Technology

Its sort of funny that the IT industry is investing their whole effort into a program that will... ...destroy the IT industry ?

I fully believe they will try and replace us as soon as they can. But as a software engineer, companies are fooling themselves if they think AI can replace good engineers. I work with some extremely talented engineers, and they would laugh at me if I said AI is going to replace them. I think people spend too much time on tech twitter listening to vibe coders. The ceiling for how complex of a project a human can handle compared to AI is at least 10000x higher with a human.

But I agree if they could replace us they would. And that’s why we band together with the people who are being replaced, because it’s bad for humanity as a whole.

Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of "shortage of workers" while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where "entry level" is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.

Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don't get too many ideas of independence in their heads.

Just curious, what do you want to pivot into?

On the flipside, we had a senior position open for something like 2 years before we finally got someone we're happy with. We fired two before we found someone would would actually do work and not cuss out our external partners.

We're still having trouble hiring mid-levels. Most of the candidates are surprised when we ask them questions about React when the job position clearly states it's for React, and they're also surprised when we ask them to write a few lines of code in an interview (nothing crazy, should take a competent dev 5-10 min, and a nervous one 15, so we allocate 20 min). I don't think our expectations are unreasonable, here's how we delineate between tiers:

• junior - needs help from a mentor to deliver feature work
• mid-level - needs direction on larger features, but can deliver independently
• senior - manages larger features, consults w/ architect on high-level design considerations

But all the senior applicants are mid-level at best, mid-level applicants are recent college grads, and junior applicants just finished a coding bootcamp and think they're hot stuff because they built a rails app by following step-by-step instructions.

We're not a flashy tech company, we manufacture niche products for a niche field, and our software does simulations and reports. It's a complicated product, and we're totally willing to train people, we just want people who can demonstrate that they can ask proper questions and translate that into easy to understand code. The interview questions aren't hard, but they are intentionally incomplete because we're not testing coding ability but instead the ability to recognize vagueness and ask clarifying questions (i.e. ask before you assume).

We're not anyone's top pick, but we do have a lot of interesting problems to solve and people tend to really like it here. So the candidates we tend to get are desperate people who aren't getting bites at the flashier companies, which often means they're not all that competent. During COVID, we'd get maybe 5 applicants for a role after it has been open for a month, and now we're getting 200-300 in the first few days of the position being open. A lot of those applicants are incompetent and I'm surprised they were offered their previous role, but there are some diamonds in the rough.