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

https://www.ft.com/content/2205e2d0-50dc-4e80-9bf7-78d0272276c0

by uxhacker • 2 months ago

260 366 2 months ago

ft.com

comprev• 2 months ago

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

smarm52• 2 months ago

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.

nyrikki• 2 months ago

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.

nitwit0052• 2 months ago

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

throwaway203710• 2 months ago

You only needed to read the "first handful of sentences from the abstract" to dismiss an EIGHTY-TWO page paper? Can you share a sample sentence and what you don't like about it?

uxhacker2• 2 months ago

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.

Spartan-S63• 2 months ago

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.

pqtyw• 2 months ago

What other options are there? Confluence pages and public Slack channels or some sort of organized events? Its not even remotely the same..

It's not like there are that many natural opportunities to meet and interact with people you don't directly work with when everyone is remote.

sethhochberg• 2 months ago

Even in a relatively open organization where conversations and work are public/discoverable by default, there's still a huuuge difference between the level of curiosity required to join a convo happening in the office kitchen while you're waiting for a coffee to brew vs needing to spend your idle time at work discovering places (Slack channels or whatever else) to chime in while hoping you're not a distraction for others.

I'm a pretty staunch defender of remote work for most roles, but outside of the smallest companies where the entire organization is on a single conversational thread, you really do lose the organic peripheral vision that comes with an office environment and deliberate effort is required to try and recreate some of that in your fully-remote org if you want some of the same upside. Even with deliberate effort, I'm not convinced you can match it perfectly.

vineyardmike4• 2 months ago

Plenty of places are sub-optimal in organization (or some other aspect)… while still being functional and successful.

Same with writing bad code. We’ve all seen sub-optimal decisions in code or technical artifacts that go on to be successful products or tools. Most people can’t/wont/don’t work at the Pareto-optimal workplace.

Ecstatify• 2 months ago

If this knowledge is genuinely valuable, it should be transferred deliberately rather than by chance. If part of your job requires understanding what the accounts team does, you should spend time shadowing them and getting proper context, not rely on overhearing conversations at lunch.

The argument that important knowledge is best acquired through incidental office interactions sounds more like nostalgia for office culture than an effective approach to knowledge sharing.

embedding-shape2• 2 months ago

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.

uxhacker2• 2 months ago

Because often it happens so randomly. Sometimes it takes two people to be on a natural break at the same time, hungry at the same time, or just how two people got on at a meeting.

andy99• 2 months ago

The best remote jobs I’ve had included many hours a week of no-agenda calls with colleagues, just catching up and talking about what we’re up to. This is very hard to make happen. Most people don’t want to, don’t see it as work, or more likely just don’t know anyone well enough to call and shoot the shit. But imo this is the only real way. Just doing transactional interactions, it’s very tough to stay well connected.

genghisjahn• 2 months ago

My first programming job, I had a private office to myself. It was amazing. I close the door, I’m left alone. I leave it open, people stop and talk and I walk and talk to them if their door is open. Was incredible. Never had anything like it since.

NeutralCrane• 2 months ago

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.

andix2• 2 months ago

I think only a few people manage to build such a network inside a company. But those are usually the successful ones, because they know much more than others.

hcs• 2 months ago

If we're collecting anecdotes, it happened for me in more of my office jobs than not. Might have been relevant that these were smaller offices.

strken2• 2 months ago

They happen all the time for me at small to medium companies. If the legal team is two people whose desks are by the door, then you are going to eat lunch together at some point. It would be weird not to! Just wait until someone says "anyone want a coffee?" or "who brought lunch?" and then stand up.

Obviously this doesn't happen when the legal team is located three buildings away. At that point you might as well be remote from the perspective of collaboration.

quadrifoliate• 2 months ago

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.

---

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.

kaashif2• 2 months ago

The number of times I was asked to lunch with "the guy in accounts or the women in the sales team"

The fact that you read a comment saying that people have lunch with each other and respond saying you've never been asked to have lunch with anyone is interesting.

I guess it varies by company and what the culture is, but it's surely totally normal to just have a friend in sales or something and hear about something going on.

I really doubt the person you're replying to orders people to have lunch.

jemmyw• 2 months ago

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.

munk-a6• 2 months ago

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.

micromacrofoot• 2 months ago

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.

ZeWaka• 2 months ago

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

lowbloodsugar• 2 months ago

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.

mattdeboard• 2 months ago

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.

graemep2• 2 months ago

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.

iterateoften• 2 months ago

In my experience, investors push hard to go in office when fundraising

atomicnumber33• 2 months ago

RTO is primarily pushed by the capitalist class, and managers are just stuck in the middle. No good manager wants pissed off employees, but managers who push back on the capitalist class do not stay managers long.

greekrich92• 2 months ago

Managers, like police and prosecutors, are enforcers for the capitalist class. This is why they are not part of the working class. Managers do the job of squeezing surplus value from workers, rather than producing real Value themselves. Relationship to capital determines class.

Negitivefrags• 2 months ago

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.

antoinealb2• 2 months ago

That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO.

I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.

sisyphuslife• 2 months ago

There are a few factors at work, including:

1) A lot of executive type work _is_ easier in person... and those executives forget that their work might not be representative of _other_ roles within their own org, and they might actually be the outlier.

