The bar is there, but it is lower than you expect. If you have a truly unique point of view to express, that brings some value to the table, slots will open up.
And I've spoken at plenty of conferences. :) Not always in the glamour rooms/slots. But... I did have one talk fill a room out the door. That was a talk on a difficult/controversial topic, and by then... I was probably about as expert as they came on the issue.
I didn't start with that though. I just started with a simple point of view talk. And I'd argue the second version of that talk is still one of the best I've given in my life.
That doesn't mean every talk has to be unique and special. An "introduction to XYZ" talk may have a bunch of equally valid speakers, which all naturally provide a slightly different angle and there is a bunch of factors going in the decision about who gets the slot.
Some talks are plain craftswork, not unique experiences and still very worthwhile.
It can. But I don't want to compete for my slot with others who can give the same talk, or a talk that is similar.
I want to make the conference committee choose between "Do we want ilc's talk on X." or "Do we want foo's talk on Y." If we are both discussing the same thing, if I'm unknown, I will lose. OTOH, if I have something interesting to talk about... I have 2 routes to "victory". "ilc gives great talks, he gets good grades and is working on his skills." and "Man that's a damn cool topic. We want that at our conference, even if ilc isn't the BEST speaker, the combo is better."
I didn't start out as the best presenter. I learned. But I always knew I had to have an interesting topic, something that made it worth them giving me a slot.
"I asked AI and it said" is far worse than lmgtfy (which is already rude) because it has zero value as evidence. AI can be right, but it's wrong often enough that you can't actually use it to determine the truth of something.
I think AI clouds the real issues around Junior hiring. Defective companies.
Let's say you hire your great new engineer. Ok, great! Now their value is going to escalate RAPIDLY over the next 2-3 years. And by rapidly, it could be 50-100%. Because someone else will pay that to NOT train a person fresh out of college!
What company hands out raises aggressively enough to stay ahead of that truth? None of them, maybe a MANGA or some other thing. But most don't.
So, managers figure out fresh out of college == training employees for other people, so why bother? The company may not even break even!
That is the REAL catch 22. Not AI. It is how the value of people changes early in their career.
I think this is the crux of it. When i got my first job I probably made half the salary of the senior engineer in our division. I am 100% sure I was not half as productive. Juniors take a lot of training and time and aren't very productive, but their salaries are actually not reflective of that. The first few months at your first job you're probably a net loss in productivity.
If salaries reflected productivity, you'd probably start out at near minimum wage and rapidly get raises of 100% every half year.
On top of that, if the junior is successful he'll probably leave soon after he's up-and-running b/c the culture encourages changing jobs every 1-2 years. So then you need to lock people down with vesting stock or something..
It seems not easy at all. Even if you give aggressive raises, at the next interview they can fake/inflate their experience and jump in to a higher salary bracket
Hiring and training junior developers seems incredibly difficult and like a total waste of energy. The only time I've seen it work is when you get a timid autistic-savant-type who is too intimidated with interviewing and changing jobs. These people end up pumping out tons of code for small salaries and stay of for years and years. This is hitting the jackpot for a company
>Even if you give aggressive raises, at the next interview they can fake/inflate their experience and jump in to a higher salary bracket
I don't think the kinds of people who see a 50% raise and complain that it's not 100% are the kinds of candidates you want to hire anyway. I'd like to see more of that before deciding we tried nothing and ran out of ideas.
I didn't leave my first job because I was non-autistic. I left because I was paid 50k and the next job literally tripled my total comp. Oh, and because I was laid off. but tbf I was already out the door mentally around that time after 2 years of nothing but chastising and looking at the next opportunity.
I would have (outside of said chastising) gladly stayed if I got boosted to 75k. I was still living within my means on 50k.
>Hiring and training junior developers seems incredibly difficult and like a total waste of energy
If that's the attitude at large, we're all falling into a tragedy of the commons.
> Juniors take a lot of training and time and aren't very productive, but their salaries are actually not reflective of that
In the current economic situation you can offer a junior 2x may be even 3x less and still get candidates to choose from.
Also there juniors who are ready to compensate for lack of experience by working longer hours (though that's not something you would learn during hiring).
> The first few months at your first job you're probably a net loss in productivity.
It's true for a senior too, each company is different and it takes time to learn company's specific stuff.
I actually got a major raise after 6m, and then another major raise 1y into my career, because my boss recognized my value.
Sadly this is not as common as it should be - but I've also mentored folks at FAANGs who got promoted after 1y at the new-hire level because they were so clearly excelling. The first promotion is usually not very hard to attain if you're in the top quartile.
I used to sit on a Google / Alphabet promo committee (more than half a decade ago, so things have changed a bit). The bar for L3 (newgrad) to L4 promotions is not high. It's certainly not a rubber stamp, but we were looking for:
- Gets things done fast enough with high quality
- Works mostly independently
- Has recommendations from more senior peers who can speak to what they've done
- Is starting to show several of the expected marks of a Senior (L5)
I had at least one, maybe two new grads who I mentored get promoted to L4 within a year of starting full time; they had both done internships at Google so they didn't have as much ramp up time.
Dumping our apprenticeship programs onto academia is exacly how we got into this mess to begin with. It has historically not been the job of a college to produce junior talent. They teach a best for T shaped individual and setup for more of their pipeline in research should students want to delve deeper
If industry doesn't want to pay for training, they better pay bootcamps to overhaul themselves and teach what they actually need. I don't think universities will bend much more since they have their own bubble on their hands.
If I thought the service should only be 1000 lines tops:
- Reject due to excess complexity.
If it is a proper solution:
- Use AI to review it, asking it to be VERY critical of the code, and look for spots where human review may be needed, architecture wise, design wise and implementation wise.
- Ask the AI again to do a security review etc.
- Tell the author to break the PR down into human size chunks using git.
Why those things? It's likely some manager is gonna tell me review it anyways. And if so, I want to have a head start, and if there's critical shoot down level issues I can find with an AI quickly. I'd just shut the PR down now.
As in any "security" situation, in this case the security of your codebase and sanity, defense in depth is the answer.
The bar is there, but it is lower than you expect. If you have a truly unique point of view to express, that brings some value to the table, slots will open up.
And I've spoken at plenty of conferences. :) Not always in the glamour rooms/slots. But... I did have one talk fill a room out the door. That was a talk on a difficult/controversial topic, and by then... I was probably about as expert as they came on the issue.
I didn't start with that though. I just started with a simple point of view talk. And I'd argue the second version of that talk is still one of the best I've given in my life.
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