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).

I started browsing spaces like /r/cscareerquestions and joined a few Discords to get a sense for what young devs are being exposed to these days. It's all very toxic and cynical.

I've noticed an inverse correlation between how much someone is immersed in Reddit, Twitter, and Discords and how well they function in a business environment. The Reddit toxicity seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle with evil managers. I've had some success getting people to chill out and drop the Reddit vibes, but some young people are so hopelessly immersed in the alternate reality that they see in social media that it's hard to shake them free.

The employer might not be the enemy but the employer certainly is not a friend either. Also its expected of young people to spend their time off with these things as well. All this plus the constant fear of being laid off results in people simply not caring too much. Which is reasonable. Maybe the bar is simply too high for what you get?