2) A lot of managers don't know how to manage by looking at output. We see this not just with WFH, but also with multi-location teams, where some managers simply can't do it competently.

3) Many managers do, in fact, get some satisfaction from having that sort of power over their workers.

4) Many executives like having an office that is a bit of a tribute to the company (and therefore their) power. And this falls apart if the office is empty.

BoredPositron• 2 months ago

Post hoc ergo propter hoc...

atomicnumber33• 2 months ago

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

only if the capital class is solely motivated by efficiency. I think this is trivially demonstrable to be not the case.

The capital class's primary interest is self-preservation - both of their capital, of course, but also preserving their place in the pecking order. And they'll spend a LOT of the former to maintain the latter because the latter is how they got the former.

Through that lens, GP's point is perfectly coherent.

"They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself."

Have you met... people? Yes there are literally many owners who do want employees to suffer. Or, perhaps worse, will tolerate tremendous amounts of suffering in the pursuit of minor other gains. (Amazon pee bottles come to mind.) It would somehow be a comforting kind of moustache-twirling comic book evil to say they just want people to suffer. Another to say they simply don't value human happiness (or lack of suffering) enough to not trade large amounts of it for small things they do care about.

I had a boss who was only willing to hire non-whites because he could inflict undesirable work on them, leaving more desirable work for the white employees.

I just want to end this by remarking that this presumption of owners being perfectly optimal, morally clean agents of free markets is absurd and honestly disgusting to bring to an argument.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

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.

I've worked remote a lot and I'm a big fan. I find it hard to discuss WFH online because it's so hard to find people willing to discuss it honestly, including the challenges. The way it's talked about here and on sites like Reddit is as if WFH is perfect, works for everyone, and the only reason we can't have more of it is because companies are hell-bent on doing things against their self interests.

I'm in another forum where we have a subforum for managers to talk, and remote work problems are a perennial topic. A lot of people really don't handle it well. There are even managers in the group who would prefer to work from home, but they've moved their teams into the office at least 2-3 days per week because their 5 day WFH experiments didn't go well.

It's a hard topic. I find myself holding back from discussing it because anything other than 100% pro-WFH anti-manager comments will get a lot of drive-by downvotes.

baq• 2 months ago

The interests of the capital class are not necessarily aligned with efficient allocation of capital. Note this is far from saying they want employees to suffer, but they install inefficient policies over them.

xboxnolifes• 2 months ago

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

Not quite. It implies it affords the working class more power than the capital class is comfortable with.

fmajid• 2 months ago

There’s some research that suggests WFH is less efficient per hour worked, but people work more hours that they would have otherwise wasted commuting so it’s a wash.

That said, the motivations of managers are seldom aligned with the interests of the business. There is such a thing as ego trips. Also, mediocre or insecure managers will rely more on the crutch of face time.

SilverElfin4• 2 months ago

They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

No, it’s more that they want to steal from employees by not paying for all the time lost to commuting and the impact of living near a few pricey locations. That theft is suffering.

kxrm3• 2 months ago

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.

SilverElfin4• 2 months ago

What do you mean by investing though? I think these days junior people have to just invest in themselves and learn by working right? It’s also hard for companies or managers to spend more on them when they can leave at any time, which means all that effort training them will just benefit some other employee.

I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal, probably in response to abusive and exploitative employers and horror stories. But the downside is if employees have less loyalty themselves, then even caring companies and managers cannot justify being loyal to them. They end up losing that time invested and learn a hard lesson.

nickff2• 2 months ago

People job hopping when they get past 'junior' status is what seems to have caused the reluctance to hire juniors, especially combined with the surge of 'opportunists' who started getting comp-sci degrees when it became obvious that it was the easiest way to earn a comfortable living. The job-hoppers made it obvious that it was just cheaper and faster to hire intermediate and senior developers (rather than investing in juniors to learn the basics, then have to pay them to stay). The opportunists further reduced the value proposition of developers to employers as many job-seekers (particularly juniors) have little passion or aptitude for the job, and will never be 'stellar'.

bluegatty• 2 months ago

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.

moffkalast• 2 months ago

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

munk-a6• 2 months ago

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.

exabrial• 2 months ago

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.

marcosdumay2• 2 months ago

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.

indoordin0saur2• 2 months ago

companies that spent so much on AI that they needed to fire people to make their short-term numbers not break

The observation that AI layoffs would be self-fulfilling prophecy is one I haven't heard before but I'm inclined to agree with it.

munk-a6• 2 months ago

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.

Pavilion2095• 2 months ago

A text generator can't be responsible for decisions that people make. You're giving them too much agency. Idk how they did it, but so many people seem to hate AI instead of people who are pushing it.

HDBaseT• 2 months ago

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.

locknitpicker2• 2 months ago

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

AI is clearly a scapegoat. If you are a CEO who is pressured to show results but can't improve revenue in this economy and can't downsize because of the red flags it represents to investors, AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains.

