39 ms·

Why nobody hires junior developers and what happens next

147 points by arnvald 5y ago

mkl95 5y ago
> Why nobody hires junior developers There are some companies out there that hire junior developers. I know because I was one of them. After a few days, you will find out the hard way why no senior developer wanted to work for your brand new employer.
- siva7 5y ago
  Funny how this is one of these things one probably won’t understand as a junior but first gets clear when turning into a senior
- huetius 5y ago
  This is funny, and has a lot of truth to it, but I like mentoring juniors. Watching “my” juniors step up to a big challenge and win, or rise in the organization (even above me!) is more rewarding than most of my day to day work.
avodonosov 5y ago
Statistics to support the claim?
lanecwagner 5y ago
I've been talking about this for a minute. Boot camps are pushing the "you can make tons of money in just 4 weeks" narrative. CS skills are ironically becoming a huge differentiator. that's why I've been indiehacking on https://qvault.io https://qvault.io
new_guy 5y ago
Because going to a 'bootcamp' for a couple of weeks doesn't make you anymore of a 'developer' than playing operation[0] makes you a surgeon. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_(game)
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Yet somehow we have all these people calling themselves "engineers" who couldn't code themselves out of anything more complex than a CRUD app.
  - akudha 5y ago
    That is because most of the “jobs” require just that skill or some other very limited skill. I was asked to hand over the stuff that I was working on, when I left a job. It was interesting to find out the girl I was supposed to train, didn’t know even the absolute basic programming stuff. She had been in the company for five years and was well liked. She was doing just one specific thing all those years, and she was very good at it. She got raises every year, the company had a perverse interest in keeping her that way. I have worked in a dozen places in my life. Though tall promises are made during interviews, not one of those companies gave a shit about employee growth etc. only way to do something interesting was to leave and find another job - rinse and repeat. It is not just the employees fault their skills stagnate. Employers also contribute to it.
  - walshemj 5y ago
    And how does CS degree where your learning just the Math Heavy theory do that? if you did an EE, Mech or Civil Degree maybe those are more appropriate.
- paulcole 5y ago
  Serious question then, how does someone become a ‘developer’?
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    Write code. Create stuff. Schooling can only ever provide you a starting off point.
  - adventured 5y ago
    There's nothing wrong with using a bootcamp to get started. Everyone has to start somewhere. The bootcamps have often gotten a bad reputation for pretending they prepare you to dive right into a serious job as an experienced developer. Many of them are guilty of misleading people to pull customers, doing the typical thing of promising overly fast results. Bootcamps, self-education, go to school for it, internships; a combination of things. There are plenty of ways to get started and keep progressing.
angarg12 5y ago
This is bogus. Every week I'm interviewing a handful of people for internships and junior roles. This is also simply not true: > top companies (big tech, high growth startups) figure out that they don't really need to hire a lot of junior developers, they'll just hire the best seniors from other companies Not only it is insanely hard to hire senior devs, but also this doesn't make sense. We have plenty of work to go around and not all of it is at the senior scope. There is always room in big tech to hire and train juniors.
- joe-collins 5y ago
  Maybe I've been looking at the wrong companies, then. It seems like the majority of openings are looking for formal educational attainment or years of on-the-job experience that, as a self-taught programmer paying bills via a different field, I simply don't have.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    If you can make it work, I'd recommend going the bootcamp route (with a bootcamp that pays a stipend and uses an income share agreement).
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    Don't be afraid of applying. If they find you a good problem solver, who is eager to learn, is humble and has reasonable cognitive skills, many companies may decide to extend an offer, even if they don't have an opening exactly to your profile at the moment. I've seen this happen with friends of mine applying remotely during the pandemic.
- jnwatson 5y ago
  The vast majority of dev jobs are outside “big tech, high growth startups”. FAANGs can’t train nearly enough juniors to make up for the rest of the industry.
