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It's brutal, my son with a CS degree hasn't been able to get to single live interview ina year. A couple of screens has been it. I've reached out to my network,

• georgeburdell 23d ago
  I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable that I pushed my manager to forego the full-time work experience requirement that we have always had so that new hires don’t even know the old way of working and can just reframe the field in terms of AI. AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well.
  • asdfman123 23d ago
    But the AI transition is different than old technological changes in that you don't really have to learn anything. You don't have to memorize keywords and new concepts like you'd have to for, say, a new JavaScript framework. If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you. Basically the only hard part for old people is getting USED to using AI. Some haven't, but it only takes a few weeks to do. After that, experience and taste really comes in handy and that can't be developed overnight.
    • throw849494499 23d ago
      [flagged]
      • darth_avocado 23d ago
        Why not use your actual account instead of creating a throwaway one if you feel so comfortable saying this?
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 23d ago
      >If you don't know something about AI, you can just ask it and it will tell you. If your questions are sharp, probing for detail, and intelligent. Have you seen how people question AIs? It's as if they can't even conceive of the AI being able to supply specific detail.
      • Kim_Bruning 23d ago
        I'd love to see examples of that! Just from debates on HN alone, I get the idea that there's huge deltas, and I'm getting really really curious.
        • tstrimple 23d ago
          [dead]
        • Kim_Bruning 23d ago
          Point of order: On the one hand I'm not sure people quoting output from software where relevant is entirely what the 'no ai' rule is about. But it's arguable, fine. For this kind of task, is linking to pastebin etc acceptable instead? Either way thank you tstrimple for going in and looking!
    • SoftTalker 23d ago
      Yeah that's my feeling about it. I don't code much these days so have not used AI very much in that respect, so for me it's basically a superpowered search agent that can formulate relevant answers based on the details I provide, without the "why do you want to do that" or "tell us what you're really trying to achieve" that you'd so often get on tech forums. But if I had to use AI for coding I don't think that it would take me very much time at all to get into the swing of it. I wrote code by hand for decades, so I know how to judge whether it's producing something that looks reasonable.
      • asdfman123 23d ago
        Yep, that's been my experience of it. Fun note though, my work these days often involves telling AI to solve a problem and me asking it why it wants to do something a certain way. It often has to patiently explain something like why the bazel rules need to be modified to accomplish my ends goals, and has to reiterate key concepts about a part of the codebase I'm unfamiliar with these days. Really the only reason I'm there is to make sure it makes the changes as clean and efficient as possible, without unnecessary complexity that's hard to read.
        • joquarky 20d ago
          > telling AI to solve a problem and me asking it why it wants to do something a certain way Just keep your guard up for when the answer to "why" may be just a post-hoc "rationalization".
  • seanmcdirmid 23d ago
    I think the problem is evaluation. They can't tell who the good juniors are with respect to the new skills that they are looking for, so they go for experience instead. It doesn't seem sustainable though for obvious reasons. > AI is the biggest threat in over a generation to seniors who aren’t investing in keeping up. Managers without an instinct for AI are an endangered species as well. New tech has always been the biggest threat to seniors who aren't investing in keeping up.
  • armcat 23d ago
    Same here. The absolute star in my team is the youngest. But! I think what's happening is that the distribution in this age group has shifted. Essentially the absolute best (high IQ, super ambitious, great communicator, cracked builder types) are now even better positioned than ever before. But the majority of mass in this age category now suffers, i.e. everyone that's "good" or "very good" but not exceptional/brilliant.
  • stefan_ 23d ago
    The juniors I have seen don't even try to understand anymore what they are building. They don't understand the product, they don't understand the technology. So everything AI is building for them is nonsense. "Reviewing" it is impossible. Some of them think they are being extra clever having Claude process review comments for them. Even if you hire one, this way they are out the door within the month.
  • risyachka 23d ago
    If you find a proper senior dev - it will be like 10 or more of that junior you described. Because you can’t shortcut experience. And AI multiplies that. I’ve seen what ai-focused good senior dev can do and it is scary.
    • georgeburdell 23d ago
      We can’t find seniors like that yet, even though our pay is nearly top tier, because hiring is so broken right now. Most hires come from referrals so it’s recycling the same people between different companies, and those people don’t have good AI experience.
  • EagnaIonat 23d ago
    Depends on the nature of the work. In highly specialised work the junior would train with a senior while the senior can offload the easier work. Now the senior can use the AI instead of dealing with a junior. Plus the biggest danger I’ve seen numerous times is the junior engineer can’t easily tell if the AI is wrong. They either accept it as correct or spend more time trying to fix AI output with an AI in an area they don’t have the skills for.
  • elmer2 23d ago
    On the contrary, new generations are skipping the fundamentals and using AI instead. Seniors will become more valuable as that knowledge is lost and AI isn't capable of full replacenent. I use AI daily and it takes almost no extra brain power to use.