Even FANGs are toning down their rah-rah AI propaganda, and Amazon goes as far as to ask their SDEs to stop with the AI bullshit and just try to use it purposefully.

esalman• 2 months ago

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.

tetromino_• 2 months ago

Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer

That's a bit like asking them to choose between AI credits and a visit to the dentist. No engineer has ever hosted an intern in the hopes of improving their project's velocity; people host interns because "it's the right thing to do" for the industry, because it's psychologically satisfying for many people, and to build cred and/or experience as a mentor. And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees.

throwaway203710• 2 months ago

    > Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer

My Brandolini's Law alarm is ringing loud and clear here. I would say the answer is both -- hire the intern and give them a bunch of AI credits. Ask them to work through the old backlog of shitty, low risk work that no one else wants to do.

resident423• 2 months ago

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?

karlgkk3• 2 months ago

Wow that sure sounds smart!

The problem, of course, is that generating a one time solution to a problem is a much easier problem space than a many-input task with human product concerns

qsera14• 2 months ago

LLMs enable a new kind of text search. It looks like reasoning and intelligence, but it is not.

For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consider a traditional internet search that comes up with a stackoverflow answer as a machine generating "novel ideas" and answers.

It is a clever marketing trick (touting Erdos solutions) employeed by AI companies.

ulrikrasmussen• 2 months ago

The most difficult and time consuming tasks in my job as a software developer is talking to customers and figuring out what they need coupled with getting them to understand what is realistic and what is not. This is a process which takes months if not years, and requires aligning internal goals and tasks with external ones. LLMs can definitely help here, but I feel that the current mode of use where the users have to explicitly manage the tiny - relative to a human brain - context window is an obstacle. I don't know if what we need is a new architecture or just more clever context engineering, but I don't see an LLM actually taking over this type of work as things are now.

closeparen3• 2 months ago

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.

indoordin0saur2• 2 months ago

This is so true. I'm not one of these people that think AI is not going to be revolutionary eventually, but the way I see upper management acting is basically exactly as you say. As a threat to discipline better labor.

locknitpicker2• 2 months ago

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?

asdff• 2 months ago

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

steviedotboston• 2 months ago

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

flextheruler2• 2 months ago

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.

grolingor3• 2 months ago

Should those other people be made to RTO and spend less time around their kids, to fill in your isolated lifestyle?

makeitdouble2• 2 months ago

I feel for your experience. To note, as a field we've long been one of the worst when it comes to depression and mental health (from the top of my head, we're par with teachers ?)

It was brutal before any glimpse of remote work, open offices didn't help in any way.

Some saw remote work as a way out of the quagmire, others like you had it worse.

PS: participation in local communities would benefit both the lonely people and the community.

rglover• 2 months ago

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.

makeitdouble2• 2 months ago

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.

throwaway203710• 2 months ago

    > Those obviously learned through a different path that what most had 20 years ago

Why do you think it was different? Lots of programmers were doing exactly that 20 years ago -- they had personal projects.

aiauthoritydev• 2 months ago

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.

RealCodingOtaku• 2 months ago

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?

Groxx• 2 months ago

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.

napolux• 2 months ago

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

Yeah.

svantana• 2 months ago

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

Devasta• 2 months ago

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.

mvfc• 2 months ago

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

ltbarcly32• 2 months ago

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.

netsharc• 2 months ago

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.

ltbarcly32• 2 months ago

You didn't read my comment. Literally addressed this point when I said "the Junior engineer isn't going to learn much if anything in the process"

qwe----32• 2 months ago

The 2nd is very true

hombre_fatal• 2 months ago

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)

svachalek• 2 months ago

Yeah I have the same issue with code reviews now. I can put some comments in, but they're just going to get forwarded to AI for addressing, so should I just tell my AI instead and make my comment in the form of a commit, saving a hop?

The basic workplace automation loop is:

1. Find what people are spending most of their time on and automate it.

2. As automation takes hold, people will adjust and their time is now mostly spent on things that aren't automated.

3. Goto 1.

Step 1 used to be 3-24 months building an app or feature, now it's often just finding the right prompt. The end states I see are:

a. We've achieved AGI and eventually everything is automated, the loop stops, and the notion of employment is over.

b. We're stuck on AGI and eventually there's nothing left that can be automated, the loop stops and humans are all employed for work that is unsuited for automation.

c. We've achieved AGI but businesses and societies can't react fast enough to ever fully absorb it, and we're all constantly in limbo going through the loop at ridiculous speeds.

I'm leaning c but indeed, who knows.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 2 months ago

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

mrweasel• 2 months ago

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?

HarHarVeryFunny2• 2 months ago

I don't see that remote work (using domestic workers) is to blame for lack of hiring, although it does have other problems:

- Less collaboration/communication

- Kills local businesses

Yes, I was being sarcastic. Outsourcing is of course a huge jobs and money drain from the US, but CEOs and the FT don't want to admit this obvious fact - they'd prefer to blame AI or remote working.

SilverElfin4• 2 months ago

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.

jay_kyburz• 2 months ago

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

neya• 2 months ago

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.

dividefuel• 2 months ago

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.

