Along with trends like having line managers be in charge of 20+ direct reports, it leaves people scratching their heads.
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.
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
(buy a VAX, get a library. oh, and a computer too.)
the 6 months after the first screen editor was installed was constant questions and answers bouncing across the room on how to do things.
With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help.
It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologies and techniques.
there’s the whiteboard element but i’ve gotten pretty good at exalidraw and zoom annotating
add in the remote makes it kinda easy to not be distracting in meetings so i can easily DM them context on the side to get them ramped up easier
That's the bit I really notice I am missing out on when I work at home.
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.
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.
I started in a whole new team (as a senior) remotely during Covid which also contained juniors. They did incredibly well and were able to reach anyone remotely with no issue.
What might have been different is that the entire team was new and we knew we had to focus on our communication online and think about effective ways to do so. Which also benefited the juniors in the team. Many teams and companies never really gave it that much thought to begin with and I still see teams struggling to work remote at times. But, after giving them some pointers they often manage to do a whole lot better.
Some basic things out the top of my head that have benefited teams and juniors specifically:
- Have a "working together" channel where people can start meetings and where anyone can join if they feel like it. It often ends up being used by people who either like working together or those who can use some overall input on what they are working on. - Have social online moments as well. One team had a 15 minutes social block in front of standup's an other team had just a weekly social call. - Actively check in on other team members. Which feels silly to say, but the amount of times where I have seen teams only communicate during standup is also silly. Specifically juniors. If they are given a task after a little while check in with them how it is going and ask if they want to share their process. Basically how you probably in the office would walk past and also have a little conversation with them. - Take time for questions from juniors and make it clear you will do so. Whenever you are in the office and they approach you for help it means you also often serve them on the spot. Yet online I have seen juniors being ghosted for a variety of reasons. At the very least make sure to respond to juniors with a "give me 5 minutes and I'll give you a call".
To be clear, I personally like working hybrid and I do think there are benefits to coming to office at least for one day per week (assuming it is coordinated and not a ghost town). But my main point is that juniors struggling due to remote work is often more a symptom of the company not really having a good training and coaching process/culture in place more than anything else. Which I am not blaming on individual teams either. Training people is hard, people get bachelors degrees in education and then spend a lifetime getting better at educating. It's up to companies to educate their teams in this as well, offer the resources and have people on staff who solely focus on junior training.
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".
$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.
However, I disagree with this part:
> Given who the power lies with in our society, I think we all know which one will win out in the long run.
Of course other persons have other needs though
Obviously this doesn't happen when the legal team is located three buildings away. At that point you might as well be remote from the perspective of collaboration.
If you have most of the work and conversation is done in public, you're not hiring very curious people.
I'm a pretty staunch defender of remote work for most roles, but outside of the smallest companies where the entire organization is on a single conversational thread, you really do lose the organic peripheral vision that comes with an office environment and deliberate effort is required to try and recreate some of that in your fully-remote org if you want some of the same upside. Even with deliberate effort, I'm not convinced you can match it perfectly.
It's not like there are that many natural opportunities to meet and interact with people you don't directly work with when everyone is remote.
Same with writing bad code. We’ve all seen sub-optimal decisions in code or technical artifacts that go on to be successful products or tools. Most people can’t/wont/don’t work at the Pareto-optimal workplace.
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.
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.
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.
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.
---
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.
The fact that you read a comment saying that people have lunch with each other and respond saying you've never been asked to have lunch with anyone is interesting.
I guess it varies by company and what the culture is, but it's surely totally normal to just have a friend in sales or something and hear about something going on.
I really doubt the person you're replying to orders people to have lunch.
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.
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.
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.
Saying "we don't need as many staff because AI" is an oft-repeated trope because it sounds like a reasonable excuse to fire people. It's nearly impossible to back up the claim with any measurable method, and investors will look aside on the mismanagement and/or ridiculously over-engineered/over-complicated custom tech stacks companies run if they say "AI" anywhere in their reports.
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.