  - dasil003 5y ago
    Also a surprisingly non-trivial number of FAANG engineers can’t operate without the world class tooling and technical leadership support they get inside those companies.
c6451b 5y ago
Having been on the hiring side and interviewed plenty of juniors I've found there seems to be a general lack of "try" anymore. I remember when I started 10 years ago I felt like the average junior I was competing against was a very talented problem solver. Perhaps I'm just being given bad candidates. The majority of them seem to come from bootcamps these days rather than Bachelors or Associates programs. They're trained in a single stack and without the formality of problem solving you learn in a degree program the average bootcamp developer seems to be too linearly tracked to really succeed at least in the mid-grade startup world I am in. They're capable of brain dumping cracking the coding interview, can solve very trivial (e.g. linear) problems, but when asked to think outside the box they seem unable to because it doesn't fit into any nice little box they learned at the bootcamp. I suppose this could also be a function of people trying to "break into" programming from a field that is completely unrelated expecting easy money and a comfortable job. I suspect it's a shell shock for them as much as it is for me the interviewer. Bootcamps, in my opinion, had good intentions but ended up not only lowering the quality of developer but also increasing the pool of applicants. After getting burned by say 30% of your junior hires it makes sense you'd be more cautious. For every solid graduate from a program in IT or CS, there are 20 "graduates" of a 4 week, extremely expensive, and borderline worthless bootcamp program. Programming is quickly going the way real estate did in the early 00's. The experienced guys will continue to make money and the people trying to get into the industry make almost nothing. ABET accredits CS programs, perhaps there should be an accrediting body to stop all these fly by night money sinkholes we call bootcamps. Lord knows the only people making money on bootcamp education are the frauds that run them.
- halo-and-talon 5y ago
  This is an interesting observation and I think part of what makes it so hard to hire developers. What you really want are people that are very good at learning and problem solving in a practical way, but that's a really difficult skill set to evaluate. Data structures and algorithms are important tools, but they're only that: tools. So we do the equivalent of figuring out whether someone can swing a hammer, but that's a weak proxy for the skill we really want. To be fair to bootcamp grads, I think plenty of "experienced" hires have also just managed to stick around and are not necessarily great developers either. It's a really tough to pin down skill.
ragona 5y ago
This article neglects to understand the massive college-hire pipelines that top companies set up. It's not that companies aren't hiring junior developers, it's that they _only_ hire from their college recruiting pipeline for their entry level roles. It's become a common policy to not make "industry" hires at SWE-1; that's basically the college hire rung. Tell you what, I would not want to be a brand new developer without university connections trying to get a role right now. If you start looking without top internships and a degree from a school with connections it seems like it'll be rough.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrebored 5y ago
  I made this mistake. I did undergrad research instead of internships in school and was sure I wanted to do a PhD -- until my final semester. I ultimately wound up having to do a much worse internship than I would've gotten partnered with my school. It took me nearly three months to find it. Big mistake that I recommend anyone in University reading this right now to avoid. Diversify your experiences!
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  I basically did that out of a small university with no internship experience or strong university/personal connections, in 2013. It was definitely a struggle at start and I've had to struggle through some really crappy roles, but I'm doing pretty solid now. Making almost double now than I was when I started out, I'm a team lead now and very happy with the company I am with now.
- arnvald 5y ago
  Hi, author here, that's a very fair point that I didn't consider. It totally makes sense that the number of available jobs looks smaller than it is, because some of them are never really advertised in public. Thanks for sharing that!
  - joe-collins 5y ago
headphoneswater 5y ago
I screen resumes for my team and pick up one or two juniors a year honestly it's hard to wade though the 20-30 identical resumes we get a week from bootcamp grads with the same copy and pasted example projects listed under their completed work Now I've worked with some bootcampers who excelled and turned out to be fantastic developers so I'm not aginst the concept but you've got to differentiate yourself a bit
moonchrome 5y ago
Software development gets marketed as an easy desk job that pays well. Reality is you either need a certain mindset (sitting in front of a computer 8 hours a day and trying to figure out how to get it to do something is not something most people find fulfilling) or need to be prepared for a really boring mentally taxing grind that's going to take years. I've seen people trying to get into development from bootcamps and just break under the requirements just to contribute to a modern project. Not to mention that the bare-minimum approach to problem solving is going to slow down your learning process (you can only get so far with copy pasting and Google).
