7 ms·

I see a ton of jobs posted for seniors right now but almost none for juniors. Are companies being shy about talent risks right now?

giantg2 5y ago
My experience is that this is an ongoing problem. For years there have been relatively few junior positions. No company wants to train people.
- bpicolo 5y ago
  You need senior engineers in order to scale training people, so it's a catch-22.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    It's only a catch-22 if you don't have the senior people. At least in my experience, companies have 80%+ senior and midlevel developers. The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them.
    - _dark_matter_ 5y ago
      Honestly at this point as a staff level eng, not having junior levels to work with is a big turn-off. I love being able to break down projects in to tasks and not have to carry out every single one of those. Convincing one of my senior-level peers to work on a project or task can be near impossible, while the junior level folks will jump on them.
      - hdhjebebeb 5y ago
        Lol I've seen this in action, lots of staff devs being architecture astronauts or diving super deep on a hot new technology, and meanwhile some intern is building the stupid webapp that actually gets used and makes money.
        giantg2 5y ago
        I would love to be an architect. It's all concepts and not really implementation beyond proof of concept. Concepts and problem solving is right up my alley. Unfortunately I need to be at least a senior dev before they will consider me. Plus it's like double my salary. Oh well.
        _dark_matter_ 5y ago
        At Mozilla at least, the architects are all some of the best programmers I know. They implement huge swaths of the architecture they propose.
        giantg2 5y ago
        That's nice. The people who are architects at my company are generally very good developers since you have to be a highly regarded senior dev to even be considered to the position. They don't work on the implementation though.
    - mooreds 5y ago
      > The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them. It's not cheap if they are willing to pay for it. That's why senior salaries keep going up. It's a tradeoff--they are willing to pay more for the privilege of not losing the time.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        I don't really see it that way. Training people is more expensive than hiring a senior dev for the simple fact that you have to use a senior dev's time to train the new person anyways.
        mooreds 5y ago
        > Training people is more expensive than hiring a senior dev for the simple fact that you have to use a senior dev's time to train the new person anyways. For the first N months, sure, but then, you have a senior and a trained junior, who is hopefully on their way to being a mid. So it's less of an expense and more of an investment in my eyes. But like any upfront investment, there is a time when the costs outweigh the benefits, especially in the early days.
        wyclif 5y ago
        The "investment" part of the equation is where I see that model breaking down and failing. There's a lot of poaching and job-hopping, especially motivated by total comp. You could say it's always been that way, but in terms of the senior/mid/junior spread it seems like in our industry, employers would rather hire another senior than hire a junior who needs investment.
        giantg2 5y ago
        "So it's less of an expense and more of an investment in my eyes." Too bad companies don't see it that way.
        mooreds 5y ago
- mooreds 5y ago
  This also means that if you can afford to hire junior folks, you can get some real go-getters for a great (read, favorable to the company) salary. But even junior salaries are going up, I've noticed.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I think junior average salary at my company is around $75k now. Seniors are around $115k. A $40k gap is pretty big. I don't know. I feel like most dev compensation is kind of random. Like does that senior really produce $40k more in value per year?
    - starky 5y ago
      It should be easy for a senior to provide $40k more value than a junior employee, especially considering that a lot of the value a junior employee creates can be due to mentorship and working with senior employees.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        But how do you evaluate value on a multi person and even multi team project? Is the tester or security person valued as much as the senior dev? Without them the devs work might do more harm than good, right? How do we put value on those intangibles?
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        giantg2 5y ago
        I wanted to add to this. How do we evaluate value for managers? They can be making multiples of what the devs are yet they are overhead.
        mooreds 5y ago