AI is clearly a scapegoat. If you are a CEO who is pressured to show results but can't improve revenue in this economy and can't downsize because of the red flags it represents to investors, AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains.
Even FANGs are toning down their rah-rah AI propaganda, and Amazon goes as far as to ask their SDEs to stop with the AI bullshit and just try to use it purposefully.
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.
The observation that AI layoffs would be self-fulfilling prophecy is one I haven't heard before but I'm inclined to agree with it.
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?
That's a bit like asking them to choose between AI credits and a visit to the dentist. No engineer has ever hosted an intern in the hopes of improving their project's velocity; people host interns because "it's the right thing to do" for the industry, because it's psychologically satisfying for many people, and to build cred and/or experience as a mentor. And companies nudge their employees to host interns to hopefully influence potentially-valuable-in-the-future smart youngsters to come back as a year or two later as full time employees.
> Managers are literally asking whether people need AI credits or interns over summer
For example, If you are not aware of Internet, you would consider a traditional internet search that comes up with a stackoverflow answer as a machine generating "novel ideas" and answers.
It is a clever marketing trick (touting Erdos solutions) employeed by AI companies.
The problem, of course, is that generating a one time solution to a problem is a much easier problem space than a many-input task with human product concerns
It simultaneously and conveniently: 1. takes the heat off AI blowback 2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing)
On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis.
Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually don't mind working from the office (which i do 4x a week). Just observing.
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.
I’ve noticed younger generations are especially a lot less loyal, probably in response to abusive and exploitative employers and horror stories. But the downside is if employees have less loyalty themselves, then even caring companies and managers cannot justify being loyal to them. They end up losing that time invested and learn a hard lesson.
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.
1) A lot of executive type work _is_ easier in person... and those executives forget that their work might not be representative of _other_ roles within their own org, and they might actually be the outlier.
2) A lot of managers don't know how to manage by looking at output. We see this not just with WFH, but also with multi-location teams, where some managers simply can't do it competently.
3) Many managers do, in fact, get some satisfaction from having that sort of power over their workers.
4) Many executives like having an office that is a bit of a tribute to the company (and therefore their) power. And this falls apart if the office is empty.
I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.
No, it’s more that they want to steal from employees by not paying for all the time lost to commuting and the impact of living near a few pricey locations. That theft is suffering.
That said, the motivations of managers are seldom aligned with the interests of the business. There is such a thing as ego trips. Also, mediocre or insecure managers will rely more on the crutch of face time.
Not quite. It implies it affords the working class more power than the capital class is comfortable with.
only if the capital class is solely motivated by efficiency. I think this is trivially demonstrable to be not the case.
The capital class's primary interest is self-preservation - both of their capital, of course, but also preserving their place in the pecking order. And they'll spend a LOT of the former to maintain the latter because the latter is how they got the former.
Through that lens, GP's point is perfectly coherent.
"They seem to imply that business owners just want employees to suffer as a goal in itself."
Have you met... people? Yes there are literally many owners who do want employees to suffer. Or, perhaps worse, will tolerate tremendous amounts of suffering in the pursuit of minor other gains. (Amazon pee bottles come to mind.) It would somehow be a comforting kind of moustache-twirling comic book evil to say they just want people to suffer. Another to say they simply don't value human happiness (or lack of suffering) enough to not trade large amounts of it for small things they do care about.
I had a boss who was only willing to hire non-whites because he could inflict undesirable work on them, leaving more desirable work for the white employees.
I just want to end this by remarking that this presumption of owners being perfectly optimal, morally clean agents of free markets is absurd and honestly disgusting to bring to an argument.
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.
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.
What changed was ZIRP ending. The layoffs from that were real, and the managers who can't hire a ton angle for more senior people instead. The junior culture changed overnight.
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
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.
I'm poorer but happier now b/c of it. That job was nuts.
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.
Which is a damn shame because most juniors I've worked with are amazing and the most recent junior hire 1.5-2 years ago is so much better than I was their age it's almost embarrassing.
And my team is in an area termed "strategically important" before anything other than AI became an annoyance.
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.
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.
