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 way I explain it is that your company is not your friend, but that doesn’t make them your enemy.

The trap is when they see everything as a false dichotomy between friend and enemy. Enemies are something you avoid or even work against. When someone starts seeing their employer as the enemy and they don’t want to do things that help out their enemy, they trick themselves into poor performance out of spite.

Which leads to performance management and eventually firing if they don’t get a handle on it. This makes them even angrier, confirming their belief that their company is out to get them, leading to deeper spiraling into spite and poor performance.

Breaking someone out of that mentality is hard but everyone is so much happier once you’ve cracked them out of the “friend or enemy” dichotomous thinking.

In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Something like the analogue to the “Reddit-infused worker” archetype, where leadership is inappropriately cynical about their workers and see them as “the enemy”?

> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Of course. If you don’t see that, you’re missing the point.

In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employee? Or do you assume all employees are inherently good and do appropriate work for their pay and don’t need constant performance management to simply do their job?

In my posts I’m not talking about all juniors. I’m talking about a problematic subset. You seem to be assuming I’m generalizing to all of them. I am not. This is a phenomenon specific to a subset of juniors that is unfortunately a repeated pattern where they all share some very common and obvious characteristics. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to break them out of that mindset and have them join their much happier peers, but to be honest once someone is that deep into the cynical mindset it’s hard to wake them out of it.

> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employee?

Of course — I implied as much via the “inappropriately cynical“ characterization.

The tension between capital and labor is inescapable and ancient.

I didn’t think you were generalizing to all juniors. Rather, what caught my interest was that before this last message I perceived the perspective of capital in your words.