alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure I understand the logic that we wouldn't hire Juniors because now we have AI.
What jobs are Juniors doing that AI can now do? I don't get juniors to build me entire web sites or implement complicated agentic pieces of work. Most of the time, we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months. If we think that we don't need to refill the pool now because of AI, then that is daft although I can understand a period where companies are deciding whether they still need 50 Developers instead of 20 + AI.
For me, the worst change for Juniors is remote working. I don't want the experience of newly qualified engineer being sitting in their bedroom all day chatting to people on Teams and not knowing when they can interrupt and when they can't. We used to have an office so we could at least do 2 days per week together but we don't any more. The banter, the office, the observation, the overhearing things is a critical part of both learning engineering and learning how to be part of a workplace.
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Totally agree about remote work for juniors. Even as a senior I feel like it's diminished some of my skills, in spite of all the benefits it brings.
> we hire Juniors to help fill the talent pool with the hope that they will be productive in a few months
The sad reality for smaller companies is that we cannot compete salary-wise, which means training juniors that will leave the minute they become productive
But mostly the issue is with the market, there are only so many things you need a junior to do in a body shop that is getting squeezed
Other companies are also cash constrained and need to pivot fast to "AI"-something, which juniors wont really help with on the short-term
I agree with you about juniors and remote work - but like everything else: just figure it out.
Your customers aren't sitting next to you several times a week, yet they have no problem paying you and expecting you to get your job done. Sure, you might need to meet in person a couple of times a year but if you're smart enough to use a computer you can figure out how to work with someone in a different location. The issue is probably not the distance.
Agreed wfh to me is just generally bad for any creative work but for a new person it must be taking aways years of development.
I guess a lot of this depends on whether you consider juniors to be part of your talent pool. Unless you are retaining them, it is just subsidizing industry at large to train them.
I stayed less than a year at my first two jobs. They bet wrong.
The goal is prevent homegrown talent, and give a reason to import H2B of offshore.
You’re in a whirlwind of propaganda at the moment. The talking points and takes are mostly planted. Even the title has an inner circle nod to it.
I think it is less about junior engineers, and more just about the kinds of work inexperienced/cheap developers are often doing: assembly line, JIRA-ticket-taker type development.
This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [0] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.
[0] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...