I feel like there are some really good junior level jobs coming in the pipeline. But we have the flush out the capabilities of AI. The acceleration of AI progress is not increasing so once the roles get adjusted junior jobs will return.

Or how about we make remote work mandatory where possible so the economy lets people live their lives. Getting back unpaid time from commutes and being able to reorganize work time freely makes a huge difference.

It's mismanagement, a prevalence of PE pushing profit margins as thin as possible, and the inevitable feeling of an oncoming recession. Mismanagement and PE both push to prioritizing short term gains (something you can use to justify your position/investment today) at the cost of long term profitability. No one is getting a bonus for having a great quarter in 2046 when your new project has turned you into a trillion dollar company. Executives tend to be very gullible and believe the department head that will claim it wasn't R&D but the new slick UX that 10x'd the company.

Add to that the economy, especially after the disastrous Trump administration, which we can all plainly see as an oncoming train heading straight towards us, and even those who would optimistically advocate for long term budgeting in good times are in baton down the hatches mode.

Hiring juniors is an excellent long term strategy that takes time to pay off - you're much better off having a mix of labor that can mix bold initiative and raw enthusiasm with prudence and planning - and those junior devs today will turn into highly skilled professionals with a deep understanding of your platform in half a decade or so. But when times are lean that's difficult to justify.

I wouldn't shift all the blame away from AI though, this isn't a singular cause thing - working for a PE owned firm we're now on the hook for 200/mo anthropic seats owing to our overlords making a horrible deal. The current brand of AI is a rent-seeking technology that's pulling funds out of the working areas of the economy to fund its insane R&D concepts while more traditional AI applications that have proven utility are languishing,

I have been working since 2008, in that time the only periods my manager has been within a hundred miles of me has been between 2010-2013 and 2015-2017.

Even if I pretend for a moment that a generation that is younger than Google is somehow unable to collaborate online, remote work has been the mode of operation of most people even before COVID, the only question is whether they are sitting in traffic or not first.

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In 2026 a Junior Engineer is just Claude Code with a bad UI, higher latency, and extra steps. Literally.

I wouldn't even considering hiring a junior engineer at this point. The ROI was already barely breakeven for any but the top of the top junior engineers as they are likely to move on before they are meaningfully contributing.

With AI in the mix the ROI for Junior Engineers is strongly negative for 2 reasons:

1. (obvious) I can just have Claude Code do the work a junior engineer would have done with faster turnaround and generally better results.

2. (less obvious) Junior engineers are going to just turn around and use Claude Code, so now I'm talking to an AI and playing the telephone game, and the Junior engineer isn't going to learn much if anything in the process.