[m00x]

I've interviewed a ton of junior engineers. Our company was senior-heavy and we're just now diversifying.

80% of them should reconsider their career paths. They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.

They were never interested in software. They just saw the success of software engineers that put in a lot of work, and were fooled by the 2021-2024 hiring spree to think it would be easy.

[marginalia_nu]

To be fair junior developers almost universally kinda suck and you have to teach them the job. They'll take 10x the time to do a job a senior would, and do it in a way that is much more complicated than it needs to be.

The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.

[throwyawayyyy]

I think this is the thing. Companies have always been forced rather against their immediate interests into the cost of hiring junior engineers. As soon as the idea gained traction that this cost was unnecessary, companies stopped. So: we had the post-COVID tech slump, and then immediately after, by horrible coincidence for prospective junior engineers, LLMs turned out to be good at coding. Result: a missing generation of engineers, and a giant headache in about 15 years time. But which tech exec could possibly care about what happens in 15 years?

[j45]

Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years.

Too many if not most can't even change a single sentence in their curriculum in 1-2 years.

It doesn't mean University isn't worth it, it's worth less if you aren't self-directed learner building things.

[BoxFour]

Universities never kept up with current practices and to be honest I don’t really think it’s their job to.

Universities aren’t vocational schools. An undergraduate education can, at best, teach you how to learn complex topics independently and give you foundational knowledge you can build upon later whether you’re going into industry, pursuing a PhD, or doing something unrelated.

The place for you to learn “practical” software development is an internship or an entry-level role, assisted with a lot of self-directed learning that hopefully university made possible for you.

[j45]

Universities left liberal arts to pursue the STEM funding and also cover vocational schools.

They also universally advertise themselves for many programs that are current.

The "teaching you how to think" part isn't out of line at all, however, applying it in the real world has to be taken relative to what students are explicitly told before registering in university as to the outcomes they will achieve.

[ghaff]

Sortof. Top research universities are mostly not vocational schools. But they do mostly figure on you picking up, say, Python on your own alongside the algorithms classs (and a ton of basic mechanical stuff).

I was a TA in grad school and did some tutoring and some students just didn't have the math basics they needed. I could help with a few things but couldn't really teach remedial high school math.

[bee_rider]

This is the well known weird thing about programming, right? University students learn CS, happen to also pick up some programming trade skills as a side effect, and then get hired as software craftspeople. The coincidentally learned skills are never quite up to date, just close enough.

But nobody wants to set up programming trade schools or apprenticeships so shrug.

[BoxFour]

Programming trade schools were (are they still?) quite popular for a long time - see lambda school et al.

They weren’t a panacea either.

[ghaff]

I have to imagine those are the people being hit hardest at the moment.

[marginalia_nu]

Problem is that programming is as much practice as it is theory. You need years practical programming experience to be good at programming, and universities are really not set up to provide that.

One might argue that it might not be a bad idea to have apprenticeships like they do in traditional trade crafts. I'd argue that this is what the junior programmer role is.

[j45]

Being both a self-taught developer before school (practice) as well as learning in post secondary (theory), the market hires for capability, developing it, and not potential.

Junior programmer roles are not internships or apprenticeships at all. Internships before the students graduate are internships.

Instead, asking an employer to act as the employee's parents, and pay to educate the new graduate so they can disappear in 1-2 years makes an increasingly harder choice.

This is part of the reason that Junior dev positions were not succeeding, prior to AI and the pandemic.

[mschuster91]

> Universities haven't kept up with the pace of change in software development in 1-3 years.

Maybe, just maybe, companies should invest into training again instead of outsourcing training to universities and saddle the prospects with the cost in the form of student debt? FFS we used to tell our children "if a job requires you to pay for entry, you're getting scammed" - and yet, we've all accepted it with "academia", "coding bootcamps" and god knows what else.

Universities should be a place for the gifted to advance science, not be degree mills for large companies too goddamn lazy and penny-pinching!

[ghaff]

The problem is we've ended up in this place where most companies don't do a lot of training and employees often don't stick around for more than a couple of years. You can finger point about the chicken and the egg but it's more or less where we've ended up in a lot of cases.

Extensive training made a lot more sense where people stuck around for 15-30 years but I expect a lot of people here would find that ludicrous.

[mschuster91]

> The problem is we've ended up in this place where most companies don't do a lot of training and employees often don't stick around for more than a couple of years.

There's nothing preventing a company from saying "hey, we're paying for your training and expecting 5 years of service in return, and in exchange for this, you get guaranteed 2-5% above inflation".

And if government would have some sort of sense, they would force companies to act like that again.

[ghaff]

There's a difference between informal expectations and requirements. We don't have indentured servitude in the US although if an employee does quit right after a paid relocation, a company may try to claw back those expenses. (Not sure there's any real legal backing to that or if it would be worth it for the company to try too hard.)

[coderatlarge]

testing is the new coding

[cassianoleal]

> they're clearly in it just for the money

It's a job, working for someone else. What other reason is there?

[chung8123]

Some people have a passion for their craft and use that to generate money. There is a difference between people who just are there for the money and people that are there for the money and the implementing their craft.

