- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I’m applying to jobs, and the amount of AI assessments, rounds, AI interviewers, questionnaires, is nuts.
One of these emails for example,
It’s rough.
I’m applying to jobs, and the amount of AI assessments, rounds, AI interviewers, questionnaires, is nuts.
One of these emails for example,
It’s rough.
I’m sorry it sucks.
It seems like there’s a dividing line between newer techs and senior techs that determines the difficulty in getting new gigs. I don’t know where it is but I crossed it at some point in the last 10 years.
Each time I’m done with a job I’m sure there will be some kind of horrible gauntlet to get the next engagement, but it stopped happening. Maybe I just made a lucky connection but it keeps happening. I think they just want candidates who have seen some shit.
I guess the point is that eventually you’ll have done something that gives you the right gray in the ponytail. Keep at it.
I have been in software for 20 years and I never had trouble finding work until this past year. All of a sudden it’s a lot harder. I’m just one data point but this time feels different for me. The job market feels a lot more disjointed and full of spoofs and fake listings.
Yeah I have over 25 years and I also have had the assesment stuff although not to often and not every time. Basically I went into tech because it was a field where they wanted people and if you were sharp you could get a job. They don’t seem to have the demand they used to but I don’t see another place to pivot and honestly I don’t think I can change careers the way I did over 25 years ago.
I am a second data point.
Do you have experience with AI dev environments? That’s generally the differentiator right now. Claude Code replaces managing a junior dev team of 5. Anyone who can demonstrate the ability to leverage it is not short of work.
Those 5 junior devs are, though.
Yep. Actually ran the rollout for Cursor at my last job, right before I got laid off lmao. I trained a bunch of devs on what do and what not to do. A bunch of my recent interviews have incorporated variations of the question “Do you think you could manage an LLM orchestration that would replace our junior devs?” and, I could but I don’t think I can muster the enthusiasm for it that people are looking for. Maybe that’s why I haven’t made it through the interview gauntlet. So much senior hiring right now seems to be looking for people to be the scapegoat for LLM bullshit and I ain’t looking for that kinda work.
But who was hiring 5 junior devs?!
Did nothing they produced matter to anyone who knew better?
I can’t think of a better way to drive my organization into obsolescence, than to have 5 junior devs rampaging across the place leaving stupid mistakes in their wake.
I love having one or two junior devs around the office. On a large team (15 devs), there’s just enough deeply unimportant unimpactful harmless bullshit to keep two junior devs from doing too much damage.
Once, on a huge team (30+ senior devs split into squads), I had four junior devs at the same time.
That is the maximum I have ever allowed, and that was during a period of exceptional demand.
Anyway, I guess I just wish the folks replacing 5 junior devs with an AI equivalent to 5 junior devs the day they deserve. Lol.
I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.
You can’t really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don’t learn (at best they’ll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).
Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there’s more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.
An extra problem is that AI heavily favours bullshitters. It destroys the capability and cues to recognize them.
The tech job market is now a lemon market for both sides - neither applicants nor companies can reasonably know what’s really offered to them, and what is made up.