- Zababa 5y ago
  > need to be prepared for a really boring mentally taxing grind that's going to take years. Isn't this most jobs these days?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    It can be, that's why aptitude/affinity are important and why I don't think software is the right choice for a large % of people I see getting into it recently.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      Very true.
- datameta 5y ago
  > Not to mention that the bare-minimum approach to problem solving is going to slow down your learning process This is a very useful reminder for myself
- throwingtt 5y ago
  I'd add that there are now so many bootcamp candidates that want a J-O-B and have a passing interest in computers that just filtering them out gets old. The only realistic option for a small team is to reject bootcamp candidates from the get go. You will of course have a few exceptions, but good luck finding them. A comp sci degree really is a much better filter for junior devs.
devwastaken 5y ago
1. Those on top naturally don't see the problem. Or they do and are intentionally disengenuous. People like their 150K paycheck and know that they're replaceable if we allow more workers. 2. Companies made their bed and are lying in it. They refuse to invest into devs because they know they're gone in 2 years. They're gone in 2 years because companies don't give incentives to stay. They would rather hire someone else and pay them more than pay an existing employee more. Lots of made up reasons as to why, it's become culture and everyone goes along with it. 3. Software work is exported to India and elsewhere. That's not a new fact, it's been going on since the 90's. Cheap global labor pushes out domestic labor. But no senator with the superpac's to get elected would ever dream of restricting global markets. Their salary depends on them not doing so. 4. A company will never say their market isn't in demand. That's like saying your company is unprofitable or that it makes bad products. It may be true, but you always say you're viable and make the best. Same as how you say your jobs are in high demand. More applicants = more control, you can pay less with less benefits. So while those in power do nothing because they're not affected, graduating students are met with little to no jobs, and we yet again see more socioeconomic decline. If dev work was in high demand there wouldn't be an unemployed compsci student in the U.S. yet I know multiple. Companies and those with the incentives are lying.
- itake 5y ago
  > People like their 150K paycheck and know that they're replaceable if we allow more workers. can you elaborate? as a senior dev myself, I am def replaceable, but my role in the company is completely different than what is expected of a junior engineer. There is zero chance I could/would be replaced by a junior engineer and I love have junior talent on my team to do the work I am not interested in. > 2. Companies made their bed and are lying in it. no... companies love hiring junior engineers directly from college because they are wayyyy cheaper than senior talent, it doesn't matter if they leave after 2 years. Training up an employee only takes a few months.
  - m00x 5y ago
    > Training up an employee only takes a few months. Uh??? No it doesn't. There's a huge skill discrepancy between senior devs and junior devs. You can train them to be somewhat useful, but it'll take years for them to champion complex projects by themselves, and even then, it takes years on top to be able to gather reqs, ask the right questions to stakeholders, and make a scalable, solid implementation. Juniors are great if you have low hanging fruits, or you want to invest in a great hire.
wilde 5y ago
Most companies are running some sort of copy of Google’s hiring pipeline, which doesn’t evaluate the ability to learn (the key to finding good junior candidates). The startup I used to work at tried to fix this by pair programming with the candidate for an hour on a trivial feature in the codebase. I felt like it did a reasonable job of finding people who learn quickly, though it didn’t often select for strong problem solving.
varsketiz 5y ago
I work in a unicorn that has 300+ developers and we run a bootcamp program every year ourselves that lasts 3 months. We give offers at junior level to basically every motivated and capable participant (50%+). We dont source from specific schools. Other top startups in my country have similar programs. I would say that people tend to hire juniors for better salaries and with less requirements than when I was starting out.
