Is no one hiring junior devs?

No, people aren't hiring junior devs, and haven't been for a long while. What they are hiring is people who have seriously built stuff; not "a webapp", but stuff in specific niches where they've essentially got past what would otherwise be the first year of industry training on their own.

And even then you have to hustle. Get yourself tickets to conferences (if you've built stuff, many niche conferences have free/subsidised tickets for open-source devs) and talk to people who are hiring - not the people who have the booths, but the people in the audience.

The idea that most people can just apply to jobs cold and eventually get one is essentially a lie, ime.

Depends on skill set. A lot of people suggest projects, conferences, etc but I don't think anything like that works at scale.

From my seat as a staff-level and involved in hiring:

1. The average "junior" is really a code camp graduate with skill in one very, very specific thing. The skill is limited however and typically insufficient to call them a full software engineer.

2. From (1) the pool of code camp graduates dramatically outpaces people with degrees. In my experience approximately 1 in 5 people I've interviewed have graduated a full program. This creates a few problems. Namely, the low-skilled pool is significantly higher which allows companies to be far more choosy. Additionally, the majority of software engineering roles these days are "wide" meaning you may be expected to do work that requires more than the formulaic approach a code camp gives you.

3. Degreed hires are still being considered and generally speaking aren't having any problem getting jobs. Not only is a degree a value signal it generally speaks to your ability to adapt. While the industry has been slamming degrees as not necessary the variance is significantly higher with non-degreed hires.

This all sounds like I am trash talking code camps and I guess in a way I am. My interviewing has given me this opinion. Despite specifically avoiding algorithmic puzzles people graduating these camps are just typically insufficient. I feel bad for them because code camps generally feel like the modern take on ITT and other for-profit scams from a decade or more ago. A lot of these people simply want the money. Understandable. However, it's simply not enough to get your foot in the door without help from the inside.

All of this adds up to the general consensus that hiring is getting harder. The code camp pool is taking the brunt of the lack of hiring, the code camp pool is large, so the noise they make about the hiring situation is proportional to their experience. As for senior devs this is largely a good thing going into a potential recession. However, getting promoted above that position may get more difficult.

I believe this largely has to do with the push for remote and that juniors do in fact need guidance in the beginning of the carreer. My brother in law just started software dev through a bootcamp and he got hired, but only with an onsite requirement. Having lead people myself, this makes perfect sense.

This however does not seem to be the case with smaller companies that actually do have offices, in my experience.

It's not just Junior Devs. It's everywhere in the tech industry from my experience. Entry level jobs across the board in the industry want you to already have been in the field for years or want to pay you the same wage as my local McDonald's while requiring college and multiple certs. They want the benefits of having experienced workers without putting in the effort of creating that next generation of experienced workers. I gave up on doing programming a while back because of lack of being able to get a job and waning interest. I ended up going back to basic helpdesk (hardware) to get more experience on my resume, and even then still had about a year of searching I settled for a job I know I'm being underpaid for because I have to have the experience. You either are being heavily underpaid or you're not getting a job in my area for new hires in the tech industry. Nearly every job near me, even ones labeled “Entry level” in any way, want at least 2+ years of on job work experience.

Others may not have the same issues as me, but I know quite a few people near me who are in the exact same boat. It's really unfortunate. I've seen jobs in my area reject me for not having enough experience not even getting to an interview for me to check, and half a year later that position is still waiting to be filled.

There is an oversupply of junior developers, especially in spaces where bootcamps and other quick, nondegree training was creating them. I can certainly sympathize with people who saw development as a route to make a living, but there are only so many developers needed out there. Honestly I think the industry did a lot of people a disservice by making it sound like learning basic coding was guaranteed to yield a good job, since that didn’t take into account the finiteness of the job landscape.

Actually the other part is everyone wants to work from home and training juniors remotely is just too hard.

This is one of the many stark differences I found in moving from London to the Bay Area. In London and the UK in general no one wants to hire junior devs, the first job is very hard to get. The attitude is: I don't want to pay to train someone up who'll then probably leave. I come to the Bay Area, and FAANG in particular, and it seems like most hires are junior devs, and in fact the whole hiring process (undergrad-algorithm based) is geared towards it. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this difference in attitude explains a decent amount of the UK's dire productivity growth this century versus its peers.

