Ask HN: What is it with this hate and disdain for interns/junior engineers?
No openings for interns or junior engineers, yet the companies and people I talk with, the senior engineers get sick often, lack drive and take longer PTO and their work isn't really that adequate.
Blaming interns or junior engineers for simple mistakes, which the senior which also should have seen.
Not training interns or junior engineers to become senior and be given more responsibility, I'm assuming we are all aware of the bus factor here.
All the while where some really smart interns or junior engineers come out of prestigious institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc), with a stunning body of work and can absolutely run rings around engineers that are called 'senior' in title only and don't have a body of work to show when they leave.
It is no wonder senior engineers are finding the job market tough now, but it is obviously even worse for juniors, and all the above doesn't help.
Of course, everyone is different, but I don't get the obsession with not giving very bright and talented juniors a chance even though they are more likely to be cheaper than seniors.
Background: I am a senior engineering manager looking to take on interns.
45 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadStarting your own business is hard, but it is the next best option if you haven’t found the right place to work.
- people seeking jobs often dont have disposable income especially those fresh out of school or minimal YOE
- tremendous time and energy for a low probability outcome
- many do not have the aptitude for running a business which require a high degree of planning and execution, soft skills
I know this is a startup focused website so its natural to suggest go out and build an app or raise money but the selection/survival bias is often not considered.
The vast majority of people will either need to switch careers or industries altogether. The fact is LLM code generation has eaten those junior/intermediate roles and soon the same will happen to senior developers as well.
What we are seeing is the same thing blue collar jobs experienced in the 90s where their jobs were outsourced/automated to labour markets in authoritarian countries except this time its outsourcing to a small group of corporations.
Sure AI is coming for some jobs, but I would say it is ideal to start young, make mistakes quickly, learn adapt etc, rather than don't do a business, start a family and you cannot take any risks, after all I am talking about highly ambitious and smart juniors so it is a path they can take if they want to.
Mentoring and leveling up juniors is expensive and time consuming. And you really need to build a team and work environment that supports them. When teams are under the gun to deliver it’s a very easy thing to drop the ball on.
An intern program is a recruiting pipeline, plain and simple. If you're cutting back, that'll be an early thing to go.
Plus, if you believe in AI-driven coding, the intern-quality code is just a few prompts away. So become a senior prompter.
Understanding how a business works will help you better position yourself as an engineer. Even Posthog believes that candidates who have entrepreneurial background have higher chances at launching products.
Engineering is the only field where you can learn without having "an official job". That's why a portfolio is always asked before jumping in interviews.
As for the stigma against junior engineers, from my personal experience in mostly early start ups programming boot camps really poisoned the well. A lot of us were flooded with very poor candidates that had really flashy portfolios and a ton of marketing and generally some favorable contacts and vcs promoting them. Most of them were terrible, often with extremely little passion for their craft.
There were obviously exceptions and I've worked with one that was phenomenal, but the whole schooling systems pitch to me was that it onboarded capable people that just needed an intro to the tech and systems, when in reality most were just folks with money trying to buy their way quickly into an industry that was desperate for more manpower.
We are all swamped with work, and the team moves together well because we can all depend on our teammates to get things done at a world class level.
No space or time for juniors. Stakes are too high.
High stakes doing what? Are you working on something important like global communications networks critical to space flight operations or something like safety-critical systems that will save lives?
Like most grifters: AI
There is definitely a trend where people get titles because of their age rather than talent, motivation or passion (it's what I call having 20y experience vs. having 20x 1y of experience).
I don't think juniors are all rosy either. There's a percentage of bad people in any profession, that as I feel it is relatively stable over the years.
When it comes to disdain, I don't know what you experienced so its hard to answer in a specific wat. One thing I have verified is that shit rolls down: The higher you are in the hierarchy, the easiest it is to just pass on the stuff you don't want to handle or the blame downward. Likely, in larger organizations where politics matter more for your career than skills or accomplishments, it is more important to show yourself up than being helpful down. It's kind of like when you're in line: you only see other people's back. For sure that can fill like disdain, because it is, but I would think it's not necessarily targeted at juniors, but more of a "normal" up to down relationship in places that evolved so, where people in power have little incentive to change the game that got them where they are. Best is to stay away from these, unless you are either good at or enjoy this game.
So my advice would be that it's probably local to where you work, and to find somewhere that isn't like that.
BUT.. ever since then i have been looking for another gig like that, to no avail.
Esp. recently, it seems the "new" idea is that programmers grow on trees anyway. Go figure..
But great job!
I just mentor people whether the larger org wants me to or not. I'm running a programming class for my colleagues whose backgrounds are weak. Either fresh out of college and never worked on anything big, or worked as engineers but never developers. It's very common in aerospace for EEs to end up as developers despite their lack of knowledge around programming and CS.
I just slotted out 1 hour every two weeks and invited people. Now I've got some of them writing tools on their own where they previously would have needed more assistance. Ths is the first time I've done classes rather than more one-on-one style, but regardless of the style, if a manager complains I just ignore it. What are they going to do? Fire me for building up the team and making everyone more competent, capable, and independent?