prhn 5y ago
We just hired two junior devs, and we could have hired more if we had the recs. Please tell me where all these seniors are coming from, because we certainly couldn't find a single qualified one during twelve+ months of interviewing. I also haven't observed "remote work makes onboarding and training more challenging" in companies that are dedicated to their remote workforce (which is basically everybody right now?). I've been remote for almost 10 years. Attrition of senior devs will always be a problem because managers don't properly incentivize sticking around. Most senior devs will never put in the long hours to reach Staff Engineer. I don't blame them, but there needs to be a way to see professional and financial growth for senior engineers who are doing their jobs well. And lastly "everyone's understaffed" because management never lets the calendar breathe. There's always more work scheduled in a given quarter than there are engineers, but management doesn't adjust the schedule accordingly. You could hire 5 senior engineers and they would still make this mistake.
- whitepoplar 5y ago
  What's the compensation range for senior devs your company wanted to hire?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tarucho 5y ago
    And what age range?
    - nsonha 5y ago
      there is no such thing, sure if you look 60 (regardless of real age), there COULD be ageism.
      - Tarucho 5y ago
        ·Saying "there is no such thing" does not make it true. What are you? 10? ·You should be able to look whatever you want, even old. ·I`ve been in lots of situations where the first thing the hiring manager asks is the candidate age and drops the CV as soon it finds out is older than 35.
fishtoaster 5y ago
I feel like this article describes the problem well without making any headway on the solution. It doesn't make financial sense for companies to train juniors so they should... just hire juniors? Honestly, I think this is going to be a self-correcting problem. Seniors will become more and more expensive until it is cost-effective to hire juniors. If you can hire a senior for the price of 1.5 juniors, you probably do. If you can only hire a senior for the price of 5 fresh grads, you start looking real hard for ways to make those juniors effective. It certainly sucks for people trying to enter the workforce now, but it seems like it'll ultimately reach a new equilibrium.
- ghaff 5y ago
  And/or you provide better incentives for people to stick around. Without getting into the specifics, the dynamics are that many companies assume that people are going to move on in a few years anyway so there's no real point in investing in existing employees so existing employees do indeed move on in a couple years.
- arnvald 5y ago
  Hi! Author here. You're right, I don't think there really is a solution - in such a large and global market it's impossible to convince enough players to start contributing more towards common good. On a macro scale we'll go back to where we were (that's also my conclusion in the article), but it's possible that in smaller scale some companies who never considered hiring juniors will start doing it, or compans will start collaborating more with bootcamps or others non-traditional schools to improve the skills of entry-level candidates
jopsen 5y ago
> it seems that the golden days for bootcamp graduates and self-taught devs are over. Going to a bootcamp (or being self taught) and getting a job at big tech was probably never easy. Breaking into those jobs is easiest if you go through the internship pipeline (which starts at a university). Also let's not pretend that a bootcamp compares to a 3-5 year CS degree. Don't get me wrong I think there are lots of jobs where bootcamp training is more than enough. But most CS graduates will struggle with the kind of dynamic programming questions you risk getting asked at a job interview with big tech. (I know I struggled) So it's IMO no surprise if bootcamp graduates gets filtered out on questions like amortized complexity, big-O, computability, dynamic programming, or computer architecture questions.
- austincheney 5y ago
  I had absolutely no problem starting my career at a major tech company as a self taught developer. The severely disadvantaged were actually the CS grads. They really wanted everything to look like OOP Java and until somebody mentored them otherwise their code was either verbose Java or (if not writing Java language) some kind of mysterious curse. The big employers preferred to hire CS grads to write Java even if it’s garbage because they were easy to find and you knew what you were getting.
