Today I chatted with a college classmate who works as an engineer in the Bay Area. He works at a startup with over 100 employees focused on AI infrastructure. He told me that recently, the candidates interviewing for their junior engineer positions are mostly undergraduates from Stanford and Ivy League schools, and they require 2-3 internships so they can immediately handle tasks that would typically be assigned to seniors. Working at a big company in the Bay Area is relatively comfortable, but at a startup, the workload is quite heavy. If you don't learn quickly and produce results, it's easy to be optimized out 🥲 Additionally, since everyone is using Claude Code to write code and has become quite confident in AI, it has become difficult for each engineer to explain how their code is written, which has made each engineer's module more independent 😂.