        > They can be making multiples of what the devs are yet they are overhead. I used to think this way. Then I became a manager. (Now I'm an individual contributor/IC again.) Oh, how wrong I was. Managers do coordination, which is far different than building, but typically more valuable. Why is it more valuable? Leverage. If I as an IC do the wrong thing and it doesn't get to production, it typically wastes my time (and any time needed to fix the mess, if doing so is harder than `git reset`). If a team of people do the wrong thing, then that's an entire team's time wasted. Managers exist to ensure that a team is pointed in the right direction. Figuring this out could include meetings (oh so many meetings) with other parts of the business or customers, discussing priorities and timelines and ensuring dependencies are understood and met. You also need to foster intrateam communication so that Bob learns that Alice has already partway solved problem X, or Alice learns that Tracy has experience in technology Y. Sure, you could rely on ICs to do this, and good ones will, but I've seen communication short circuit big issues and save lots of development time. Is the manager's effort overhead if, by their efforts (even partially, with the help of other team members), the team solves the correct problem, rather than the wrong problem correctly? This explanation ignores the political aspect of management (protecting your team from budget cuts, layoffs and being pulled into extraneous meetings/other efforts). I've intentionally ignored this because it was minimal at most places I've been a manager, so I can't speak out of personal experience. But I've heard about other places where this was a large chunk of the value added by management.
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  That's why I stopped looking for an engineering job and became a technician. Started at the top of the pay scale due to my degree, which was nice.
Macha 5y ago
I work for a company that has been pretty strong on pipelining in people as junior engineers and progressing them within the company, but even the direction we had while working remote from covid is that training in juniors while out of office is something that higher ups don't want to deal with (even if they would have little involvement in the process, such is corporate bureaucracy), so they're reticent to open positions to more junior level developers, and grads are pretty much right out unless they've interned with us previously.
MattGaiser 5y ago
For my current job the posting said 4 years of experience. I had 1 at the time. Officially, my company is only hiring seniors, but if a decent junior applied (at least a year of experience inclusive of internships), I could see us taking them, especially with the right tech stack. So, apply anyway.
- mooreds 5y ago
  This bums me out. On two levels: * The company doesn't have a clear idea of what they want, so they fall back on 'years of experience'. Lazy. I've written job descriptions and I know it's hard, but c'mon. * This will turn off talented folks that might make great team members (esp folks who don't apply unless they have 100% of the qualifications).
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    It is a more a case of what they want vs what they are willing to/forced to take in the current market. I doubt they would openly consider that person, but when there is a candidate in front of them who has reasonably passed some questions and is willing to accept, I would hope they would budge.
  - thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
    >esp folks who don't apply unless they have 100% of the qualifications This group disproportionately including women and excluding referrals (people who have the same experience, hobbies and education as your current employees) - got his last job via referral.
dvtrn 5y ago
I had an interview this week where the recruiter was flat out and honest when I asked them "what's one thing you'd change about this company?" (something I've been asking a lot lately and being very observant to how different company reps answer) and he told me that he lamented and would absolutely change the fact that his hiring managers aren't actively seeking out or even remotely interested in trying to hire more juniors. Gotta say, I respect the hell outta that fella for being so honest about that, partially because I've observed the very same phenomenon.
stubish 5y ago
Remote work will make it worse. Having worked for a remote-first company for over a decade, one thing I noticed is that every position was effectively senior level. Because you need staff able to work mostly autonomously, and at a minimum you need people experienced enough to pick up what they need to learn quickly from peers at the other end of a text chat or phone line. I'm sure we will work out how to do this better, but I think it is still a work in progress.
starky 5y ago
At least from my perspective. It is a combination of needing a certain number of senior level employees to mentor junior employees and to lead projects and we have a good pipeline of junior candidates through our co-op program such that there is no need for us to post a job when we have known good options.