  - rhines 5y ago
    In my experience, the worst CS grads are worse than the worst bootcamp grads, but the best CS grads are better than the best bootcamp grads. Bootcamps self-select for people who actually tend to have some interest, and force them to learn to graduate. So all bootcamp grads (or at least those from decent bootcamps) learn a decent amount during the bootcamp. University often gets people who are just there for the degree. When I was in university I marked for many classes, and also helped students, and there are many people who simply have no interest in the material and do not learn a thing. They can still graduate by doing the minimum amount of prep for tests, relying on others for projects and assignments, and cheating. However, university is also a 4 year long process where you can choose to take challenging courses in a variety of subjects, pursue cutting-edge research projects, and do whatever else you want in your free time. A motivated university student can graduate with not only what they learned in class, but accumulated knowledge from the books they read, courses they took, and projects they worked on outside of class. Plus a deep understanding of all the theory and such covered in class. Which isn't to say they're better in any sort of judgemental sense - give a bootcamp grad another 3.5 years purely dedicated to learning, and they'd be just as capable. Unfortunately, relatively few people actually make the most of their time in university, or even come close. (At least, in terms of learning - perhaps they value other things more, which is fine, but we're speaking of employable skills.) Maybe 10% of students at my university graduated with a level of skill equal to or better than a motivated bootcamp grad.
codr7 5y ago
May I recommend my previous employer; who likes to hire infant developers, teach them a framework and sell their "services" for piles of cash.
throwaway45886 5y ago
You could "fix" hiring juniors if there were a school that taught real world professional software engineering by immersion. Colleges don't do it, boot camps don't do it. I want every junior dev to work on a fake team building a fake product for 24 months, with a senior (not a "professor", but a real senior dev) shadowing and pointing out common pitfalls and how to avoid them. I know they wouldn't write amazing code, but I could trust they would do everything else right. (My dream would be that CompSci was taught more like a trade school)
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Computer science is only vaguely related to software engineering. Having CompSci knowledge helps but isn't enough by itself, and similarly, not having it isn't a big deal for the majority of projects. We don't need to change CompSci, what we need is a proper "software engineering" trade school that focuses on actual day to day software development (including soft skills and dealing with project management, etc). The fact that a lot of companies only hire senior people and want experience suggests that there's a lot of stuff people only pick up with experience that's not being taught anywhere - something that a proper school should be able to fix.
  - Macha 5y ago
    > We don't need to change CompSci, what we need is a proper "software engineering" trade school that focuses on actual day to day software development (including soft skills and dealing with project management, etc). There are plenty of "software engineering" degrees that do focus more on these areas than traditional computer science. As an industry we look down on them and quiz textbook knowledge of algorithms to keep them out. This is something that needs to change or it turns it into a self fulfilling prophecy that these courses get seen as second rate (because the good candidates know they're making getting their first job harder by selecting such a course).
  - smolder 5y ago
    The software engineering track has long existed separately from comp sci at my tech school, at least. They discouraged people from taking CS who aren't primarily interested in theory.
pyb 5y ago
Where it would make sense, I am interested in consulting with companies on this problem. I'd be pairing with your junior developer full-time to help them onboard more comfortably. Please reach out if that sounds interesting.
dionysus_jon 5y ago
Anecdotes without any data
zz865 5y ago
I work for a big corp that hires lots of grads and it really isn't working out. The first year they take a lot more work than they produce, but start to get useful. People used to stay for 2-4 years so it was worth it for the company, recently people have been leaving pretty much after those first 12 months (this is pre-covid too). I used to spend a lot of time helping the grads but it really isn't worth it.
- arnvald 5y ago
  I agree with you - I regularly see advice on Reddit, Twitter and other forums to change jobs after 12-18 months, often people recommend juniors to jump ship as soon as recruiters reach out, that the first job should be just foot in the door to get to the industry. It means that companies hiring for entry-level positions are at a disadvantage
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  There is information missing here. Why are they leaving? What work are you giving them it takes that long to play even? What kind of juniors are you hiring to begin with?
  - mattm 5y ago
    FWIW Ive heard the same thing from someone I know who ran a consultancy. He said it was 50/50 of whether a new grad would be up to speed and productive enough after 8 months. Basically the first 8 months the company was likely to lose money on the new hire. Your comment seems to insinuate that the blame falls with the company. There is just a long ramp up that needs to happen with junior hires. There is so much technology and processes to learn about.
    - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
      Let me turn it around: in what world would you find it acceptable for a paid professional to take 8 months before they stop being a liability? Especially in today's jobhop heavy environment? Humans learn incredibly fast when motivated, so yes, I am quite skeptical when someone throws such a vague statement as if we should just accept the problems lie with juniors and not any of the many things a company could be doing wrong. In your case, "so much technology and processes", I'm already skeptical an individual needs to know that much to be productive in a junior role, for a few contexts only.
freework 5y ago
There's a couple things this author didn't mention that is important when you analyze the software developer labor market. First off, the overwhelming majority of developers are senior developers. If it takes X years to transition from a junior to a senior, then that means every single developer is a senior, except for those who started within the last X years. I think a lot of articles like this make the mistake of assuming that senior developers make up a small percentage of the entire developer population. Another thing to keep in mind is that the average age of a software developer is very young. The very first generation of developers are only now starting tor retire and leave behind job openings. Other industries, for example doctors, don't have this problem. There is a rate of doctors who graduate medical school, and a rate of doctors who retire, and that rate differential determines the ease of getting hired right after medical school. The retirement rate of developers is extremely small. In 2018 I did an onsite interview at Google, and I was blown away by how young everybody was. I was 35 at the time, but it seemed the average age of people that I saw there seemed to be about 22 years old. Eventually, after a decade or so, the retirement rate will increase, and job openings for juniors will return, but it's still a long ways off. One more thing. My personal experience is that it was easier to land a job as a junior developer back in 2010-2012 than it is to land a job today in 2020 now that I have 10 years of professional experience. It always bothers me to see people post about how its so easy to get a job if you're a senior developer, because I just don't see it. Its as hard today as it's ever been. Year after year I experience more difficulty finding a job than ever before. Every single interview I've done in my entire career since becoming a "senior" (sometime around 5 years into my career), never once have I felt like I'm being treated like I'm a valuable resource. For instance, with my last job hunting stint, I made it a policy to turn down all interviews where I was asked to do either a whiteboard problem, or a take home project. Without exception, every single company said "fine, bye". If senior developers are such a rare resource, you'd think at least one company would try to negotiate with me and try to make it work out, but no. Every single company was fine with letting me go after refusing to do the whiteboard/take-home. Even in 2010 when I was first starting out, I felt more respect coming from companies during the interview process. I don't believe in this idea that there is a huge demand for senior developers, and extreme low demand for junior developers. It only makes sense that both would track the same level of demand. There is no fundamental difference between a junior developer and a senior developer. They are both developers. With the senior, you get a little bit more productivity, but the junior gives you productivity too. I would believe it if seniors had good demand, and juniors slight less, but still good demand. Or Senior developers low demand, and junior slightly worse demand. But I don't believe senior is high demand, and junior is low demand. That just doesn't make sense.
stevev 5y ago
If you are a new dev, here are a few things to consider: Many companies hire most during the first and last quarters of the year (Feb-Apr), (Sept-Nov). Last quarter: New budget for next year allows us to increase devs. Early training opportunity during the slow season. First Quarter: Things are picking up, we need more devs for the new projects. Trying to get jobs outside of those periods may be challenging. You’ll likely face a competitive hiring process to fill vacant positions. The easiest way to get your foot in the door in this industry is either you know someone personally that can refer you to an open position, or seek tech recruiters. (I’m not including individuals that graduates at top colleges as they should have no issues getting jobs). Tech recruiters does have a bad vibe in our industry due to many reasons, but due to the challenges of securing that first tech job as a brand new dev, the opportunity is a fair trade. Tech recruiting firms work closely with actual hiring managers. They know what managers are looking for. The hiring process can be fast. Fulltime positions with benefits: Expect harder interview and bias skill aptitude from hiring manager. Contract to hire: Easier interview. Higher initial hourly pay due to no benefits. Things I didn’t include but are equally important, have finished personal github projects, good resume detailing your projects tech, purpose and value. Brush up on algorithms, OOP and designs. Data structures. Work on acing the interview process. If you live in an area/city that does not have the available framework/tech that you are interested in, move or suck it up and learn it. (Things are better now, in the US that is) Be sure to ask what’s the salary range of the position(s). Don’t sell yourself short. And be firm on a potential salary transition. Negotiations can always happen after the 5-6 months contract. Be reasonable.