Eridrus• 2 months ago

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

tibbar• 2 months ago

Given how many studies have built-in sampling bias or other surprising assumptions, I still welcome people gut-checking it vs their experience. (Plus, the stories are interesting, right?)

marcosdumay2• 2 months ago

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.

ef2k• 2 months ago

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.

atomicnumber33• 2 months ago

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.

aspbee555• 2 months ago

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

giancarlostoro• 2 months ago

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.

bastawhiz• 2 months ago

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.

munk-a6• 2 months ago

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,

CompoundEyes• 2 months ago

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.

drivebyhooting• 2 months ago

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.

malephex• 2 months ago

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!

h4kunamata• 2 months ago

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.

qwe----32• 2 months ago

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

folkrav• 2 months ago

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

marciob• 2 months ago

that's true, but it doesn't invalidate the claiming, Netflix outsourced the training step.

cosmic_cheese• 2 months ago

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.

madrox2• 2 months ago

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.

vineyardmike4• 2 months ago

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.

jvanderbot• 2 months ago

My first and only layoff was effective 1h before that law went into effect. 1,000s of us were shunted off b/c an entire research arm was canned due to the changing cost of research s/w teams.

I'm poorer but happier now b/c of it. That job was nuts.

stult• 2 months ago

The R&D tax credit change actually took effect in 2022, and one of the few good things Trump's BBB did was reverse it

mvdtnz• 2 months ago

The layoffs are happening all over, not just in USA. Atlassian has cut jobs. Spotify. Wisetech. Xero. It's happening all over. This is not a USA tax policy problem.

PaulHoule2• 2 months ago

That tax change got reversed!

twodave• 2 months ago

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.

busterarm3• 2 months ago

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.

dpark• 2 months ago

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.

duttish• 2 months ago

I'm in BigTech and these days we have to fight to even get backfill hiring. If we can get one head count per year we're aiming for someone that can handle a wider range of tasks.

Which is a damn shame because most juniors I've worked with are amazing and the most recent junior hire 1.5-2 years ago is so much better than I was their age it's almost embarrassing.

And my team is in an area termed "strategically important" before anything other than AI became an annoyance.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

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

KaiserPro• 2 months ago

Ok, but if it was ZIRP, why are people hiring expensive seniors when they could hire 3/5 no name juniors for the same cost?

CyanLite2• 2 months ago

Because most people aren't good at training the juniors.

ghaff2• 2 months ago

At the end of the day, there are a bunch of different things going on. Higher interest rates, general overhiring during COVID for whatever reasons, and (yes) AI. And probably more macro trends. Maybe at some point we'll see some data-driven analyses but, from what I've seen, it's really hard to tease all the threads apart.

Remote work would seem to have a potential impact on mentoring and future development but that seems like a longer term trend. But, maybe, as the article suggests, some companies that are heavily remote are thinking that entry employees are going to be harder to develop--but that's a problem for the future so better not hire them today.

atleastoptimal• 2 months ago

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

class3shock2• 2 months ago

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).

Grimburger• 2 months ago

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.

elictronic• 2 months ago

Tragedy of the commons, prisoners dilemma.

Externalizing costs is a great short term strategy, for startups. We really should regulate any company over a certain size to force them to pay for their externalities but we all know they won’t happen. I’m sure this won’t have any lasting consequences or lead to the collapse of any economies.

DangitBobby• 2 months ago

Why do they hold that view, you reckon?

class3shock2• 2 months ago

But a big reason people only stay two years because we have had decades of companies gutting every incentive to stay somewhere longterm.

Whether or not companies should or shouldn't in their particular case is hard to answer generally. I am in an adjacent field to software and work on products that have lifetimes measured in decades. In that area short term thinking has been incredibly detrimental to organizations. I would also think investing in educating people that are going to work in an industry or are working in an industry will be a net positive to that industry. That is more a vibe based assertion than fact based though.

c0rruptbytes2• 2 months ago

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

this is ft trying to help their real estate portfolio

bradleyy• 2 months ago

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

jjtheblunt3• 2 months ago

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.

throwaway203710• 2 months ago

Can you provide some example financial/economic newspapers and magazines that do not give you "that feeling"?

gedy• 2 months ago

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.

Tade02• 2 months ago

Each and every parent of 4+ whom I worked with lived in the middle of nowhere and would only emerge from the deep woods for an occasional workshop a few times a year.

It's a lifestyle impossible if one has to show up an hour's drive away, every weekday.

postexitus• 2 months ago

Wow, took me 2 mins to scroll down to first anti-RTO comment - the sentiment is certainly shifting.

elicash• 2 months ago

The FT columnist/reporter, primarily, is lifting up this paper <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6787638> as his newsworthy hook. But his conclusion is that "the evidence consistently shows hybrid arrangements get the best results." So I don't get the sense that he has a bias towards any specific outcome, given this kind of middle position.

And given he's the chief data reporter, it doesn't surprise me that he's looking at the academic work here.

chopete3• 2 months ago

In capitalistic economies everything will have a vested interest.

Especially anything done by an entity linked to for-profit.

dodu_• 2 months ago

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

MagicMoonlight2• 2 months ago

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!

kittikitti• 2 months ago

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.

jdlyga• 2 months ago

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.

mc3301• 2 months ago

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.

wombatpm• 2 months ago

Screen share on slack or teams gives you the same. I’d routinely work with remote teammates that way, and we’d jump in a control each others machines as needed. We’d do hours of that as a team, breaking into breakout rooms as necessary. Much more effective that a hot conference room

c0rruptbytes2• 2 months ago

seems more like a culture problem, i have my calendar very public, all my junior devs know ill get on a zoom with no hesitation and they actually seem to enjoy the screen sharing, every zoom is recorded with AI summary/transcript so they’re more focused on asking questions instead of taking notes (and i think they’re really solid juniors and actually go back and watch)

there’s the whiteboard element but i’ve gotten pretty good at exalidraw and zoom annotating

add in the remote makes it kinda easy to not be distracting in meetings so i can easily DM them context on the side to get them ramped up easier

cbdevidal3• 2 months ago

I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room.