giantg2 5y ago

My experience is that this is an ongoing problem. For years there have been relatively few junior positions. No company wants to train people.

bpicolo 5y ago
You need senior engineers in order to scale training people, so it's a catch-22.
- giantg2 5y ago
  It's only a catch-22 if you don't have the senior people. At least in my experience, companies have 80%+ senior and midlevel developers. The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them.
  - _dark_matter_ 5y ago
    Honestly at this point as a staff level eng, not having junior levels to work with is a big turn-off. I love being able to break down projects in to tasks and not have to carry out every single one of those. Convincing one of my senior-level peers to work on a project or task can be near impossible, while the junior level folks will jump on them.
    - hdhjebebeb 5y ago
      Lol I've seen this in action, lots of staff devs being architecture astronauts or diving super deep on a hot new technology, and meanwhile some intern is building the stupid webapp that actually gets used and makes money.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        I would love to be an architect. It's all concepts and not really implementation beyond proof of concept. Concepts and problem solving is right up my alley. Unfortunately I need to be at least a senior dev before they will consider me. Plus it's like double my salary. Oh well.
        _dark_matter_ 5y ago
        At Mozilla at least, the architects are all some of the best programmers I know. They implement huge swaths of the architecture they propose.
        giantg2 5y ago
        That's nice. The people who are architects at my company are generally very good developers since you have to be a highly regarded senior dev to even be considered to the position. They don't work on the implementation though.
  - mooreds 5y ago
    > The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them. It's not cheap if they are willing to pay for it. That's why senior salaries keep going up. It's a tradeoff--they are willing to pay more for the privilege of not losing the time.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I don't really see it that way. Training people is more expensive than hiring a senior dev for the simple fact that you have to use a senior dev's time to train the new person anyways.
      - mooreds 5y ago
        > Training people is more expensive than hiring a senior dev for the simple fact that you have to use a senior dev's time to train the new person anyways. For the first N months, sure, but then, you have a senior and a trained junior, who is hopefully on their way to being a mid. So it's less of an expense and more of an investment in my eyes. But like any upfront investment, there is a time when the costs outweigh the benefits, especially in the early days.
        wyclif 5y ago
        The "investment" part of the equation is where I see that model breaking down and failing. There's a lot of poaching and job-hopping, especially motivated by total comp. You could say it's always been that way, but in terms of the senior/mid/junior spread it seems like in our industry, employers would rather hire another senior than hire a junior who needs investment.
        giantg2 5y ago
        "So it's less of an expense and more of an investment in my eyes." Too bad companies don't see it that way.
        mooreds 5y ago
mooreds 5y ago
This also means that if you can afford to hire junior folks, you can get some real go-getters for a great (read, favorable to the company) salary. But even junior salaries are going up, I've noticed.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I think junior average salary at my company is around $75k now. Seniors are around $115k. A $40k gap is pretty big. I don't know. I feel like most dev compensation is kind of random. Like does that senior really produce $40k more in value per year?
  - starky 5y ago
    It should be easy for a senior to provide $40k more value than a junior employee, especially considering that a lot of the value a junior employee creates can be due to mentorship and working with senior employees.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      But how do you evaluate value on a multi person and even multi team project? Is the tester or security person valued as much as the senior dev? Without them the devs work might do more harm than good, right? How do we put value on those intangibles?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - giantg2 5y ago
        I wanted to add to this. How do we evaluate value for managers? They can be making multiples of what the devs are yet they are overhead.
        mooreds 5y ago
        > They can be making multiples of what the devs are yet they are overhead. I used to think this way. Then I became a manager. (Now I'm an individual contributor/IC again.) Oh, how wrong I was. Managers do coordination, which is far different than building, but typically more valuable. Why is it more valuable? Leverage. If I as an IC do the wrong thing and it doesn't get to production, it typically wastes my time (and any time needed to fix the mess, if doing so is harder than `git reset`). If a team of people do the wrong thing, then that's an entire team's time wasted. Managers exist to ensure that a team is pointed in the right direction. Figuring this out could include meetings (oh so many meetings) with other parts of the business or customers, discussing priorities and timelines and ensuring dependencies are understood and met. You also need to foster intrateam communication so that Bob learns that Alice has already partway solved problem X, or Alice learns that Tracy has experience in technology Y. Sure, you could rely on ICs to do this, and good ones will, but I've seen communication short circuit big issues and save lots of development time. Is the manager's effort overhead if, by their efforts (even partially, with the help of other team members), the team solves the correct problem, rather than the wrong problem correctly? This explanation ignores the political aspect of management (protecting your team from budget cuts, layoffs and being pulled into extraneous meetings/other efforts). I've intentionally ignored this because it was minimal at most places I've been a manager, so I can't speak out of personal experience. But I've heard about other places where this was a large chunk of the value added by management.
bobsmooth 5y ago
That's why I stopped looking for an engineering job and became a technician. Started at the top of the pay scale due to my degree, which was nice.

Macha 5y ago

I work for a company that has been pretty strong on pipelining in people as junior engineers and progressing them within the company, but even the direction we had while working remote from covid is that training in juniors while out of office is something that higher ups don't want to deal with (even if they would have little involvement in the process, such is corporate bureaucracy), so they're reticent to open positions to more junior level developers, and grads are pretty much right out unless they've interned with us previously.

MattGaiser 5y ago

For my current job the posting said 4 years of experience. I had 1 at the time. Officially, my company is only hiring seniors, but if a decent junior applied (at least a year of experience inclusive of internships), I could see us taking them, especially with the right tech stack. So, apply anyway.

mooreds 5y ago
This bums me out. On two levels: * The company doesn't have a clear idea of what they want, so they fall back on 'years of experience'. Lazy. I've written job descriptions and I know it's hard, but c'mon. * This will turn off talented folks that might make great team members (esp folks who don't apply unless they have 100% of the qualifications).
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  It is a more a case of what they want vs what they are willing to/forced to take in the current market. I doubt they would openly consider that person, but when there is a candidate in front of them who has reasonably passed some questions and is willing to accept, I would hope they would budge.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  >esp folks who don't apply unless they have 100% of the qualifications This group disproportionately including women and excluding referrals (people who have the same experience, hobbies and education as your current employees) - got his last job via referral.

dvtrn 5y ago

I had an interview this week where the recruiter was flat out and honest when I asked them "what's one thing you'd change about this company?" (something I've been asking a lot lately and being very observant to how different company reps answer) and he told me that he lamented and would absolutely change the fact that his hiring managers aren't actively seeking out or even remotely interested in trying to hire more juniors. Gotta say, I respect the hell outta that fella for being so honest about that, partially because I've observed the very same phenomenon.

stubish 5y ago

Remote work will make it worse. Having worked for a remote-first company for over a decade, one thing I noticed is that every position was effectively senior level. Because you need staff able to work mostly autonomously, and at a minimum you need people experienced enough to pick up what they need to learn quickly from peers at the other end of a text chat or phone line. I'm sure we will work out how to do this better, but I think it is still a work in progress.

starky 5y ago

At least from my perspective. It is a combination of needing a certain number of senior level employees to mentor junior employees and to lead projects and we have a good pipeline of junior candidates through our co-op program such that there is no need for us to post a job when we have known good options.