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There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

(workweave.dev)
263 points mooreds | 4 comments | 30 Sep 25 03:17 UTC | HN request time: 1.008s | 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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Aurornis ◴[30 Sep 25 04:50 UTC] No.45421994[source]▶
> 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.

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krackers ◴[30 Sep 25 05:08 UTC] No.45422110[source]▶
>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.

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aspect0545 ◴[30 Sep 25 05:19 UTC] No.45422166[source]▶
There’s a big difference between somebody not being your friend and somebody being your enemy. I’ve had a similar experience with a sub par employee, who at some point admitted that he wasn’t doing his best at work because he was "only there to exchange his time for money, not make any meaningful contributions".

That guy was absolutely immersed in internet culture, making him less self-aware and very unpleasant to work with.

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lloeki ◴[30 Sep 25 05:28 UTC] No.45422216[source]▶
This mindset existed well before reddit; hell, it existed well before the Internet.

Some people simply show up at work solely to put food on the table, doing the minimum amount of work so as not to get fired.

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Aurornis ◴[30 Sep 25 13:33 UTC] No.45425236[source]▶
Showing up to work and actually doing their job, even if it’s the minimum, would be an upgrade over the Reddit toxic mindset I was describing about.

The problematic juniors show up to their jobs determined to be uncooperative, sow discontent among coworkers, stonewall progress in meetings, and think they’re just going to job-hop to the next company before the performance management catches up to them. They see the jobs or even the concept of working to live in general as a scam and feel like they’re winning some deep cultural war if they collect paychecks while making life difficult for their manager.

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1. watwut ◴[01 Oct 25 16:37 UTC] No.45439810[source]▶
I mean ... if a junior can stonewall a progress on a meeting then seniors there somehow horribly failed the meeting moderation. I have literally never seen that, because you can just make meeting without them the next time

Second, I seriously doubt juniors ability to "sow discontent" among more experienced seniors. They can latch on existing discontent, but juniors are too low on hierarchy and seniors have too much of opinions for juniors to have much power there.

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2. jdlshore ◴[01 Oct 25 21:41 UTC] No.45443887[source]▶
I’ve seen it. In my organization, open discussion and creating space for disagreement and alternate perspectives are the norm. A couple of junior programmers were upset about a process change, and weaponized the process to sow discontent at every retrospective, usually through vague “a lot of people have told me they’re unhappy about X” comments. A huge amount of energy was spent trying to take their concerns seriously and address them.

Eventually they were removed from the team. It should have been sooner, but the manager is very empathetic and supportive of his team. Morale immediately shot up and things are much better now, as well as more productive.

Not every workplace is a dog-eat-dog hellscape. In fact, I’d say they’re the minority. But you do reap what you sow: if you’re determined to see it as a zero-sum game and go looking for conflict, you’ll find it.

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3. hitarpetar ◴[02 Oct 25 14:35 UTC] No.45450191[source]▶
it sounds like you had a bad experience with two coworkers and are using them to generalize an entire generation.
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4. jdlshore ◴[02 Oct 25 17:42 UTC] No.45452879{3}[source]▶
I’m not sure how you’re getting that at all. GGP said they didn’t see how junior developers could “sow dissent” and I shared an example of where it happened. I wasn’t making any generalizations. (I also wasn’t on that team.)