With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help.

It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologies and techniques.

magicalhippo2• 2 months ago

Part of being in the office is that you pick up on what's going on around you. Coworkers might discuss some issue and you might decide to listen in, and so on.

That's the bit I really notice I am missing out on when I work at home.

closeparen3• 2 months ago

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.

hibikir• 2 months ago

So man companies that are doing RTO are in no way trying to reorg to make teams stay colocated, it's rather puzzling. I know a UK manager with only reports in the different parts of the americas, and there's never more than 2 in the same city, so for all intents and purposes, the teams are just fully remote but stuck badging in. And that's after a reorg this april, where many US managers got laid off.

Along with trends like having line managers be in charge of 20+ direct reports, it leaves people scratching their heads.

jansan• 2 months ago

Good thing there are companies outside San Francisco, too. Actually, almost every company is not in San Francisco if you think about it.

uejfiweun2• 2 months ago

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.

throwaway203710• 2 months ago

The first part of your post was very insightful, and I broadly agree. It is interesting that you consider (office) "dress codes" a personal friction. Do dress codes still really exist? I work in a very conservative industry, and the dress codes have changed dramatically in the last 10-20 years. For any other industry, I'm sure the changes are even greater. Also, I am the type of person that really likes to dress well and maintain good appearance when I go to the office. It's a nice way to start the day. The idea of working from home wearing "house clothes" isn't for me.

However, I disagree with this part:

    > Given who the power lies with in our society, I think we all know which one will win out in the long run.

In a capitalist system, there is always push and pull between employer and employee. Look how desperate tech hiring was during the COVID-19 crisis. It was insane. You had silly stories on HN of people working two jobs at once. Next, the economy slowed and layoffs came. The script flipped. Once the economy is strong again, employers will be more flexible on accepting remote work. For many industries that employ technologists, part-time work-from-home is now a permanent reality. If you not a "gold standard" company, you need to find non-economic advantages when hiring. One of those is part-time work-from-home.

skipkey• 2 months ago

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.

magicalhippo2• 2 months ago

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.

creesch2• 2 months ago

From a different perspective your sample size is just one, your team/company.

I started in a whole new team (as a senior) remotely during Covid which also contained juniors. They did incredibly well and were able to reach anyone remotely with no issue.

What might have been different is that the entire team was new and we knew we had to focus on our communication online and think about effective ways to do so. Which also benefited the juniors in the team. Many teams and companies never really gave it that much thought to begin with and I still see teams struggling to work remote at times. But, after giving them some pointers they often manage to do a whole lot better.

Some basic things out the top of my head that have benefited teams and juniors specifically:

- Have a "working together" channel where people can start meetings and where anyone can join if they feel like it. It often ends up being used by people who either like working together or those who can use some overall input on what they are working on. - Have social online moments as well. One team had a 15 minutes social block in front of standup's an other team had just a weekly social call. - Actively check in on other team members. Which feels silly to say, but the amount of times where I have seen teams only communicate during standup is also silly. Specifically juniors. If they are given a task after a little while check in with them how it is going and ask if they want to share their process. Basically how you probably in the office would walk past and also have a little conversation with them. - Take time for questions from juniors and make it clear you will do so. Whenever you are in the office and they approach you for help it means you also often serve them on the spot. Yet online I have seen juniors being ghosted for a variety of reasons. At the very least make sure to respond to juniors with a "give me 5 minutes and I'll give you a call".

To be clear, I personally like working hybrid and I do think there are benefits to coming to office at least for one day per week (assuming it is coordinated and not a ghost town). But my main point is that juniors struggling due to remote work is often more a symptom of the company not really having a good training and coaching process/culture in place more than anything else. Which I am not blaming on individual teams either. Training people is hard, people get bachelors degrees in education and then spend a lifetime getting better at educating. It's up to companies to educate their teams in this as well, offer the resources and have people on staff who solely focus on junior training.

fsckboy• 2 months ago

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

budman1• 2 months ago

not just the terminals. the bookshelf with the documentation was in the terminal room.

(buy a VAX, get a library. oh, and a computer too.)

the 6 months after the first screen editor was installed was constant questions and answers bouncing across the room on how to do things.

honkycat• 2 months ago

BS. Pairing works great over zoom

throwaway203710• 2 months ago

When I compare pair programming in person vs. by video chat, there is no comparison. In person is always more effective. That said, if you have no choice (your pairing partner is not in the same office), then video chat is way better than 10 years ago, and is a reasonable alternative.

creesch2• 2 months ago

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".

MikeNotThePope• 2 months ago

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.

preisschild• 2 months ago

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

adabyron• 2 months ago

I've found less friction in my experience. I prefer pair programming remotely over in person.

Pair Programming in person - one computer & one person looking over another's shoulder usually.

Pair Programming remotely - two computers & you can easily swap control of either's device or change who's sharing their screen.

