What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending.

IMO one of the worst decisions we've ever made because 80% of the time the interns we take on and then hire are absolute superstars.

And even before we ended it we had a couple of years where we stopped competing for talent from Waterloo. I guess Trump made that harder but yeah bad decisions all around.

This is a huge factor. I’ve seen teams admit that they are too “senior heavy” and then still hire senior engineers over junior when the rare position opens up.

I’ve also seen teams cut college hiring and internships because head count is tight and they don’t expect positions to open up.

A lot of my past employers built their process around requesting additional headcount first, then determining the budget for the role second. It was in every manager’s best interest to maximize the budget for the role so they could hire the best candidate they could find. In practice this meant arguing that you needed someone senior or staff at minimum. Then the job posting got written. There was always a theory that we’d take great juniors but they would get filtered out before getting far enough. When they were told they had to lay off 2 people, they would cut the least experienced and hold on to the most experienced.

At other companies managers were given budgets and left to manage their headcount to fit. This created an inverse situation where they would try to get 3-4 juniors instead of 2-3 seniors or 2 staff level people. When layoffs came you would see teams choose to drop the one highly paid person instead of cutting 2 juniors.

So while your company lost their juniors, I know a lot of people angry that their companies let go of experienced people to keep the cheaper juniors around. Little policy changes can have an outsize effect

Remote work would seem to have a potential impact on mentoring and future development but that seems like a longer term trend. But, maybe, as the article suggests, some companies that are heavily remote are thinking that entry employees are going to be harder to develop--but that's a problem for the future so better not hire them today.

Generally I'd get all my deliverables done by the time that anyone else showed up, so after standup I'd just circulate and see what everyone was working on, and if I saw someone who was frustrated, I'd see if they wanted help. This let me help train and teach the kids, which I really enjoyed.

That's the one reason I don't like fully remote/zoom jobs. I really enjoy the interaction and the ability to teach.

We did indeed notice it took very long to get them up to speed.

They didn't really get going until the lockdowns were fully lifted and people returned to office.

Hard to tell what would have happened without the two+ years of Covid restrictions, but with a sample size of two I feel like it wasn't a fluke.

the real glory days were the 70's when we all had to share a single multitasked computer, and the terminals (not enough for everybody) were all connected by wires and formed a sort of hive around the mini in a room called "the bullpen". Senior, junior, multiple unrelated projects sitting shoulder to shoulder, the shared tips and techniques, the humor, man it was so much fun. The day my coworker learned to play Ride of the Valkyries on the VT-100 keyboard due to a bug in the autorepeat function... music! the shared computer disk could not have held a single mp3 had mp3's even been invented yet

I just replied further down ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48353154 ) about this. You are entirely right, but it is also something that can largely be mitigated if companies and teams are self aware enough. I am not going to rewrite that entire comment but in addition to what I wrote there any self respecting company over a certain size should still have a junior training process in place that spans at least a year possibly two. Letting individual teams or even individuals figure out how to handle juniors always would give you wildly different results, but being in the office this was often hidden because some juniors would organically find other people for support. If you are not physically in the office you need to make sure they have other check-in moments with each other. Allow for moments where they can meet people outside their teams (knowledge presentations, workshops, etc).

I still think working hybrid (but one day per week imho is often enough) is the sweet spot for many reasons. But overall I mostly think that the FT (as often) is making excuse for things that boil down to "no, the main reason is actually corporate cost savings and refusal to invest in core processes".

Of course other persons have other needs though

Pair Programming in person - one computer & one person looking over another's shoulder usually.

Pair Programming remotely - two computers & you can easily swap control of either's device or change who's sharing their screen.

The only thing working in an office wins on imo is building very close relationships with co-workers. I think physical presence is a human thing that cannot be beat. You can still build great relationships remotely but they're not the same. From the point of view of a company, remote relationships might be good enough or even better as they can prevent people becoming "to close" and ending up on the news at a concert together.

$DAYJOB might as well be fully-remote since the team is heavily distributed and it's the same problem.

I think it's a problem for all workers, not just juniors. Maybe 1 person in the org sees the whole elephant. Way too many "organizational branch mispredictions" from incomplete mental models colliding.

There is probably some AI-caused firing coming soon on companies that vibe-coded so much that people abandon their products. I expect Microsoft start is on Github.

I have been repeating for months that AI hasn't caused any firing. But it doesn't seem to be technically correct anymore.

There is also plenty of freelance / artistry type people who would of had work before (i.e creating Halloween, mothers day, Easter, etc) promotional material which is now just outsourced to AI. You see some of the biggest companies on Earth posting AI stuff for special event, etc.

