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 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.

They aren't that wrong however. Over the last two-three years alone we've seen waves of layoffs. Layoffs from FAANGs hit the headlines, but so many more happened without hitting the news.

And the thing is young people... They adapt.

They usually don't have the cultural baggage we older people have, so they often see things for what they truly are without any rose-tinted-glasses from past better times.

Their grandparents were able to get a fairly stable job at a company, stay there until retirement and grow a family. Their grandparents were able to switch jobs IF they wanted to. On the other hand, kids nowadays know they will likely be fired at some point, irrespective of their performance, and that they need to play the game for what it is.

Can you really blame them?

It feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. If you go into a new job, full of cynicism, doing the bare minimum (or less), acting like everyone there is out to get you, then you shouldn't be surprised when you're the first to go when layoffs happen (or sooner, even).

Yes, the labor market has changed, and in many ways not for the better. But layoffs are not new. I remember my dad being afraid of them back when I was a teenager in the 90s. I remember him getting hit by one of them, even, and scrambling to figure out what to do (fortunately he was re-hired by the same company, in a different group). I survived layoffs in the three following decades; yes, the most recent waves were brutal, but I wouldn't say they were anything special compared to, say, ~20 years ago.

You can recognize a company for what it is (a capitalist organization that cares more about next quarter's numbers than whether or not you still have a job), but also be a positive, professional person, who goes in and does good work every day, gets along with coworkers and managers, and doesn't play games. You can be realistic without being a toxic cynic.