The only thing working in an office wins on imo is building very close relationships with co-workers. I think physical presence is a human thing that cannot be beat. You can still build great relationships remotely but they're not the same. From the point of view of a company, remote relationships might be good enough or even better as they can prevent people becoming "to close" and ending up on the news at a concert together.

randusername2• 2 months ago

Opt-in versus opt-out. Active versus passive. A lot of mentorship is just role modeling, juniors observing how seniors conduct themselves in various situations by proximity.

$DAYJOB might as well be fully-remote since the team is heavily distributed and it's the same problem.

I think it's a problem for all workers, not just juniors. Maybe 1 person in the org sees the whole elephant. Way too many "organizational branch mispredictions" from incomplete mental models colliding.

abalashov• 2 months ago

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.

moezd• 2 months ago

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.

dinamic• 2 months ago

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.

epolanski• 2 months ago

Juniors remotely need a proper setup but can be definitely done.

Juniors require pairing and mentorship if you really want them grow.

I think that AI has put lots of pressure on everybody, juniors included, to deliver more, thus finding time for juniors is hard.

agentifysh• 2 months ago

Surprised none of these comments address the issue from cultural/generational value gap

I increasingly find across different borders that Gen Z simply are not optimal or desirable for hire and its not just "remote coding jobs" but across the spectrum.

In South Korea, there are lot of of 35yo+ getting hired while people in their early 20s struggling.

I see the same outcome in different advanced economies and the answer is quite simple, Gen Z, are simply not equipped to work or put up with grit that is needed. They are too self centered and contradictory to their own interests. They expect others to bend over backwards for them without any merit.

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.

Unfortunately, from personal anecdotes and others, gen z simply are not aware and thus stuck in a loop. Frankly, I don't have any sympathy. I don't know where this entitlement comes from but its not helpig them and it certainly will not improve outcomes.

wvenable• 2 months ago

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

hbs18• 2 months ago

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"

lll-o-lll• 2 months ago

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 made me laugh so hard! I am gen x, and we used to say exactly the same thing about you spoiled, entitled, narcissistic, gritless millennials!

You should have seen what it was like when I first started! You should have seen what I was like!

You’ve got it all wrong! It’s not the generational differences that are the problem, it’s these darn young people are too darn young! (And some of them are a completely useless waste of space, as I was until life slapped a bit of sense into me). It’s a bit over the top, but I really love Musashi (novel) for this representation of the worthless youth who needs to be tied to a tree and suffering to the point of death before finally breaking and getting his crap together (become a human being; not just an animal). Feels like an (exaggerated) representation of the genuine journey all young men must make.

contubernio• 2 months ago

Most comments are just older commenters confirming what everyone over 50 knows, which is that young people are slow and stupid and not as competent as we were back then nor as competent as we are now.

Every generation ever has known this once it got old enough ...

hdgvhicv2• 2 months ago

In the U.K. youth unemployment was the same level as today back it 2007. Post GFC it shot up to over 20%

Similar high levels in the black Wednesday crash and in the early 80s

https://www.statista.com/statistics/813142/youth-unemploymen...

khanmaria• 2 months ago

I'm all in for remote working. My first job out of college has been remote. As much as I would love for a senior to help me out when stuck, my org completely made it clear they needed juniors who could independently own products end to end without handholding. It's frowned upon to not have domain knowledge there, and in fact within month of joining I had to answer any questions related to the domain handed to me. This burnt me out. I wish organizations did not expect this much from juniors. My only aid has been burning myself out to learn fast and use AI to confirm my learnings, costing my mental and physical health. If my company was onsite, it would have been even worse to have the answers ready on spot.

Valodim• 2 months ago

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.

harrouet• 2 months ago

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.

lanyard-textile2• 2 months ago

Super +1. Burnout is not failure.

lanyard-textile2• 2 months ago

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.

ramon156• 2 months ago

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.

worldisworsenow• 2 months ago

Paywall
AI hate bait
Antiunion rhetoric
Blind to tax recession

You owe us a cat tax, OP. Your content is bad and you are deep in the compensation pocket.

motbus3• 2 months ago

All companies I worked, big or small, local or remote. All of them stopped hirokg juniors long time ago. I have a guess that Juniors are much weaker today + AI + bad economy + (what I call) immediatism*

I don't agree with remote work arguments because I saw that before with remote companies and totally works

No company is investing for the next 10 years, not even 5 depending on the scale.

arexxbifs2• 2 months ago

What if there are several reasons all at once?

* Economy is tighter overall.

* Covid overhiring followed by firing means fresh graduates face competition from a large cohort of people with a few years of work experience.

* Even if it's not necessarily true, if the C-suite _believes_ that AI can replace juniors, that's enough to funnel money away from hiring and into AI investments. When money for hiring is tight, seniors are prioritized.

* Like it or not, workforce immigration (such as H-1B) causes displacement.

* The number of CS graduates in the US has doubled over the last decade.

In Sweden, fresh graduates across a number of fields are having a hard time finding jobs. Many of thosee seem to have either a STEM education affected by a dip in "green" capex/investments, or in "overhead" sectors likely to be tightened in bad times, such as HR specialists.

boshalfoshal• 2 months ago

Its AI. Both AI actually being good now, and CEOs believing AI is good. Even at most big tech companies, L3 engineers were basically the "claudes" of their team (or at least, 80% of their job was basically to be a "claude"). You give them some well scoped, largely coding task (that you either delegate as part of a larger project, or just something you don't want to do), and then they execute it. Once they build trust and learn the system, then they get larger projects, and then promotions.

