[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