Also seeing this problem, I have friends in dire life circumstances trying to make a better life for themselves and their families by studying on top of a full-time job and I've not had luck trying to get them referrals.

One of them is a mid-30s handyman who turned out to have one of the best knacks for UI/design I've seen.

It's a shame because he's a very decent junior React dev that'd be a great combo UI designer but can't find an in anywhere

I feel like you've really got to do something to stand out or make connections

I don’t know why anyone would hire a junior. I was an utter loss for the first two companies I worked for.

They basically paid to train me and then I went off to a far better paying tech company that doesn’t hire juniors.

In a highly liquid market like tech, you can’t really afford to invest in people as they cost the same as just hiring off the market to retain/replace.

Speaking for myself, I am always open to hiring non-entry level juniors that demonstrate they can punch above their weight a bit. I have a philosophy of keeping the front end of our hiring funnel as wide as possible, my recruiting staff will screen almost anyone thats had at least one professional gig or an active github. And the folks that don't meet the experience expectations we have often still get a chance to show us what they can do if they check other boxes.

But the frank reality is that the definition of "junior" has changed significantly compared to 5-10 years ago. The education options for becoming a software engineer have broadened dramatically. As a result, the barrier to entry for simply submitting a resume to any given req is much lower. And while this is manifestly a great thing for inclusivity outcomes, it has disproportionately worse impact on the signal-to-noise ratio in the hiring funnel.

I think many orgs are still in the process of evaluating their risk tolerance for bringing on unproven talent. I do think _some_ risk is warranted, but its very easy over time to accidentally index too far in either direction.

It’s a whole new world now for junior devs from what it was 10 years ago. The market is absolutely flooded with young CS grads, and self taught/bootcamp devs are facing unimaginable competition for entry level roles as a result.

We are still hiring plenty of juniors, but they are almost exclusively CS grads at this point. I honestly worry that software is going the way of law and finance, where credentialism is rampant.

It sucks due to how the current market incentives are laid out. Why the hell would a company want to invest in a junior dev, when they're going to bounce in two years?

Training junior developers is hard and timeconsuming. It also hurts that the variance of quality of software engineers starting out is so wide. There is so much risk involved with someone with 0 experience. More often than not, you get guys who cannot code their way out of a box without you holding their hand every step of the way. Every once in a while you get a crazy whale who can probably code Optimus Prime from scratch.

a few years ago I had a lot of trouble find a "junior" or entry-level programming position anywhere. eventually I found a remote web developer position. then various family circumstances occurred causing me to temporarily leave the position for awhile to deal with things. this was right as the covid stuff was ramping up. when I was once again ready to work, the developer unfortunately instituted a hiring freeze due to covid, so it was back to the job search once again.

I ended up finding work at my local school district. the two programmers who are in charge of our district of some 12,000 students are both over 50, and they were more than happy to hire me to learn how to keep everything running. it's not a glamorous job, and there's no doubt that my salary, even adjusted for cost of living, is not great compared to many other people who post here… but the benefits are great, and being the future of keeping my childhood school district running on the technology side keeps me feeling fulfilled at work. plus, I have incredible job security going forward.

for any "junior devs" looking for work: I recommend seeing if there's any local government positions like this that are available. my district can't be the only one run by programmers who are closing in on retirement, desperately searching for younger people to learn how to take the reins first. I'm mostly self-taught but even a self-taught level of understanding of SQL was sufficient to get hired—I've since learned quite a bit more on the job but a CS grad should have no problem at all.

Just to add for anyone reading this thread and aspiring to be a dev and being demotivated this is not the experience I witness (in the Netherlands). There are jobs for junior devs. One of the problem might be not wanting to advertise to hire very junior devs as I have seen people apply at the company I work for that have just completed a bootcamp or udemy course and nothing else and think they are qualified. If you advertise hiring at a low level you will get lots of spammy applications.

(I understand why these people are taking the shotgun approach and applying everywhere because some company will bite but it can be annoying on the receiving end)

My company is hiring junior devs all the time.

I never called myself a "junior" engineer, even at the beginning of my career, that is lowballing yourself at best. You are an engineer with 6 moths or one year, etc... of experience. You need to sell yourself to employers, clients, etc... no one will advocate for your success or a fair compensation. If you are really unexperienced, let the interviewer to assess that fact. No need to lie on your resume or interviews, just don't put yourself in a position where recruiters/hiring managers will have very easy to give you a worst compensation for the same work you would otherwise do at a better rate.

