Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

When I started, I was an intern. I was lucky to live in a day where not every metrics were used to rate someone's productivity. So employees had time for me. Time to help me learn, and figure out stuff.

As I wasn't paid, I had low pressure to deliver good things. That said I was trying really hard to bring a net positive.

I miss the days where having interns was a common thing. We'd give them the repetitive boring jobs but they'd also get real experience and see _how_ things were done. Later they'd be trusted to do just about anything.

Now it's all 'senior'. Every job is looking for a heavy-hitter rockstar superman. Even if it's wrapped into this joly 'hey we're cool and kinda awesome too, woowee us!' - they're still wanting to find senior mad-scientists.

I contract myself out to large/small businesses, all sorts of industries, big pay jobs. Number of interns: 0.

The net result is I see plenty of 'senior engineers' hired who I wouldn't call senior. They've got 5 years experience, 2 of them were writing tests, and they're 'senior'?

Do the future a favour, get a few interns. They'll keep you young!

> get a few interns

Pretty much agree, but not sure Internships are the best way to do it. Expecting people to work for no pay means you only get those that can afford to work for no pay.

I remember an article on HN from few years ago, about the German apprentice system. Paid work, coupled with college education.

https://tobi.lutke.com/blogs/news/11280301-the-apprentice-pr...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5314268

Twenty years ago I don’t think the word internship carried an expectation of being unpaid. The term ‘unpaid internship’ was used for that.

It’s interesting that unpaid internships have become the norm so much that the ‘unpaid’ part of the term has become redundant.

I don't know anyone who expects an internship to be unpaid, especially in the tech industry. I've heard quite a few complaints in the medical industry though.

My degree involved 4 months of school followed by 4 months of paid work. It meant that it took 5 years, but it was totally worth it. I graduated with 2.5 years of experience at different companies, no student debt, and a full-time job already lined up.

Writing good tests is not easy. It's an important skill that not everybody has. In some industries, where you write safety critical software, you actually need more experience before you are allowed to work unsupervised as a tester. The testers I've worked with also had a say in the design of the software and were allowed to veto architectural decisions for being too hard to test.

So please don't look down on people writing tests. Quality assurance is what makes software suck less.

To your point, I saw a set of job listings for a start-up where the most junior engineer was a "Lead Engineer". Keep in mind that the requirements included basic knowledge of programming languages and web design, so this seemed to actually be their entry level job.

I wanted to apply just to ask why it was so important to throw "Lead" in front of there. What happened to all of the "Junior Engineer"s? If nothing else, that title is a lot more honest!

Part of the wave of level inflation; and if companies use titles instead of comp to hire folks who may consider title more valuable than comp (there are many). Consider: you’re a manager that desperately wants to hire a candidate but can’t match their other offers comp. one easy way to lure the candidate is with other things, including inflated titles. Naturally, you shouldn’t put any meaning into these titles. They tend to mean vastly diff things across organizations.

> I miss the days where having interns was a common thing.

Has this really changed as much as you think? It is well-known that the tech giants (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc) hire a number of interns - from what I've seen, I'd guess it is at least in the high thousands between those three. Many more startup-y companies seem to do so as well - the June HN hiring thread shows 27 hits for "intern", and unicorns also are known for hiring a large number. Where I work we increase in size by ~10% every summer when interns arrive, and my last job was even more.

It's also no longer the case that tech internships are frequently unpaid, so they're much more accessible. At the top internships, they're making significantly more than average full-time devs. This seems to indicate plenty of competition.

I think it's due to companies being understaffed. I've talked with people at a couple of tech companies, both startups and large corporations, why they don't hire more interns.

The answer was the same: We don't have enough resources to train them. Everyone's overworked and behind schedule, and can't even set aside a measly 1 hour a week to show interns the ropes.

And some feel that it's just a chore, like interviewing candidates.

It seems like companies these days want direct replacements or shoe-in workers, that can go from orientation / setting up equipment on day 0, to producing code on day 1.