And given he's the chief data reporter, it doesn't surprise me that he's looking at the academic work here.
It's a lifestyle impossible if one has to show up an hour's drive away, every weekday.
Especially anything done by an entity linked to for-profit.
It was brutal before any glimpse of remote work, open offices didn't help in any way.
Some saw remote work as a way out of the quagmire, others like you had it worse.
PS: participation in local communities would benefit both the lonely people and the community.
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.
> Those obviously learned through a different path that what most had 20 years ago
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.
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.
Conversely, it is much easier, on several levels, to support and guide someone you spend your whole day and go to lunch with.
- Longtime trends of companies trying to externalize training costs.
- Avoiding hiring in general due to uncertainty in the economy.
- Companies dumping tons of money into AI thus having to cut money from other places, particularly ones that don't add much value in the quarter (internships).
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.
Externalizing costs is a great short term strategy, for startups. We really should regulate any company over a certain size to force them to pay for their externalities but we all know they won’t happen. I’m sure this won’t have any lasting consequences or lead to the collapse of any economies.
Whether or not companies should or shouldn't in their particular case is hard to answer generally. I am in an adjacent field to software and work on products that have lifetimes measured in decades. In that area short term thinking has been incredibly detrimental to organizations. I would also think investing in educating people that are going to work in an industry or are working in an industry will be a net positive to that industry. That is more a vibe based assertion than fact based though.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6787638
Unclear if it's been peer reviewed. The abstract looks fairly convincing. But it is argued against by the majority of research on this topic.
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.
I increasingly find across different borders that Gen Z simply are not optimal or desirable for hire and its not just "remote coding jobs" but across the spectrum.
In South Korea, there are lot of of 35yo+ getting hired while people in their early 20s struggling.
I see the same outcome in different advanced economies and the answer is quite simple, Gen Z, are simply not equipped to work or put up with grit that is needed. They are too self centered and contradictory to their own interests. They expect others to bend over backwards for them without any merit.
Perhaps the biggest difference I see from millenials and gen z is that the degree in which they realize the difference between having earned the right to expressing your opinion and expressing your opinion.
Unfortunately, from personal anecdotes and others, gen z simply are not aware and thus stuck in a loop. Frankly, I don't have any sympathy. I don't know where this entitlement comes from but its not helpig them and it certainly will not improve outcomes.
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.
I wouldn't even considering hiring a junior engineer at this point. The ROI was already barely breakeven for any but the top of the top junior engineers as they are likely to move on before they are meaningfully contributing.
With AI in the mix the ROI for Junior Engineers is strongly negative for 2 reasons:
1. (obvious) I can just have Claude Code do the work a junior engineer would have done with faster turnaround and generally better results.
2. (less obvious) Junior engineers are going to just turn around and use Claude Code, so now I'm talking to an AI and playing the telephone game, and the Junior engineer isn't going to learn much if anything in the process.
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)
It personally seems hard to connect that to remote work as that had been going for 2 years and in between was the largest hiring burst we'd done, which included many junior folks. Though admittedly I'm biased as a remote worker.
* Economy is tighter overall.
* Covid overhiring followed by firing means fresh graduates face competition from a large cohort of people with a few years of work experience.
* Even if it's not necessarily true, if the C-suite _believes_ that AI can replace juniors, that's enough to funnel money away from hiring and into AI investments. When money for hiring is tight, seniors are prioritized.
* Like it or not, workforce immigration (such as H-1B) causes displacement.
* The number of CS graduates in the US has doubled over the last decade.
In Sweden, fresh graduates across a number of fields are having a hard time finding jobs. Many of thosee seem to have either a STEM education affected by a dip in "green" capex/investments, or in "overhead" sectors likely to be tightened in bad times, such as HR specialists.
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?
That sounds exactly like funneling money away from hiring and into AI investments to me.
As for COVID overhiring, Amazon doubled their workforce during the pandemic. I'm sure plenty of those hires are still employed. During their latest layoff, they also spoke about "shifting resources to invest more in artificial intelligence".[2]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/meta-layoffs-zuckerberg-says... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/amazon-cut-thousands-of-engi...