It may be useful to think of companies as categories - Fortune 1000 companies, startups, and consulting companies, although categories these can overlap.

From what I've seen a lot of startups seem to need "full stack" programmers, who can program ReactJS. Especially before a series A these companies usually can't afford to hire senior programmers, or even regular programmers, so it is a good place to get your foot in the door and get some experience, although probably at the worst pay.

Then there are consulting companies. As you are going in on a team, and the companies you are being placed at often do a mini-interview before you go in, and your placement contract can be for just a few months, companies you are placed at are less worried about taking a risk bringing you in. The trick is the level - the consulting company might not care much what level you're at, but the company you are being placed at generally wants someone who can bang out features cleanly and with little to no help. I have seen 22 year olds just out of coding boot camp being placed as "senior" programmer for a three month stint, which they are generally not reupped for - and I have heard this happens in other places too. It gets you in the door but it's hard to stay there. If you're not reupped and on the bench, the consulting company might show you the door fairly quickly too.

Some Fortune 1000 companies have internships, generally for college students, and the ones who managers and mentors are happy with can get offers as a junior/associate when graduating. It's probably good to try to intern at a different company each summer and to keep in contact with managers and mentors. It also depends on the job market - people who graduated in 2000-2001 or 2008-2009 or maybe now probably have worse luck than graduates at other times.

This is unfortunate to hear, I'm still crawling through a chemistry PhD and I was hoping I'd be able to transition into software and get as far away from touching any more glass as possible.

Do you think the situation is different in more specialized niches (i.e. would I be able to reasonably compete with a CS grad for a job at a biotech firm?)

We do, but we don't advertise. We get them through networking (some of my best developers we found through word-of-mouth referrals by current and former employees vouching for them). And even more so, we dip into the pool of former interns every year and hire a batch of them.

I’ve hired a lot of developers who were straight from dev bootcamps. Some of these were very good. I wrote about the candidates I hired from the Grace Hopper program here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-grace-hopper-divi...

In general, every project needs some experienced engineers and then a larger number of novice engineers. In any software project there is a large amount of work that is tedious and almost secretarial — you don’t want your most experienced engineers bogged down in that muck. It’s important to have some novice engineers who can handle that kind of boring grunt work.

Another contributing factor in my opinion is that companies would rather outsource entry level dev work to foreign countries with cheaper labor. I have a feeling this will backfire in the coming years as companies struggle to find sufficiently experienced senior devs.

My consulting company hires junior developers if they show good initiative and attitude. If you are finding that you can’t get hired as a junior (<3 years) you might be looking at areas that are too niche.

As a junior, you gotta lower your standards and get into the field. This isn’t like 10 or even 5 years ago. Junior developers are abundant. Boot camps are pumping out “qualified” (I don’t mean this to be rude, but many boot camps are not qualifying people to do real enterprise work. There is a gap, you have to find a company willing to bridge that.) candidates en masse. Do something that sets you apart. Make contacts.

This happened in the 2000 crash. There were a lot of people with CS undergraduate degrees that couldn't write a for loop.

A letter from an undergrad advisor was usually enough for the strong coders to cut through the noise.

These days most decent coding academies have relationships with hiring pipelines (check before you enroll!), and write recommendations for the strong students. That might only get you an entry level stepping stone job, though. (A letter from a professor with relevant publications is worth much more than a letter from an unknown coding acadamy.)

Nope, we just laid off the least experienced 10% of our team, and haven't hired a junior since 2019.

Best advice is that you don't need a job to become a mid or senior dev:

Go contribute to open source projects. It's the best hiring indicator we have and it's much better at teaching you real world programming than boot camps or CS degrees (I have a CS degree but learned basically nothing about how to actually build software).

I am looking to hire, what I call, at least one mid-level developer for the company I am currently working for. A mid-level because the company needs them to be productive within a couple of months and it's not currently practical to train anybody who is too junior. There's a lot of work to be done and you need the experienced people doing the work rather than training the less experienced team members. I've been trying to set expectations and argue that you need to invest and train but I need to balance all of this with business needs at the end of the day.

As an aside, I find that labeling of junior and mid-level and senior very confusing because I've been interviewing people who claim they're experienced but don't even understand the basics. And I am not talking about algorithms or white boarding or live coding or any of that nonsense.