Most aren't at the stage of using full AI "art" for advertisements (except maybe Coke) but some of these companies would already have full time artists, which they've bypassed. Their jobs are not forever and eventually will get killed.

I disagree. AI is often depicted as autonomous agents YOLOing features, but they excel at pattern matching from free form text and examples, and execute feedback loops. This means that they are particularly apt at small maintenance tasks spread across the project following clear high level guidance.

This is your typical junior task, the kind of task that is plausibly very boring and repetitive that is validation-heavy until it stumbles upon an unexpected turn and forces a senior to step in.

Once you offload these tasks to an agent running on a background, what exactly is left for a junior to do?

Juniors can arguably lean on AI coding agents to tackle more complex and more extensive work, but the truth if the matter is that they lack the skill and tools to effectively address this sort of work. They can get things to build but they fail to get things to make sense or be maintainable.

So what is a junior dev to do?

You get what you pay for / put the work in for. If you're just hiring them, saying "read these docs and ship some PRs", and ignoring them, it's not too hard to predict what'll happen.

Engage at least as much as you would in person (more likely more, because you don't have passive hints about struggles), and it works out fine.

And given he's the chief data reporter, it doesn't surprise me that he's looking at the academic work here.

Especially anything done by an entity linked to for-profit.

Why shouldn't they? You're commenting on a website where the common if not overwhelming view is that people should move jobs every 2 years or they are going to lose out.

Places are still hiring juniors, but now the bar for them is just much much higher, because a large portion of the junior level work (i.e, execution on implementation details), is pretty much 80-90% done by some senior + AI at this point, whether people believe it or not. This was certainly the case at the FAANG I was at.

I don't know why this "COVID overhiring" rhetoric is still a talking point. Covid was over 5 years ago at this point, those "overhires" have already left or have been flushed out from all these layoffs. Are you telling me the "COVID" overhiring resulted in such a huge surplus that, 5-6 years later, they are still on the market?

There has been a huge shift towards metrics, to the point that managers are often forced to or at least commonly believe they are forced to game those metrics.

It is challenging to take strategic risks when you have to focus on metrics which cannot measure let alone value those choices.

15 years later...there are good parts and bad parts. Great for focus and getting real work done, terrible for feeling like you have any real connection to your peers (even if/when I went to meetups, conferences, etc, you always feel like an "outsider"). Eventually embraced the "lone wolf" aspects and learned alternatives to socializing, but yeah, that first lap around the track was brutal.

At my current job we see "junior" devs with 3 years of GitHub contributions and fully in production personal projects. Those obviously learned through a different path that what most had 20 years ago, but they're definitely not an exception either, and I genuinely think there is an adaptation process that many are missing.

Perhaps everyone can't follow that path. but not everyone could follow the previous one either. We'll probably only know when the dust fully settles.

If you have most of the work and conversation is done in public, you're not hiring very curious people.

The argument that important knowledge is best acquired through incidental office interactions sounds more like nostalgia for office culture than an effective approach to knowledge sharing.

Finding a way to make this happen in a remote environment feels like what's missing right now. I know there been some Slack/chat apps that kind of force those kind of meetings, but it's very different from what happens with real humans in real places in close proximity to each other.

Engineers have a reputation for being loners, but marketing, sales, and other "soft skills" or "people oriented" functions are super cliquey as well and rarely contribute to this supposed "knowledge transfer" that higher-ups keep talking about. I did notice that this cliquishness gets better at their level; the VP of Sales and the VP of Engineering did have lunch a lot. But expecting it to translate to the lower ranks is naive or fake.

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If any actual leaders who have already mandated in-office time and happen to be reading this, see what happens if you mandate that everyone in the non-tech parts of your org is required to have lunch with the tech people every single day of in-office work.

dTrack this as a metric and be honest with yourself whether it's going up; and most importantly whether that is actually helping the company.

My current remote employer does as good a job at building trust between employees with 6 monthly on-sites. But they also do things that expose cross team productivity issue: rotate people in leadership roles between all the different company meetings, so the CEO might be in the planning meeting this week. Get different people in different roles to join customer calls. Not just anecdote at the coffee machine, actually see what's happening across the company.

1. Work gossip like "Gosh, it'd be great if I could make a widget on this page instead of needing to click into that modal and then toggle the "Yes I do" checkbox - I do that twenty times a day" - whether UX based or generally feature based.

Of course if everyone is working remotely via email this isn't going to happen.

I've had the same problem in person too (silos, no one talking) so I think it's more about structure than remote/in-person.