Places are still hiring juniors, but now the bar for them is just much much higher, because a large portion of the junior level work (i.e, execution on implementation details), is pretty much 80-90% done by some senior + AI at this point, whether people believe it or not. This was certainly the case at the FAANG I was at.

I don't know why this "COVID overhiring" rhetoric is still a talking point. Covid was over 5 years ago at this point, those "overhires" have already left or have been flushed out from all these layoffs. Are you telling me the "COVID" overhiring resulted in such a huge surplus that, 5-6 years later, they are still on the market?

arexxbifs2• 2 months ago

Meta fired 8,000 employees not two weeks ago: "[Meta] revealed to employees in April that it would conduct a major round of layoffs the following month while nixing plans to fill 6,000 open positions. The company told workers in a memo at the time that the job cuts were intended to help offset investments into other areas like AI." [1]

That sounds exactly like funneling money away from hiring and into AI investments to me.

As for COVID overhiring, Amazon doubled their workforce during the pandemic. I'm sure plenty of those hires are still employed. During their latest layoff, they also spoke about "shifting resources to invest more in artificial intelligence".[2]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/meta-layoffs-zuckerberg-says... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/amazon-cut-thousands-of-engi...

tikhonj• 2 months ago

What if it's interest rates?

I'm amazing at how anybody can discuss any questions about the tech job market without addressing the end of zero-interest rate policy. "It's interest rates, stupid" ought to be the first thing we consider, and stuff about AI/remote/etc only comes in when we have a specific reason to consider it.

aussieguy1234• 2 months ago

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

arrowsmith• 2 months ago

ZIRP will never happen again

TrackerFF• 2 months ago

Follow the money.

ZIRP caused a massive overhiring in certain fields, especially in tech. The post-COVID hiring started to cool down around 2.5 years ago, and hit rock bottom 1 year ago. There were almost 4 times as many listings at the peak, 4 year ago, than there were 1 year ago.

A quick data point: US Software job listings

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

US interest rates

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

So companies are flush with cash, and ride a bubble where there's a huge demand for digital tools. People that enrolled college during the height of the bubble were promised jobs left and right, and good salaries. People need to remember that these sort of things rarely change overnight - there can be a latency that takes months to years.

At least to me, it seems like a classic example of a boom and bust. When I did my EE degree, everyone that specialized in control / automation were guaranteed a oil & gas job, many had a job offer 1 year before the graduated. The petro companies would wine and dine us, and we could send out competing offers to negotiate.

Then came a huge crash, and almost no one had a job. The offers were rescinded, multi year hiring freeze. All in all very bad times.

I'm not at all buying the argument that WFH has any serious effect on junior hiring.

stevenwilkin• 2 months ago

https://archive.ph/7XytV

maxehmookau• 2 months ago

Absolutely get in the bin with this ridiculous take from a newspaper with a vested interest in getting people back in to expensive office real estate.

Juniors cost more to train, take more effort, and time from seniors who are otherwise "productive" and so companies don't want to hire them and be responsible for that additional work.

It's not remote working, or AI that's to blame for weak junior hiring. It's short-termism from companies that see no reason to spend their time training up juniors.

doubledamio• 2 months ago

There is no doubt that juniors have much more difficulty starting their careers in tech nowadays.

This might be naive, but isn’t this purely a demographic/saturation effect?

fipar• 2 months ago

You know that thing about the answer to any headline that’s a question being almost always “No”?

I’ve been fully remote for 17 years and, before that, did short periods of remote work as early as 2003.

The first junior I remember being onboarded remotely (into an irc-mostly, voice call for ultra rare cases job) was me and it worked pretty well.

From about 2010 to 2012 I grew the support team of a database services company from 2 to about 20 people (the 2 at the start was counting me). A lot of the new hires were junior when it came too dabatases, some just junior period, and it worked great too.

There were some in person meetings but the vast majority of onboarding and training happened remotely.

Maybe people invested in office real estate are perhaps biased to get the wrong answer on this one.

If I had time now, I’d write an article titled “is the FT right about the cause of weak junior hiring?”

I don’t have time, but you can apply that saying about headlines to my imaginary article.

xchip• 2 months ago

NVIDIA is hiring wherever the talent is, learn from NVIDIA, stop whining.

merksittich• 2 months ago

My previous submission to the same article (without the syndication code, hence not recognized by the HN deduplication):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319392 (2 comments)

Aboutplants• 2 months ago

Most teams are run as skeleton crews and if I’m a hiring manager I’m ensuring I get senior, experienced employees regardless of where they work. If a company allows remote then my net for quality senior employees is massively increased.

alfiedotwtf• 2 months ago

I remember when companies would hire fresh out of uni (sometimes not even uni just enthusiastic), without experience, and then build them up brick by brick, into a competent developer. Contrast this to needing to be in the top 5 leetcode just to pass the HR screener, and then throwing into the deep end just so they can PIP you in 3 months because they didn’t give you any time and resources to train you up.

So now we have a gap, and the best fix we collectively came to was give senior developers AI so they didn’t need to hire fresh starts.

