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baq

Regardless of its realized effectiveness improvements it froze the intern/junior hiring pipelines.

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> Regardless of its realized effectiveness improvements it froze the intern/junior hiring pipelines.

Would be great to see some industry-wide stats here. There are three OTHER factors are play here:

1. Record numbers of CS undergrads (more supply)

2. More remote-CS/tech grad programs (yet more supply, many overseas)

3. Bursting of the tech-vc bubble (less demand)

4. AI (???)

Not sure how much can be attributed to AI. That said, i'd confidently say our team is at least 2x more productive than 3yrs ago. Huge numbers of loose change get thrown to the LLM to solve, instead of writing clever algos, etc.

a fifth plausible force here is that tech companies simply hired too aggressively during the zero interest rate policy, covid-related digitalization, engineering hiring rush of 2021-2023.

things are getting back to normal actually, and the companies who are embarrassed to be making cutbacks are saying it's actually because they're using AI, not because they over-hired.

Also, looming potential financial crisis, and massive uncertainty. Like, under the current economic conditions, a lot of companies will be in wait-and-see mode, and will be slowing or pausing hiring _anyway_.

The company I used to work for did the opposite by freezing senior+ hiring. Their argument is that juniors are more value for money.

I've seen the opposite -- more senior hiring because seniors can now outsource a portion of rote work to the LLM -- everything from trivial utilities to docs to testing.

Also, I get dozens of calls/emails a month from my undergrad/grad alma matter. The bottom seems to have fallen out of the labor force when even ivy leave and top-5 cs/tech schools have students desperately seeking entry level jobs.

To be fair, as I mentioned on another comment, there are other factors:

1. Record numbers of CS undergrads (more supply)

2. More remote-CS/tech grad programs (yet more supply, many overseas)

3. Bursting of the tech-vc bubble (less demand)

That is a poor argument, regardless of the salary. Juniors are a net loss for at least the first year in almost any environment.

Nevertheless I see it happening as well. Juniors left to roam freely in new projects where a senior drafted a happy path then was sent to the next project. Say hello to the way of outsourcing.

They made it work well. They had highly decentralised teams and used a bunch of no-code and serverless tools. They also knew that juniors and interns would work longer hours and give less push-back when gives somewhat crazy requests.

I'm not saying everyone should do this. Just wanted to give another perspective.

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