[cassianoleal]

Such a large part of the job is dumb meetings, politics and trying to work around bad governance. The only reason to put up with all that is money, because one needs to pay the bills.

Remove the need to pay bills and you'll be left with no one applying for a crappy job making money for someone else.

Implementing the craft has nothing to do with putting up with employment and employers, workplace harassment, waking up at unhealthy hours, wasting most of one's time awake doing things for someone else...

[awepofiwaop]

> they're clearly in it just for the money

That's often how jobs work. I happen to like my job, but let's not pretend like everyone is going to make sufficient money following their most passionate interests.

[vunderba]

That might be true, but I never met a ME/EE major who wasn’t passionate about their craft. Not once.

Anecdotal in my experience, but that also used to be the case for most CS majors back when I graduated... but that was well before the rise of the FAANGs.

[cosmodisk]

I'm yet to meet anyone even remotely associated with tech ( let's call it all IT) that is good and only cares about money. Debugging code at for 8 hours straight is most people's hell on earth but some people love it and that love doesn't come through paycheck alone.

[cassianoleal]

> is good and only cares about money

I do the job for money. Period.

I also happen to really enjoy computers, systems, etc. I enjoyed most of the jobs I've had, but the reason why I was there doing the job, as opposed to being at home nerding out for my benefit alone, was always the need to pay bills.

[sixtyj]

Everyone perceives the world differently. For example, I like to look for mistakes and I spot them (in a text while editing), but I have a friend who’s hopeless at that. On the other hand, he’s good at seeing projects through to the end, which is something I’m not good at.

So it really is good to find people who are a good fit for a specific position - and who, in the worst-case scenario, would do the work even for free or without anyone supervising them.

The question is whether the younger generation has grown up with the motto “money first and at any cost”… Not everyone, of course, but when I see how everything everywhere is reduced just to monetary value, it makes me feel a little down sometimes.

[disgruntledphd2]

To be fair, my perfect job is third level teaching, but that wouldn't support me buying a house where I live, so I'm a data scientist (which I also enjoy).

Housing in particular is a driver of people optimizing for cash.

[awepofiwaop]

Based on their actions, virtually all successful high level executives in tech only care about money and they don't care about making good products, etc.

[sixtyj]

If people are unable to find joy in their paid work even after some time, they should consider doing something else.

For sure, sufficient money is important part of this equation.

But I strongly believe that if you find (your sort of) fun in what you do then you become faster and more efficient at it.

Edit: Cleaning, nursing etc. Yes there are professions that almost no one wants to do. But that doesn’t mean that these people do it just for money.. this is prejudice that if you don’t like it and don’t have fun that other people are the same. No, they aren’t.

[sdevonoes]

Wheres the joy in cleaning public toilets? Should all of those workers leave?

[sixtyj]

It is a prejudice. You have to ask them. Ask nurses why they do what they do. Ask house cleaning stuff why they do it. For sure, a lot of people stay in their jobs because they don’t have any opportunity. But if you go deep enough you find out that a lot of them found some sort of fun while doing their cleaning-public-toilet-sort-of-job. (I have done my research so I know what I am talking about.)

[oblio]

The real test for your theory is what people do when they're not getting paid. I have never in my life heard of a large forum/subreddit/WhatsApp group for cleaning toilets. There are no toilet cleaning meetups.

Some, actually many, jobs are just shitty.

[dingaling]

Finding fun moments to make a job tolerable is very, very far away from doing a job because they enjoy it.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

I've been programming for 25 years now because I really like it. But if it didn't pay, I'd do something else, because I really like not being poor even more.

[coderatlarge]

i don’t condone cheating but i also don’t blame anyone who follows a generally benign career path for its financial benefits.

[01100011]

I wouldn't blame them either, but I sure as hell wouldn't hire them.

[coderatlarge]

I’ve seen passionate artisans waste way more time than focused, disciplined, mercenaries; i think it’s a situational choice

[Loughla]

Why? If they do good work and meet or exceed expectations, who cares why they're doing it?

[knollimar]

The problem is they do good enogub work or don't care about the quality when they should push back.

Or they will refuse to self invest, which makes them a worse long term investment for a company.

[rvz]

> The problem is they do good enogub work or don't care about the quality when they should push back.

With that sort of carelessness in the quality of your sentence, I probably would not hire you.

Seniors and above lead by example.

[knollimar]

Are you implying something about my spelling on a phone in my free time transfers to my work performance? Silly if so

[datakan]

That’s every profession. I interviewed someone once that claimed Linux skills on his resume. I asked a couple basic questions and his response was, “well I don’t know that but my dad does”.

Great, when is he applying?

[geor9e]

I got a degree in mechanical engineering. There's these two technicians under me that for years I thought we just hired off the street and maybe they graduated high school. I have to show them how to use terminal. I have to show them how to fix a Python script.

Imagine my horror when I found out recently both of them have a computer science bachelor's degree from a UC Santa Cruz.

[siva7]

I have no doubt any junior, no matter their background or degree, will break into tech fine like all of us did if they are in for the reasons we got in - being nerds and fascinated by software. You can't fake that.