I'm amazing at how anybody can discuss any questions about the tech job market without addressing the end of zero-interest rate policy. "It's interest rates, stupid" ought to be the first thing we consider, and stuff about AI/remote/etc only comes in when we have a specific reason to consider it.
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?
- Less collaboration/communication
- Kills local businesses
Yes, I was being sarcastic. Outsourcing is of course a huge jobs and money drain from the US, but CEOs and the FT don't want to admit this obvious fact - they'd prefer to blame AI or remote working.
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.
Yeah.
> 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.
ZIRP caused a massive overhiring in certain fields, especially in tech. The post-COVID hiring started to cool down around 2.5 years ago, and hit rock bottom 1 year ago. There were almost 4 times as many listings at the peak, 4 year ago, than there were 1 year ago.
A quick data point: US Software job listings
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
US interest rates
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
So companies are flush with cash, and ride a bubble where there's a huge demand for digital tools. People that enrolled college during the height of the bubble were promised jobs left and right, and good salaries. People need to remember that these sort of things rarely change overnight - there can be a latency that takes months to years.
At least to me, it seems like a classic example of a boom and bust. When I did my EE degree, everyone that specialized in control / automation were guaranteed a oil & gas job, many had a job offer 1 year before the graduated. The petro companies would wine and dine us, and we could send out competing offers to negotiate.
Then came a huge crash, and almost no one had a job. The offers were rescinded, multi year hiring freeze. All in all very bad times.
I'm not at all buying the argument that WFH has any serious effect on junior hiring.
Anecdotally, I've run an apprenticeship program for a few years now in software. We hire 5 apprentices at a time - usually people who have done some online courses in programming and want to get into the industry. They would be pre-junior.
The year we went fully remote for lockdowns, the failure rate of the apprenticeship went from 0% to 80%. We went to a hybrid policy of "you choose how many days you want in the office" - failure rate dropped to 40% with the top of the group being the 2 people who were in the office everyday. Today, it is a mandated 4 days a week in the office - failure rate is at 0% again.
Not only does nobody fail, but the folks who consistently turn up to the office and get involved talking to seniors are inevitably the ones who progress the fastest. The ones fighting to work from home because it's inconvenient consistently do worse.
All those opportunities to improve by 1% via a meaningful conversation or a whiteboard diagram disappear when working from home. The 1%'s matter the most when you're a junior.
A lot of senior developer roles list things that make it sound like senior devs are supposed to mentor other devs but they never seem to do so.
this is ft trying to help their real estate portfolio
- Really hard to get juniors up to speed when they are remote, when I started out as a junior I sat around a bunch of senior folks, and inhaled in all the knowledge via the interactions we had all day.
- In my previous company, we hired a bunch of juniors who clearly were not self-motivated. There were few who were actively disengaged, would not even care to turn the camera on. They were a few boot-camp grads who though motivated, I could not for the life of me teach computer fundamentals. You can't learn a 4 yr degree's worth of stuff in 6 months at a bootcamp.
Yes Covid was great for us senior folks who did not need direction and were disciplined, but really bad for junior folk.
So now we have a gap, and the best fix we collectively came to was give senior developers AI so they didn’t need to hire fresh starts.
Gee… I wonder why we have a problem :shrug:
When in the office I got a lot of people complaining/pissed I was leaving early because I got there an hour or more before everyone so I could get more work done/do the work on systems they needed. The only thing I got while in the office was constant interruptions for things a junior could have handled. Meetings was a bad word, never allowed, so there was really no reason for me to be there constantly (I could have done most of my job remotely and gone into the office once or twice a week)
I hired a junior I was eager to mentor/train to replace me, they proceeded to throw endless things I did at them expecting them to fill the multiple hats I was filling (to the point they pushed them to work on very dangerous equipment and got themselves hurt)
Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't
I absolutely loved the work I did. I GTFO of that misery that was only miserable/got me crucified due to the stupid shit people made up in their head instead of the actual work I did
I’ve been fully remote for 17 years and, before that, did short periods of remote work as early as 2003.
