There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.

> The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Why is this a problem, though? Imagine hiring doctors or architects with that expectation. "The problem is that no one is truly passionate about dissecting cadavers anymore".

I think our industry got hooked on being able to hire self-taught geniuses in the early days of tech. But the profession has gotten a lot more commoditized, and we just can't continue like that. Gotta hire "normal" people and teach them what they need to know. And yeah, "normal" means people who decided to learn programming because it pays well, not because they want to design compilers in their spare time.