Gee… I wonder why we have a problem :shrug:

cjrp• 2 months ago

I wonder if it’d also related to the reduced length of time that people stay in a job now? Why invest in training a junior if they’ll move jobs as soon as they reach mid-level.

goda90• 2 months ago

This is a pretty narrow anecdote but my employer prefers hiring right out of undergrad and training. They also were quite aggressive in ending remote work after Covid. I felt a lot better about the new developers I worked with before LLMs got big than I do now.

hmokiguess• 2 months ago

Why does it have to be one thing? It's likely a whole lot of things that are contributing to this, including education and their parenting.

randusername2• 2 months ago

IMO it's multi-faceted but all revolving around how broken hiring is for juniors.

- HR is rarely equipped or incentivized to select true entry-level candidates without an obvious record of success in a similar prior role

- Algorithmic job boards are brutal and they make juniors anxious or under pressure to have all the answers if they are seen at all

- Seniors that in the past would take hiring risks because they saw something of their own children in a junior candidate are, in 2026, a lot more likely to still have young children they want to WFH focus on

- College is very expensive now and CS programs can be selective. I continually see a disconnect where seniors interview for the curiosity and passion that served them well in their career but the candidate's parents told them to do CS for the ROI. Fair I guess, but these are different people to manage.

notarobot123• 2 months ago

Why not both?

__alexander• 2 months ago

Brace yourself, hybrid and return to office propaganda are coming.

travelalberta• 2 months ago

I blame the pervasive messaging of "learn to code" and those "day in the life of a software engineer" videos. The number of CS graduates is like double what it was a few years ago. As we transition into a 'bust' cycle for tech with lots of layoffs suddenly you have a tricky situation where mid to senior engineers are looking for any kind of work they can get, while at the same time there is an ocean of junior talent looking to get their foot in the door.

Gastonison• 2 months ago

the issue is pay bands, not remote work or ai. Why would you hire a junior instead of a senior, if the senior costs only 20% more?

vanviegen• 2 months ago

Where are you seeing such a narrow pay band? I don't have a great view on the market, but that strikes me as really odd.

spjt• 2 months ago

Why would remote working have anything to do with the amount of junior hiring? You can maybe make the case that remote work isn't as helpful for juniors etc etc. but that has absolutely nothing to do with the decision to create a job requisition or not.

ghaff2• 2 months ago

I would think the general situation would be that it's probably harder to develop juniors now in a (more) remote environment so we shouldn't hire them and hire more experienced people instead.

closetohome• 2 months ago

I would guess it's a talent pool thing. If you're hiring in-office you're limited to locals and candidates willing to relocate. If you're hiring remotely, the pool is much larger not only in terms of size, but in range of compensation. For example you might be able to get a mid-level engineer living in the midwest for the cost of a junior in a major city.

jollyllama• 2 months ago

A lot of disagreements ITT, but a lack of counterexamples. If this theory were false, we'd expect to see:

* places with strong in-office presence where juniors are not being hired

* remote teams with strong hiring of juniors

sharadov• 2 months ago

As someone who worked remote for 8 years I can see a few reasons

- Really hard to get juniors up to speed when they are remote, when I started out as a junior I sat around a bunch of senior folks, and inhaled in all the knowledge via the interactions we had all day.

- In my previous company, we hired a bunch of juniors who clearly were not self-motivated. There were few who were actively disengaged, would not even care to turn the camera on. They were a few boot-camp grads who though motivated, I could not for the life of me teach computer fundamentals. You can't learn a 4 yr degree's worth of stuff in 6 months at a bootcamp.

Yes Covid was great for us senior folks who did not need direction and were disciplined, but really bad for junior folk.

jazz9k• 2 months ago

Remote work takes the same discipline as running your own company.

I've been working remotely for 20 years now, and most people just can't handle it and are either distracted, slacking off, or just not working.

I've seen lots of people fired over it, and ruined it for everyone.

I'm a consultant now and no longer have to hope and dream that my employer will let me work remotely. It's in my contract.

cauliflower99• 2 months ago

Folks who are new in any role in any industry really need to understand that remote work is a huge disadvantage when you know nothing or nearly nothing.

Anecdotally, I've run an apprenticeship program for a few years now in software. We hire 5 apprentices at a time - usually people who have done some online courses in programming and want to get into the industry. They would be pre-junior.

The year we went fully remote for lockdowns, the failure rate of the apprenticeship went from 0% to 80%. We went to a hybrid policy of "you choose how many days you want in the office" - failure rate dropped to 40% with the top of the group being the 2 people who were in the office everyday. Today, it is a mandated 4 days a week in the office - failure rate is at 0% again.

Not only does nobody fail, but the folks who consistently turn up to the office and get involved talking to seniors are inevitably the ones who progress the fastest. The ones fighting to work from home because it's inconvenient consistently do worse.

All those opportunities to improve by 1% via a meaningful conversation or a whiteboard diagram disappear when working from home. The 1%'s matter the most when you're a junior.

wnc31412• 2 months ago

The only thing that doesn't make sense: these companies are more profitable than ever. Google stock rocketed up last year. AI spend per employee is also up, many companies with a strictly enforced minimum AI spend. Surely that cost could have gone to entry levels?

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

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