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.

>seems to taint young people into thinking that their employer is their enemy

Is this not true to a first approximation though? I mean you do have to "hide your power level" in some way, but the fact that the employer isn't your friend or family is a good working model to keep in the back of your mind. It's a prisoner's dilemma type situation, and defect/defect seems to be the equilibrium we've converged at.

> the fact that the employer isn't your friend or family is a good working model to keep in the back of your mind.

That's completely different than being your enemy.

What you want to avoid are work environments where most workers are focused on gaming internal politics to get ahead. Those environments are soul destroying.

But that's not all work environments. And most work environments are some mix of internal politics and wanting to actually create good and useful products.

Executives are almost solely focused on financial rewards.

Employees (middle management and down) are explicitly structured to use salaries (to reduce costs/earnings from going to them).

Salary is generally a flat monetary incentive, and bonuses aren't big enough typically. You make more money by promotion up a rigid hierarchy: so that is the true motivation.

And that is politics.

If you have salaries, you have politics, and a downward trend towards more of them.

Engineering workers are often idealistic, which is a different set of motivations to exploit by management for monetary advantage. But idealism/creation leads to turf wars and emotional investment in "your code", which is another entire axis of politics.