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There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

(workweave.dev)
263 points mooreds | 2 comments | 30 Sep 25 03:17 UTC | HN request time: 1.215s | 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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protocolture ◴[30 Sep 25 05:01 UTC] No.45422071[source]▶
I find that the ability of people to understand hypotheticals is extremely diminished.

"How would you troubleshoot x"

"I havent done that before"

"Ok, but how would you approach the problem"

"I dont know sorry"

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1. qcnguy ◴[30 Sep 25 14:26 UTC] No.45425887[source]▶
How is that not understanding a hypothetical? Seems they understand it just fine, what they're saying is they don't have the needed knowledge/confidence to answer the question.

Not understanding a hypothetical would go like this:

"How would you troubleshoot X?"

"Why, is X broken?"

"No, but imagine it was broken."

"If it's not broken why are you asking me that"

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2. protocolture ◴[30 Sep 25 22:59 UTC] No.45432311[source]▶
Ok, but a completely fair and honest answer is to google it. Or review internal documentation/asbuilt for the system. Or to ask your mate steve.

You don't need to understand the technical detail in the hypothetical, to extract search terms and research it.

The answer of "I dont know that system so I wouldnt know where to start" is failing the hypothetical. You have many starting points for all technical research. It means you cannot even imagine where to begin.

If you are so shocked by the appearance of technical term you don't understand, that you wont even take the first step of putting that term into google, you really shouldn't be applying for technical jobs.

The most common answer I get, if I fight the interviewee, and reposition it as a technical issue they do understand, is that they relay to me an anecdote from a time when they did complete the troubleshooting. IE, they still dont engage with the hypothetical, they just use recall.