A proposal: how to hire junior engineers in the age of AI

About six weeks ago I wrote We are all Product Engineers now, an exploration of what LLM-written code is doing to the job of software development. A few weeks after that I turned it into an AI Engineer New York talk, which at a quarter-million views is now by far the most-watched talk I’ve ever given. The talk and the post both end with an exhortation: we have to figure out how to hire new engineers to do the vastly-changed job of software development now that “programming” isn’t part of that job description. This is a monumental shift and there is an entire cohort of people who got into college three and four years ago who are emerging into a job market that has absolutely no use for the skills they learned. Since then I’ve been thinking about how, exactly, one could go about hiring junior engineers who would be good at the new way of doing things, specifically about how to interview them. This post is about my best idea so far. Junior hiring has collapsed, and old tech interviews…