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Comment by aynyc | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna get some downvote, but I'll say this. Over the last 10 years, the quality of the juniors trends opposite of salary curve. We don't have a crazy interview process, nor are we working on anything ground breaking. By any measurement, we are a run of the mill company that don't offer top end salary but market competitive. The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the name nor the high end salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and HR suck in general. My no-hire/hire ratio is literally 50:1. Most of them can't even answer basic computer science questions such as under what condition that a binary search is useful, what's the difference between NoSQL database and relational database, or converting binary to decimal, etc.. They all talk about cloud and distributed computing, etc..

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I feel this pain.

We have an intern that is finishing a four year computer science degree that has no clue what git is, never used a log and all he presents is AI garbage.

I find it profoundly depressing to try and teach someone who has no interest in the craft.

> My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1

80% of the candidate I interview pass (leetcode style coding interview, as mandated by the company). This is actually annoying because I'll probably have to raise the bar and start rejecting very good candidates.

Sorry, flip that number around. 1 in 50 passes the interview.

> The quality of junior engineers I've interviewed has been abysmal. Maybe because we don't have the name nor the high end salary, or maybe our recruiting firms and HR suck in general. My hire/no-hire ratio is literally 50:1.

I'm sorry but to me this part reads like a humorous phrase that's popular in some circles in my region which goes:

"Maybe <list of negative things, usually correct characterizations of the speaker>, but at least <something even worse>"

The companies I worked for used automated coding quizzes like Codility to weed out the worst applicants, but I suspect you're already doing that.

How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?

> How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?

Because of our work is changing, faster than ever, not day to day but over time. You need a foundation to handle that change. My 2X years experience showed me that the people who has strong foundation handle the transition well. If I'm going to hire and invest and mentor, I want that person to be successful.

> How is them knowing when binary search is useful relevant to what they'll be doing at work should they get hired?

Because it goes directly to their understanding rather than whatever rote memorization they’ve done. Anything that involves rote memorization can be done, better, by LLMs. What’s in short supply are people with good critical thinking skills and the ability to deal effectively with new problems.

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