When I started out, I had 6 months of training and getting familiar with codebase plus tech.

This is obviously not the case everywhere, but seems like a trend from my own experience.

Getting a job for life in the private sector seems like a pipe dream. From my perspective it seems the relationship between employer and employee has become only about self-interest, making the long-term investment in employees is risky when they may just take the training and leave for better opportunities and security. I didn't think this was entirely the case until my dad was made redundant from the only job he had for 35 years of his life. I keep forgetting how much of an impact 2007/2008 really did have on the economy and the psyche of the working population, coming into it now seems like normal working environment for young adults.

Most people are senior in order to support their pay. They were hired on by another company cause they really needed someone and could afford them.

That company's HR department said "there's no way I'm paying a junior web developer that, that's not what glassdoor.com says they should make". The hiring manager knew they'd be an asset worth "senior" status, because they knew they had to move quick and the candidate already had a week's worth of in-person interviews scheduled elsewhere. Thus, the web developer is now a "senior web developer".

It's on their email signature, so you know it's legit.

> 2 of them were writing tests

I mean, I've seen the counter... and it's not pretty.

I believe the point being made is that 5 years isn't really enough to call oneself senior, especially if 2 of those years is in a very narrow focus with little to no consideration for the larger picture required.

So maybe there are still interns, they just have a fancier title now?

The meaning of a job title is encoded in your company's performance review and promotion system criteria. All other beliefs about what a title "should" be are just noise.

For us, "senior" means "promoted twice" i.e. by first building a successful small system and then by building a successful medium system, with the first having not imploded yet, and your peers and stakeholders generally happy.

Also, at some companies getting promoted is the only way to higher pay, and you have to promote people so they don't leave due to financial factors. It can be the only way around brick walls set up by HR("no, we can't give this guy a $5k raise, but we can promote him to senior and give him a $5k raise" - logic)

Yeah that's a good point.

I would agree if it weren't for the baggage that gets attached to the "senior" and "junior" titles. I'll admit to having my own -- otherwise I wouldn't be here arguing about it, haha.

Mostly I feel that "senior" is more likely to trigger overconfidence and "tin god" personas; conversely "junior" is a classification I feel people tend to be too much in a hurry to shed. These are obviously traits of the people exhibiting the behavior, and not the fault of the terms themselves, however it is not inappropriate to take human nature into account. Accordingly I am wary when the title is tossed around lightly.

In general I do agree that titles are mostly arbitrary and useful just as an org-specific shorthand for the responsibilities and achievements implied.

Thanks for sharing your org's criteria, it's nice to hear about places that base evaluations on how happy both peers and stakeholders are.

I think this is a natural run of things. Junior people are in India, and always stay junior in the sense: their oursourcer companies never get hired to do critical stuff, or that's just a mistake.

Senior people are those who started off writing open source as a hobby, built up a great github profile, got hired into a small and poorly funded startup to do a job which a senior would do (because that startup didn't have a better alternative), broke some things, built experience, and proceeded to work in normal places as a senior.

This is how i see it should happen in a perfect world. It's just the international division of labor: if you have a low budget to pay someone do low-impact coding you will have a better bang for the buck spending it in India, not hiring a junior in the Valley. When you need to do serious stuff, you need local people of a senior level.

There is no place left for an American junior, as well as for Indian senior, too (their companies operate, or at least should in the perfect world operate, in outstaffing mode so they don't really need architects, only job for a senior developer may be doing interviews, probably).

The world is not static. It's complex and ever-changing. And people aren't trained to think about that complexity or change.

You can keep trying to reduce the complexity and change you see around you by pretending it boils down to simple divisions, but you end up just fooling yourself.

The more interconnections develop across and around traditional hierarchies, the less such divisions and hierarchies are required. People who see that increasing connections create more paths and opportunities will prosper. And people who don't see it will not. Irrespective of whether they are Americans or Indians.

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