Any large scale engineering product where “who you’ve talked to” is how things “get done” is going to fail.

Really you are just outing yourself as a member of the political class: someone who believes feelings and opinions matter to the behavior of CPUs.

Conversely, it is much easier, on several levels, to support and guide someone you spend your whole day and go to lunch with.

Get out of it, this kind of companies have a dysfunctional management. After the initial learning, they will be unable to recognize your value and contribution.

Also, don't feel guilty about getting burnt out. It's not your fault and you got tougher.

They're demanding you evolve beyond your capabilities without time, experience, or mentorship.

Expecting domain knowledge at the junior level is weird. It's like being an expert at entry level.

I know it doesn't help all that much to hear, but here's a sign so you at least know you're not crazy. That's not okay and that's not a healthy org.

This might be egotistical so take it with a grain of salt, but I've started realizing that there's no compensation for me anymore if I do well. Tldr the company im working for has a lot of gaps I could put effort in and make it perform well, but it's not my company, so I don't.

Why would I? what's in it for me? Will I stay there after 5 years?

This isn't even limited to me. I talk to colleagues that could improve our current position if they were being put on the issues at hand. They're not being utilized, so they just do whatever.

Companies expect us to do this proactively, because we're such good workers.

I've done my fair share of overworking myself for a company that ditched me once I'm burnt out. It's kind of like ego-death, but for validation. You realize that all this effort is futile. The company grew, you didn't. In one year all the higher-ups have a fancier title and you're still the dev.

Managing people is hard, managing remote people makes it hard to hide that you're a poor manager. If you want to allow for remote work, you need to invest in management training. You should do that for onsite as well, but it will be less visible that you if you skip that step.

What if unrealistic economical growth is to blame for weak junior hiring?

This reads like the classic case of "I had it bad therefore everybody else should too"

This made me laugh so hard! I am gen x, and we used to say exactly the same thing about you spoiled, entitled, narcissistic, gritless millennials!

You should have seen what it was like when I first started! You should have seen what I was like!

You’ve got it all wrong! It’s not the generational differences that are the problem, it’s these darn young people are too darn young! (And some of them are a completely useless waste of space, as I was until life slapped a bit of sense into me). It’s a bit over the top, but I really love Musashi (novel) for this representation of the worthless youth who needs to be tied to a tree and suffering to the point of death before finally breaking and getting his crap together (become a human being; not just an animal). Feels like an (exaggerated) representation of the genuine journey all young men must make.

> WFH has been shown to raise the cost of supervising and monitoring workers, and can slow on-the-job learning

- HR is rarely equipped or incentivized to select true entry-level candidates without an obvious record of success in a similar prior role

- Algorithmic job boards are brutal and they make juniors anxious or under pressure to have all the answers if they are seen at all

- Seniors that in the past would take hiring risks because they saw something of their own children in a junior candidate are, in 2026, a lot more likely to still have young children they want to WFH focus on

- College is very expensive now and CS programs can be selective. I continually see a disconnect where seniors interview for the curiosity and passion that served them well in their career but the candidate's parents told them to do CS for the ROI. Fair I guess, but these are different people to manage.

If being in the office conforms to the interest of the capital class, it implies that WFH is inherently less efficient.

This is one of those things that I often find strange with work from home advocates. They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself.

I have been fortunate to have a C-level above me, who believes in hiring juniors, take over in the last year. We are hiring now and mentoring, but not enough companies around me are doing this.

It's odd that we conflate that somehow 'return to office' is inherently more productive and that somehow 'dumb corporations acting against their interest'.

I don't think that's true, and if it were, well, we should all be in a position to take advantage of it.

Sure, FT is part of the 'corporatocracy' for sure but they're not working to 'create narratives'. Individual journalists are actually writing about things they see.

My bet is the real reason is that companies just don't want to hire juniors, and that's it.

Junior employees are a long term investment - if the R&D budget is frozen, you're sure as heck not going to dump 60% of your budget into onboarding.

1a. If you train it enough, one day you'll be able to trust that it's going to be able to execute what you want correctly, and you don't have to meticulously go through each line to find any issues.

to your list of arguments?

Because just like a junior human, training Claude will make it a capable senior developer, right...?

/S because this is the Internet.

We may still be too early on the curve of AI usage for AI to be the major driver of the labor market changes, but we also have no clue about what to do about it.

Often the conversation puts "Using AI ourself" at odds with "Delegating to a junior developer", but the junior developer is going to be using AI just like the rest of us further bringing into question the value of junior developers (and eventually senior engineers).

What really is the next step? (Rhetorical question since nobody knows)