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There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

(workweave.dev)
263 points mooreds | 3 comments | 30 Sep 25 03:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.943s | source
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Cornbilly ◴[30 Sep 25 04:08 UTC] No.45421796[source]▶
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.

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1. eru ◴[30 Sep 25 05:04 UTC] No.45422091[source]▶
> I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Well, if we assume that the share of the population of nerds is roughly constant-ish, then an expansion of the total number of developers would lead to nerds making up a smaller and smaller share.

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2. jimbokun ◴[30 Sep 25 16:20 UTC] No.45427480[source]▶
The idea that people have different aptitudes and proclivities has become a radical concept to some these days.
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3. eru ◴[01 Oct 25 02:20 UTC] No.45433642[source]▶
Maybe.

Back in the olden days, you needed to be a hero who knows all the innards of your 8 bit machine just to produce a decently playable game that was more sophisticated than Tetris. These days even an idiot like me can hack something together in a high level language like Python or Rust. That's progress!

Similar to how everybody carries an awesome digital camera around with them today. The absolute number of photographers has increased dramatically. And even the absolute number of great photographers has increased dramatically, because constant practice helps.

But I'm fairly sure the skill and dedication of the average person engaging in photography has dropped equally as dramatically: that's how lower barriers to entry look like.