The first junior I remember being onboarded remotely (into an irc-mostly, voice call for ultra rare cases job) was me and it worked pretty well.
From about 2010 to 2012 I grew the support team of a database services company from 2 to about 20 people (the 2 at the start was counting me). A lot of the new hires were junior when it came too dabatases, some just junior period, and it worked great too.
There were some in person meetings but the vast majority of onboarding and training happened remotely.
Maybe people invested in office real estate are perhaps biased to get the wrong answer on this one.
If I had time now, I’d write an article titled “is the FT right about the cause of weak junior hiring?”
I don’t have time, but you can apply that saying about headlines to my imaginary article.
It's as though the only idea any tech CEO has had in the last year is "what if we gave our best engineer 1000 agents and a case of Red Bull and fired everyone else?" Historically you had to hire junior engineers, because you needed the help. Now there's a [theoretical, purely imaginary] world where you don't, because agents will magically do that work for you. Nobody is losing sleep over the effect this has on talent as a whole, because that's a problem for someone else in the future.
That's what's causing junior hiring to fail, because they don't want to hire juniors with passion, because especially with AI assisted tooling, these juniors suddenly seem a lot more capable than those aging guys who need their third meeting before lunch. Thus they hire the fresh graduate as an impressionable and yet unreliable junior instead.
This might be naive, but isn’t this purely a demographic/saturation effect?
I've been working remotely for 20 years now, and most people just can't handle it and are either distracted, slacking off, or just not working.
I've seen lots of people fired over it, and ruined it for everyone.
I'm a consultant now and no longer have to hope and dream that my employer will let me work remotely. It's in my contract.
Similar high levels in the black Wednesday crash and in the early 80s
https://www.statista.com/statistics/813142/youth-unemploymen...
I don't agree with remote work arguments because I saw that before with remote companies and totally works
No company is investing for the next 10 years, not even 5 depending on the scale.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319392 (2 comments)
Juniors require pairing and mentorship if you really want them grow.
I think that AI has put lots of pressure on everybody, juniors included, to deliver more, thus finding time for juniors is hard.
* places with strong in-office presence where juniors are not being hired
* remote teams with strong hiring of juniors
But let's not pretend reality enters the decision-making of the large tech company at any point, for any kind of decision.
Even if I pretend for a moment that a generation that is younger than Google is somehow unable to collaborate online, remote work has been the mode of operation of most people even before COVID, the only question is whether they are sitting in traffic or not first.
AI is not to blame here, but their own lack of experience which does require exposure to real environments.
Juniors cost more to train, take more effort, and time from seniors who are otherwise "productive" and so companies don't want to hire them and be responsible for that additional work.
It's not remote working, or AI that's to blame for weak junior hiring. It's short-termism from companies that see no reason to spend their time training up juniors.
> AI hate bait
> Antiunion rhetoric
> Blind to tax recession
You owe us a cat tax, OP. Your content is bad and you are deep in the compensation pocket.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200925070728/https://likewise....
The point isn't to toot my horn, just to say that this seemed like an obvious problem with WFH even before the postpandemic cultural moment.
Add to that the economy, especially after the disastrous Trump administration, which we can all plainly see as an oncoming train heading straight towards us, and even those who would optimistically advocate for long term budgeting in good times are in baton down the hatches mode.
Hiring juniors is an excellent long term strategy that takes time to pay off - you're much better off having a mix of labor that can mix bold initiative and raw enthusiasm with prudence and planning - and those junior devs today will turn into highly skilled professionals with a deep understanding of your platform in half a decade or so. But when times are lean that's difficult to justify.
I wouldn't shift all the blame away from AI though, this isn't a singular cause thing - working for a PE owned firm we're now on the hook for 200/mo anthropic seats owing to our overlords making a horrible deal. The current brand of AI is a rent-seeking technology that's pulling funds out of the working areas of the economy to fund its insane R&D concepts while more traditional AI applications that have proven utility are languishing,
Every generation ever has known this once it got old enough ...