  • francisofascii 23d ago
    How are the youngest more productive than the seniors? As an aside, I have seen that the newest employees are performing better than those hired during Covid. I think the quality of recent hires are just better because no one is hiring, and so many quality candidates are available.
    • georgeburdell 23d ago
      I didn’t say “most productive”, there was a qualifier attached. A person productive with AI is capable in a different way than the existing folks who are struggling to keep up with their jobs and retool to AI
  • JeremyNT 23d ago
    > I don’t understand this logic. If I’m being honest, the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. It's high variance. A young person can move fast because they lack the accrued assumptions of a senior, but that also means they can quickly move in the wrong direction because they lack the wisdom to identify mistakes before they pile up. "Use AI" isn't really a skill, getting an implementation is now as easy as google for an answer was for our generation. A senior can trivially learn this. But sniffing out the bullshit and knowing when you're going astray still requires a critical eye that not everybody is going to have. So it seems reasonable to me that moving more slowly and being more cautious, letting the uncs use their knowledge to keep things from going too far afield, is a really smart idea.
  • wuschel 23d ago
    > the most productive people with AI on my team are the two youngest. They don’t have product wisdom, yes, but the gap is so noticeable Is it Software or another problem domain? What problem are they attacking, what stack/method are they using?
  • jghn 23d ago
    There are effectively 2 schools of thought on this. One states that more junior people will excel. Younger people tend to be more hip to new tech trends, more natively immersed in changing times. And the contemporary AI tools eradicate any knowledge & wisdom gap that the seniors may hold over them. Thus, they'll be faster. The other school states that the most important thing right now is the wisdom of experience. That the AI tools have made everything *but* the wisdom pretty much an afterthought. Thus, there's no point in having someone who doesn't have deep wisdom. Which is right? Probably a little bit of both, depending on one's exact needs.
  • orwin 23d ago
    In my experience in the past year, new hires, juniors or mid-level programmers (probably even "seniors") who use AI to contribute quickly have a big issue of now ownership or understanding of the code and of the issues that we might encounter. They contribute very little during meeting because they have trouble understanding the subject matter. We are a network tooling team, and now we think our next hire will be a young network engineer who probably will generate code that we will have to review carefully, but we have to do that anyway, because we can't really afford having our engineers stuck on a basic knowledge of networking issues. In any case, thanks to AI everything have a SDK so we won't have to make in-house library to automate everything (thousand of hours making libraries for cisco, forti, zscalers and other lost, but to be honest, good riddance), so the demand for engineers in my situation will decrease.
  • dimaaan 23d ago
    From my experience. There is a reason why youngest developers are more productive. They accept everything Agent suggests. They don't understand or care. They rely on your review of the Agent output from prompt they copy-pasted from JIRA. So you spent your time reviewing it instead of your own work. From study titled "The Widening Gap: The Benefits and Harms of Generative AI for Novice Programmers" https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116 https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116 >> Without building this solution, and instead just taking what ChatGPT generated, they had skipped crucial steps in the programming problem solving process, and were now lost When you skip the problem-solving process and take the LLM's first output, you're not building the cognitive framework needed to debug or maintain that code.
    • esafak 23d ago
      I had a junior happily accept the agent's suggestions, bugs and all. Her productivity ended with her tenure; meat proxies add no value.
• randycupertino 23d ago
  Right now my company seems to be only hiring people they already know or have worked with before. Every single hire in the last 4 months I've seen get on-boarded has been back-channeled. I've had 4 direct referrals and none of them have gotten in but all made it to the final round just to be surpassed by someone the hiring manager already knew and liked from their previous teams. Even with a strong referral it's hard!
  • dver 23d ago
    I had a job search as well and same. Previous slam dunks that stalled at final interviews with someone who had a higher recommendation. Fortunately I have some unique skills that allowed me to land a gig.
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  • 33e 23d ago
    Why is this? Is it partly influenced by the fact that LinkedIn etc suck?
    • HWR_14 23d ago
      A known value is worth a lot.
    • randycupertino 23d ago
      I think it's trust. If you worked with someone and you know they are awesome and you are running a team you want to hire people who are known entities that you know will hit their deliverables, do a great job and won't be weird or cause friction with cross functional teams. Also of course there's always politics to navigate. I had a candidate I loved for my team who made it through 8 rounds and panel interview with strong hiring recommendations but we got overruled by our skip level who wanted to hire her friend. The interesting thing is people recommend "networking" and people think it's like... meeting people at industry events or reaching out to linkedin connections but that's not really how I see networking working in real life. The networking that actually gets people jobs is networks from people you've already worked with before, or your professor is on the board of the company or like.. your parents know the exec team really well etc. So new grads truly are disadvantaged.
• y-curious 23d ago
  We hired one junior out of maybe 10 hires. I don’t really know where to slot them in currently, as they lack the background knowledge of what is good or bad from AI. It’s a shame because years ago, I would have hired them and pointed them at a million small projects. Best of luck to your son. I wish I had advice
  • dver 23d ago
    Thanks, it's been tough on him. I'm glad we're able to support him through this, others are not as fortunate. He's looking into pivots now and taking flight lessons.