You know, if someone does something anyway because s/he loves it, why pay for that? "Long term" answer is - because you want that to be available again, but IMO "long term" has fallen out-of-fashion, in software making, or even in general.
ah. have fun
He who dares and all that.
People sometimes come to realize important things when they mature. This may include insights like "there's a life happening outside work waiting to be lived". Or acquiring a better sense where it pays to spend time and energy for maximum effect and where it is wasted.
> Blaming interns or junior engineers for simple mistakes, which the senior which also should have seen.
Juniors making simple mistakes really doesn't rhyme with the rest of what you said. Are they
a) Brilliant people, able to replace seniors while being paid a pittance for working their ass off?
or
b) Actually inexperienced and still have to learn a lot until their output has the required quality?
> Not training interns or junior engineers to become senior and be given more responsibility
Any junior waiting to be taken by the hand and shown the path to greatness through careful and detailed tutoring by colleagues I can recommend only one thing: Learn to learn by yourself. Fast. Your colleagues are busy with their own work and tutoring you very often has very little bearing on their current goals, compensation or career prospects. It is thus one of these areas where they have learned not to spend much time and energy. (Though some people have strong altruistic tendencies and/or find it satisfying to mentor and teach, but that's an intrinsic motivation which is either there or it isn't. When you run into someone like that: Lucky you!)
On a more calculating note: As you have let on that you think juniors are viable replacements for senior while being cheaper, the seniors might not be very motivated to bring their replacements up to speed...
> we are all aware of the bus factor here
As an employee, that's generally not much of a concern.
> All the while where some really smart interns or junior engineers come out of prestigious institutions
I suggest you attempt to hire them. I wish you the best of luck!
> I am a senior engineering manager looking to take on interns.
Do it. It's going to be a valuable learning opportunity for everyone involved. Including you.
I've hired interns and juniors at my past three positions, from various educational backgrounds including ivy leagues and ivy-adjacent schools (UCLA, CMU, for instance) over the course of the last ~5 years, and I'll give an opposing anecdote.
A lot of people who attend elite institutions are able to do so because they've been groomed from a very young age to have a given trajectory in life. Their entire existence and sense of self-worth seem to be predicted by "prestige" and being better than someone else.
This typically translates into someone who is very difficult to work with, especially when it comes to interns.
The "I'm clearly better than you because I attend $school" attitude, typically coupled with real-world industry naiveté leads to a real "I'm gonna change the world because I'm so special" Spongebob-esque archetype of person. Insufferable to work with, impossible to manage, always off spinning their wheels on something not at all aligned to what the business really needs. Ignore direction, ignore technical architecture, because they assume they know better.
I've also found that they don't really care all that much about their internships, because in their mind's eye, they're the "main character" and they're surely going to move on to something great because they'll be a $school alumnus.
They also tend to not be particularly well-rounded individuals. No hobbies, varying degrees of social ineptitude, anti-social competitive behaviors due to where they attend school.
I really could not care less about a "body of work", I care that you have some aptitude, passion, and are bearable to be around for >= 40 hours/week.
I get your point about senior engineers, a lot of people tend to mentally clock out and settle into their ways, no longer wanting to go above and beyond, typically because they have families, friends, hobbies, and no longer want to participate in a game where there are no winners.
But a clocked-out senior engineer who does the bare minimum, but understands how the business works will still be an order of magnitude more valuable than some $school intern.
> Of course, everyone is different, but I don't get the obsession with not giving very bright and talented juniors a chance even though they are more likely to be cheaper than seniors.
Unless you're working at some cutting-edge startup, businesses don't value merit, really, they care that you understand process, business needs, and the quickest path to execution to ensure continuous revenue.
Interns can be great, or horrendous, and I've personally found there to be an inverse correlation to how good the school they attended is to how useful they actually are in real industry terms. It's simply a trial period for both parties with the ideal outcome being they become a full-time hire once they finish their degree.
When money is tight, as it is now, there's simply no point in taking on individuals who will effectively be a burden for potentially months before delivering any real value.
Regarding your bus factor comment, businesses hedge that senior+ engineers will not be willing to shoulder the risk of job hopping in a shoddy economy, so there's really no concern from that angle of needing to "backfill" with junior engineers who will grow.
This will all get better when money begins flowing more freely again. Just a function of time.
The essential value of domain knowledge and experience are under-estimated by educators. The ability to produce leet-code is no substitute for years of experience at the coalface. In my experience, 90% of established business systems coding is to handling exceptions and special cases. No programming course can prepare you for that.
Isn't it a fair question?
If he doesn't want people to take PTO, don't give them PTO. If he wants to discriminate because of health issues, he should probably get a good lawyer.
I didn't flag this, but it's so poorly written that it's not surprising.
Gives me the impression that senior engineers resent OP's career progression at his workplace. Hence OP's disdain for not getting enough respect.
Recruitment is pretty binary in that sense and given the nature of our work, I don't blame them either.
Why not fire them before they leave anyway, and replace them with your cheaper smarter harder-working juniors?
As to why we're here, I think it's obvious at this point that tech massively overhired between 2016 and 2022.
Finally, the growth areas haven't completely disappeared, they've just shifted. If you're a junior right now, you should be getting into ML or something, not webdev. Plenty of entry level roles in ML.