[ghaff]

I do think that's part of it. A lot of people jumped into the roles when they saw it as an alternative to other types of STEM or, heck, any work and was likely to pay a lot more money.

[sys_64738]

> They glaringly cheat during interviews, they can't answer basic software questions, and they're clearly in it just for the money.

I'm curious what they do to cheat during interview?

[icedchai]

They simply ask Claude or ChatGPT. I've had a few interviews with individuals who were definitely cheating. Strange pauses. Obviously typing and then reading from the screen, giving incredibly verbose answers...

[01100011]

Going back 29 years to the beginning of my career, I'd say maybe 50% of the graduates in my class, probably more, either were not cut out to be engineers or didn't really have any passion for it(or both).

I can't imagine what the ratio is now after everyone was pushing their kids into coding and every douchbag chasing a high salary tried to enter the field. Maybe close to 90%?

I can't imagine there is much of an issue for bright, passionate folks just starting their career if they can manage to communicate their passion and skills to a company. Sure, they might not go directly to a fang, but there are literally tens of thousands of companies who staff engineers and if I were new that's where I'd target to get started.

[Fraterkes]

Alright, I’m at the start of my career but do have a genuine burning interest in programming. Am I fucked or not?

[coderatlarge]

I’m at the end of my career and got lucky to share your interests at the beginning of a specialist boom

in your place i’d focus on delivering big wins for end-users via multiple roles ; i personally believe the days of being a specialist in one type of stack (ex: “i’m a ui developer”) are over , in this next stage we’ll say “i build products for young people looking for educational opportunities “ ; ie you’ll beed to cut across use-cases and disciplines in a way that was atypical just a few years ago

[weatherlite]

My honest take is forget that burning interest in programming, it likely won't matter that much in a few years. There may be a need for technically strong people who understand whatever the domain the company works on well I say focus on that. Knowing all kinds of deep python/c++ trivia is a decaying skill imo.

[ThrowawayR2]

Depends on whether you leverage that interest to motivate you to sharpen your skills so that you're better at your job than your peers. If you're interested but don't do anything with that interest, then you are still in the same boat as the uninterested people.

[jemmyw]

If you're in that 20% that actually has an interest in the work then you'll probably be fine.

[coderatlarge]

actually my feeling on this is that pretty soon unless you’re in the top 1% of performers for a software task it will become difficult to hold a role at a frontier company.

[disgruntledphd2]

They are hiring far too much and far too quickly for this to be the case, right now at least.

[coderatlarge]

yes it may be valid for large values of “pretty soon”. the market is going to be irrational for as long as it likes :)

[kappar]

> They glaringly cheat during interviews

How so? I am curious what cheating you are experiencing and how you detect it.

[brcmthrowaway]

Exactly my thought. It's the same psychopathic cohort when quant finance was hot. Graduate to a 500k job? Too hard to refuse.

[trueno]

honestly at this point putting out a software-coded job requisition is getting the interview cheaters full stop now.

our noob to hero pipeline these days is just requisitions that cover some basics but flat out say its an entry position and a chance to step into something new. we quickly weed out the overqualified and find candidates who seem like theyre genuinely just looking to find a way to break into something new, and our interview process is largely centered around getting to know them as a person what they're all about and we seem to do an okay job triangulating "this kid is curious, seems like they'd glue well with everyone here". mildly grill on some technical stuff but mostly just to get a read on where they're at & make assessments on what we're willing to teach. we actually don't do whiteboarding coding exercises or any of those challenges, not really a fan of those and i've never felt like they were a useful litmus test on whether or not someone will be successful in a role. people can hide a lot of insufficiencies/ego/insecurity/toxicity behind coding exercises, polished resumes and mastering interviews. it is of our opinion that the journey to expertise/excellence also involves having a good grasp on who you are as a person & who you want to be, and a solid moral compass you can navigate with. because there will be highs and there will be some very low lows, any journey to excellence sails these seas & we're very interested in people who can be open and honest about where they might be.

at this point we've reasoned out that the normal requisition is just going to get an influx of people who think they're charmers and can rehearse an interview and then pan out to be a nothingburger. we've had a couple of those in the past few years and it's annoying. we don't hire often do but when we do we're just interested in having someone around that we like and seems eager to learn, we've had great luck with this formula and this seems to pluck out people who get lost in a sea of incredible looking resumes, we give them a good learning track and goals and they seem to leapfrog past every goalpost we've put in front of them. as far as juniors go, we like hearing about other weird non-computer problems they've solved in life. when we find the right candidate we kind of just know when we talk with them, they universally are pretty open about their own shortcomings but just demonstrate some sort of very passionate need to build or solve things and find a community where their contributions are valued. we see the mission as needing to build them up as a person first and the nerdy stuff is the fun sidequest they can join us and chase dopamine with. we all enjoy teaching & watching people grow so it works out pretty well and we've transitioned a couple to senior positions in the past 4-5 years. people who, when we first interviewed them years ago, may have not had any business on paper being in this field. people we're proud to have watched pan out to be incredible resources, some of the heaviest hitters our org has seen, and if im being real at this point really great friends.

[cognitiveinline]

Everyone non-remote is moving onsite interviews fast.