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There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

(workweave.dev)
263 points mooreds | 1 comments | 30 Sep 25 03:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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hibikir ◴[30 Sep 25 03:54 UTC] No.45421738[source]▶
Hiring juniors is always great if you, somehow, have a much better filter for finding the stars than the rest of the market. But if you don't, hiring bad juniors is a disaster: No different than outsourcing bits to a bad satellite office.

So are you actually good at finding the good juniors in this very difficult environment? Can you change your hiring machinery to improve, as most traditional ways have stopped working? Because hiring a lot of juniors that don't work out sure can kill companies.

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goalieca ◴[30 Sep 25 04:03 UTC] No.45421781[source]▶
Hire one junior per team. Don’t overload your senior staff with OKRs and managerial tasks. Let mentorship and apprenticeship happen.
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throwawaysleep ◴[30 Sep 25 04:21 UTC] No.45421859[source]▶
I guess what’s the value of the junior there? Why is that superior to just having the seniors have their heads down coding and not being pestered by a junior?
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_heimdall ◴[30 Sep 25 04:57 UTC] No.45422035[source]▶
As an industry we can't just cut off the pipeline of future senior devs.

This is the fundamental contradiction of LLMs. The promise today is that the tooling can largely replace juniors, and honestly that may be true.

The hope behind that promise, though, is that the tech will catch up with senior devs before the pipeline dries up and that we have found a sustainable social and economic model before humans truly aren't employable at any meaningful numbers. That hope seems ill placed to me, but I guess we'll see if we develop such skilled LLM or similar tools at all.

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nickff ◴[30 Sep 25 05:42 UTC] No.45422287[source]▶
The problem is that if everyone hops jobs every 9-18 months, it’s not worth training up juniors because the employer will never get to benefit. It seems that we’re in an unfortunate, but stable equilibrium.
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kelnos ◴[01 Oct 25 07:48 UTC] No.45435355[source]▶
This has been the state of things long before LLMs, and companies still hired and trained up juniors, only to see them leave after 18 months.

But that's fine. The junior you trained up will be more effective at their next job, and the junior your competitor trained up will be more effective when you hire them at your company. Again, that's how it's been for far longer than we've had LLMs.

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1. program_whiz ◴[02 Oct 25 09:16 UTC] No.45447663[source]▶
The only problem with this utopian view of the world is the game theory. My company which doesn't hire juniors gets to benefit from others training them up for free. As a result, companies will opt not to train them (since this is optimal) -- which means they don't get trained. Classic prisoner's dilemma / free rider situation.