This is in Australia but may not be country-specific. The job ads I've been noticing for the past couple of years are asking for an increasing amount and level of experience for their roles so I agree with you that it will be a problem in the future.

Another issue is that I've spent a lot of time and effort in the past to train up graduates on our grad program. Previously you would train up people and they'd train 2 years then work for at least 2 years after.

During the boom the last few years, people left after a year or 18 months. Only one stayed a full 2 years largely because he wasn't that great. Honestly can't be bothered any more.

We are. Most roles can be remote even if not explicitly called out: https://finra.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FINRA/jobs?jobFami... Feel free to contact me if any of them need a resume put on top of the stack.

With the abundance of material available for people to self-train as a developer, the pool of candidates has exploded - bootcamps, self-paced university courses (CS50), etc. all mean the bar has been raised for what is considered a junior.

YouTube, Udemy, Exercism, TryHackMe - these allow anyone with an internet connection to learn, perhaps with the aim of entering the industry.

At Stacker (YC S20) we have 4 Junior engineers in a team of 15 engineers (so ~25% but a higher % of new hires), all of whom have started in the past year.

We're not actively hiring new Junior positions right now due to having the right balance across the team - but just to provide some anecdotal evidence that some companies indeed have been hiring Junior engineers recently.

On-boarding and training a remote junior is a horrible experience for both the mentor and the junior. With the additional ramp up time it's just so much easier to hire someone more experienced. As more and more companies return to the office hopefully this issue will clean itself up.

As a Junior who graduated BSc Computer Science in June this year I haven't been able to find anything. I don't want to leave Canada (Although I am willing to relocate within Canada) but a lot of my fellow alumni who have found jobs are going to be working in the US.

I worked a lot of hours through my degree in a non-tech position (Bills/Tuition are expensive) and as a result don't really have much in the way of a portfolio outside of stuff built in class. That seems to be a big limiter but at least something I can work at.

I did take a volunteer position for a local non-profit over a few summers when I had the time but it was more sysadmin/helpdesk style work and nobody seems to care. I've had such a hard time I'm actually looking into joining the Military.

because recruitment for software eng roles is lazy imo. The least effort is to look for someone with experience.

I am personally of the opinion that experience isn't a good indicator of programming ability, but it may be an indicator of software engineering capability. See here https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programmi... (links to a study and talks about this point more)

I've worked with masters students who were far better programmers than senior engineers I've worked with.

My former employer is always hiring junior developers, but a degree is required. There were a few hundred new dev hires over this summer.

I left the company to take an L3 position at Google, where I will be starting shortly.

Me personally: no.

Before Covid, I had an excellent setup to train developers using pair programming and working closely together for months.

Now, training is impossible. I cannot train a junior dev remotely, and the job is remote.

I graduated from a bootcamp last year with no previous industry experience, and was one of the few lucky people in my class to have a relatively easy time finding a job (I was hired through an early career engineer program).

Many many people in my class took six or more months of applying constantly to eventually receive an offer. It's doable but it's a full-time commitment, and I see a lot of unconscious bias in who ultimately gets a job v. who doesn't.

What is the benefit of hiring them? Mentorship takes time away from seniors and code needs a thorough review if not full refactoring.

It was like this in the last recession, junior profile were shunned because senior profile were available on the market.

I just graduated and got a job as a data engineer, but want to be swe. How hard would it be to switch if I stay as a data engineer for 6-12months? Worried about being pigeonholed from the start.

High saturation of entry level coupled with automated filtering of applications.

A lot will tell you, you need to do X,Y or Z but I think that's the real picture for a large majority.

I am, send them my way!

> This is going to make the senior dev situation worse in a few years since there doesn't seem to be any pipeline to make new ones.

What situation is this referring to?

We sure aren't. I advocated for it multiple times and instead we got given a team in india to outsource excess work to. :(

What is a junior dev? If I've done 11 years of PHP and 9 of Go and various undefined years of JS and would like to switch to a Java job, I know little about, bit enough to serve an api over http, am I a junior?

We absolutely are, but we don't advertise it.

Get a job as an entry level QA. This is the way.

don't say you're a junior dev

My FB/Instagram keeps showing me that pretty but loud woman about learning to be a "Front End" or "Back end" developer. It seems everyone wants to be a developer these days and why not, seems easy.