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I think this is a problem across the industry. Companies don't want to give engineers adequate raises so they get trained as juniors and walk out and get 20-30k

I think this is a problem across the industry. Companies don't want to give engineers adequate raises so they get trained as juniors and walk out and get 20-30k raises. So then everyone is only interested in seniors. Senior has all but lost its meaning too... It describes how long you've been in the industry, not if you have the skills to be a technical leader, etc. At larger corps when a senior leaves, you're often given budget to re-hire a senior, so there is no incentive to hire a junior/entry level. A lot of companies don't even have pathways from internships to entry-level positions. They just let them finish their internship and say "good luck" This is a problem for diversity as well. Look at the makeup of the seniors in the industry. Now look at the junior/entry level folks coming out of master programs, colleges and boot camps.

pm90 5y ago
I don’t think it’s a question of raises, more like they’re just not willing to invest the time. Most non giant companies don’t have good processes for on boarding engineers so it’s mostly yolo. They want engineers to be productive very quickly. Someone just out of college will likely not have the skills required to drive projects on their own to completion without help/supervision. Bigger companies have pretty great onboarding tools and processes and dev tools that abstract most complex things away, allowing developers to become productive rapidly. I think of them as factories that can extract the most value out of new grads. I say this as someone who was a junior not that long ago, but of course my experience is anecdotal so take it with a pinch of salt.
- mason55 5y ago
  Yeah I always see this expressed as a criticism, like "oh these small companies just hate junior devs! Everyone wants to hire a senior dev, no one wants to hire a junior dev and train them!" But it's not always that easy. If you're a small company still looking for product-market fit or doing a fair bit of greenfield development, there's just not much work for a junior dev to do. These companies aren't all stupid or lazy or discriminating against new grads for some reason. It's the same reason estimates are hard - we're building brand new things that we've never built before and a lot of the work is in the design. Junior devs need to be told what to do. The architects/senior devs become a huge bottleneck because they can only design so much stuff at once, so until you can find more of them you can't hire more junior devs because there's not going to be anything for them to do. Until you get to a point where you're doing repeatable work or your design/architecture is solidified enough to keep people on the guard rails, there's just not a ton of work for a junior dev to do. Finally, you also have the issue that a lot of devs don't want to get into any kind of management but they want to be managed by technical people. You end up with a shortage of decent managers (where "decent" means both someone who's ok at the job of management and is acceptable to the team). If we had more work to give to junior devs we'd happily hire them - they are so much cheaper! And one other contributing factor is a lack of unions. Say what you will about seniority-based comp/perks, they do make people stay in one job for longer, which makes it more worthwhile to invest in a junior dev.
bradleyjg 5y ago
> A lot of companies don't even have pathways from internships to entry-level positions. They just let them finish their internship and say "good luck" This is so crazy to me. IME if you break even on an intern, not including pay, you’re very lucky. In other words if the code or whatever you get out of an intern equals in value the amount of time your regular staff invests in the intern. In most cases it’s negative and you have to pay them on top of that—-plus events and so on. If you aren’t using internships as a recruiting tool I have no idea why you’d bother.

pm90 5y ago

I don’t think it’s a question of raises, more like they’re just not willing to invest the time. Most non giant companies don’t have good processes for on boarding engineers so it’s mostly yolo. They want engineers to be productive very quickly. Someone just out of college will likely not have the skills required to drive projects on their own to completion without help/supervision. Bigger companies have pretty great onboarding tools and processes and dev tools that abstract most complex things away, allowing developers to become productive rapidly. I think of them as factories that can extract the most value out of new grads. I say this as someone who was a junior not that long ago, but of course my experience is anecdotal so take it with a pinch of salt.

mason55 5y ago
Yeah I always see this expressed as a criticism, like "oh these small companies just hate junior devs! Everyone wants to hire a senior dev, no one wants to hire a junior dev and train them!" But it's not always that easy. If you're a small company still looking for product-market fit or doing a fair bit of greenfield development, there's just not much work for a junior dev to do. These companies aren't all stupid or lazy or discriminating against new grads for some reason. It's the same reason estimates are hard - we're building brand new things that we've never built before and a lot of the work is in the design. Junior devs need to be told what to do. The architects/senior devs become a huge bottleneck because they can only design so much stuff at once, so until you can find more of them you can't hire more junior devs because there's not going to be anything for them to do. Until you get to a point where you're doing repeatable work or your design/architecture is solidified enough to keep people on the guard rails, there's just not a ton of work for a junior dev to do. Finally, you also have the issue that a lot of devs don't want to get into any kind of management but they want to be managed by technical people. You end up with a shortage of decent managers (where "decent" means both someone who's ok at the job of management and is acceptable to the team). If we had more work to give to junior devs we'd happily hire them - they are so much cheaper! And one other contributing factor is a lack of unions. Say what you will about seniority-based comp/perks, they do make people stay in one job for longer, which makes it more worthwhile to invest in a junior dev.

bradleyjg 5y ago

> A lot of companies don't even have pathways from internships to entry-level positions. They just let them finish their internship and say "good luck" This is so crazy to me. IME if you break even on an intern, not including pay, you’re very lucky. In other words if the code or whatever you get out of an intern equals in value the amount of time your regular staff invests in the intern. In most cases it’s negative and you have to pay them on top of that—-plus events and so on. If you aren’t using internships as a recruiting tool I have no idea why you’d bother.