    • 8cvor6j844qw_d6 23d ago
      Just curious if there's really no offer at all or offers with lowballs? I know a 2 of senior devs that got laid off from different times and one is approaching nearly a year of unemployment with no offers and another approaching half a year with few offers but elected to continue looking due the offered salary not matching their expectations.
      • dver 23d ago
        He hasn't gotten to an in person interview stage yet.
      • johnnyanmac 23d ago
        Been a few years for me. I'm technically "employed" (legally speaking), but I've been trying to find full time work on and off for 3 years, now. Thousands of applications. Dozens of recruiter calls. Maybe 20 or so processes past that first call. 3-4 that seemed to be going somewhere but went nowhere. One was a ghost after 5 rounds of interviews. The market isn't just rough, it's downright disrespectful at times.
    • y-curious 23d ago
      Does he do any side projects? Where you can support him most is feed him some problems he can build a solution for. I think working through the pain points of building an end to end product and putting that on his resume will go far. I also would recommend he finds non-SWE jobs at companies for the time being too. I mentioned in another comment but I was a “solutions engineer” aka customer support. It was minimally technical and boring but it had plenty of time to upskill and move laterally. I am a new father to a 3 month old son. I will be nudging him to be an electrician if he has no obvious career interests. Union, good pay, endless work and lots of opportunities to do your own thing. It’s scary to even consider what the job market will look like in 22 years.
• Tade0 23d ago
  This sounds much like the civil engineering crisis in my region of the world after the 2008 financial crisis. There was barely any new construction going on for a couple of years and once it started anew, there was a gap as while people were retiring, new hires weren't replacing them. I guess we're just going to shrink as a field until the market won't be able to handle it.
  • glimshe 23d ago
    Our field started as a niche for geeks. For a long time, CS paid you the average for engineering work - hardly equivalent to six figures today for most with the exception of seniors. It's still like that on most of the world. Many people here lived through ridiculous times. It was possible to make 1M in a year without incredible skills/hard work. Big tech was and still is full of these people. I'm not saying that was a bad thing at all, but it always felt unsustainable. CS salaries will decline and fewer people will want to be software developers, balancing the market. Then it may go back to where it came from with the geeks sticking around. No more coding bros. Maybe that's okay. When I got my degree, I never expected more than a slightly above average salary. I do this because I love it and can't imagine doing anything else. I was lucky and I'm thankful for the luck I had.
    • dimaaan 23d ago
      That resonates me. When I was in high school, I lied to girls about what I was planning to major in just so I wouldn't sound like some antisocial nerd. Nobody back then thought coding was cool. It was just the thing the weird kids did in the computer lab.
      • DeluluDon 23d ago
        Yes, this is why 60% now prefer being single.
    • eli_gottlieb 23d ago
      Seconded. The year I graduated from college, the median CS graduate was employed making about $65k/year USD. I got offers for $80k/year and thought that was pretty hot shit.
• A_SIGINT 23d ago
  Can you give me an email to reach out to you at? My company may need an intern/Junior here soon. I'd be happy to take a look at his resume. Fully remote, Full stack .NET in addition to AI/Python/data-science work
  • dver 23d ago
    dverespey@gmail.com is mine. In my profile as well.
  • dimaaan 23d ago
    Honestly, that is way too much for a junior. I'd side-eye that list as senior .NET dev full stack. You're asking one person to do frontend/js/css, backend/databases/Redis/MQ, and Python with all that math behind data-science, but i doubt he can understand and review all of this
    • A_SIGINT 23d ago
      Of course I wouldn't give all that to a Junior! It's just what they could expect to work with if they stayed long term.
• dayvid 23d ago
  There's no mercy for people learning the ropes now. The lower latency of LLMs make people impatient to deal with growing pains.
• david38 23d ago
  Agreed. My daughter with a degree in math from Berkeley served coffee and tutored for a year before being accepted into a math PhD program. Amazing
• mk89 23d ago
  Make him do side projects, something he can explain and be proud of. Online communities, some github projects he might be interested, ...anything. Let him contribute to something, yes for free, so that potential future coworkers can see 1) who he is, 2) what he can do, 3) how he approaches people.
• foxyv 23d ago
  It took me about 2 years out of college to get a job in my field. This was back in 2014-2015. This is just kind of how it goes nowadays. The trick is to make sure you don't stop learning while you are job hunting. I pretended that I would never get a job and my only hope was to build my own products so I spent my time learning how to build my own stuff and maybe sell it. Meanwhile, my resume started having more and more skills. Things are changing, so I can't make any guarantees. But don't get too discouraged. Pay attention to what is in demand like Python, PySpark, and PyTorch. Make sure that the next time it rains soup your son has a bucket.