shahbaby 5y ago
Other fields have organizations which artificially keep their supply low in the form of licenses, certificates, degrees, etc. Not only does that keep their salaries high, it ensures a certain calibre of junior applicants. But in the software world, we scoff at the idea of any regulation as gatekeeping. Tech companies say everyone should learn to code. Bootcamps are happy to sell the dream. No regulation. No standard. Open to everyone. They've succeeded in increasing the supply but have diluted the quality to the point where being a junior developer today doesn't mean anything. Reap what you sow.
donretag 5y ago
Even before the pandemic, when searching for a new role, I would avoid what I call the "senior trap". When everyone on the team is senior, the new person by default is the junior developer. With the senior trap, the new developer not only gets the "junior" tasks, but also theoretically is the last in line for promotion. Senior is not just about a bump in pay, but also expanding your responsibilities. But you cannot have too many cooks in the kitchen. I would constantly see the phenomenon over and over again, teams with nothing but senior developers. Nowadays, I am in the market for a lead/staff level position, and I would see job listings at companies where everyone is a lead. How can that be? One company I spoke with said they basically have a flat organization and higher mainly very senior engineers. I've worked remotely for years before the pandemic and I can demonstrate my value to potential employers. Can hit the ground running with little direction. It must be very difficult for those that are just starting out right now. To add to the article: companies, but wary that some developers might want to work in mixed (jr/sr) environments.
baron816 5y ago
I know people here are going to hate this idea, but non-competes could help alleviate this problem. Non-competes are clearly terrible for experienced employees, but I think for those who are just trying to break into the industry, it can be helpful. If a company knows that their junior engineers aren't just going to up and leave as soon as they've completed spending a bunch of money to train them and are now useful, they'd be more willing to hire more of them. It took me three years from the time I completed a bootcamp to when I finally got a real software engineering job. Had I signed a contract that would've required me to work for a company for three years, I would've been in a much, much better situation.
dan-robertson 5y ago
This article appears at least somewhat BS to me at a first reading but I think I have found the root of my disagreement: the definition of junior. Regarding the article: 1. One point made in the OP is that big companies don’t hire junior devs. For my definition of junior, this is false. Look at e.g. [1] where you can filter by YoE=0. I count 98 entries over a year and you can multiply that up to account for the other big companies and the fact that only a fraction of people add datapoints on that site. Not only do I think that this corresponds to a large number of people but I think it is sufficiently large to dispel the idea that only graduates from top universities can be hired at such companies (there aren’t enough graduates and many go into research or smaller higher-paying/hotter companies too). Google for one has tens of thousands of engineers. They won’t all be senior. And just look at how many internships people do. 2. The company I work for hires lots of junior devs (though we don’t call them that) and puts a lot of work into finding and mentoring interns for its size, though it is small. We seem to do an ok job of reasonably quickly getting them to the point that they are contributing more than they cost. 3. The impression I get from HN is that the job market is extremely hot at the moment and that lots of senior people really hate the “algorithms” questions or feel there is a lot of ageism. But my intuition is that someone fresh out of university who knows a programming language would be in a good position for that sort of question that is like homework and abstracted away from the real world. But maybe this impression is biased by certain people being more likely to post or me reading 20 posts from 'ChrisMarshallNYC and thinking I’ve read 20 different people. 4. When I look at how I found a job after leaving university (not so long ago) I don’t think I had too hard a time. I sent a mediocre CV to a recruitment agency and one company, did interviews with three companies (no idea how many the recruiter sent my CV to, probably more) got two offers and accepted one. This was a mix of smaller and medium-sized (think 200 employees in my country and 700 globally) businesses. Caveats would be: 1. I didn’t do CS at Uni. I didn’t do internships. But I did go to a ‘top’ university. I’m not in the US. This was before the rona. 5. I concede that the shift to remote work in early 2020 probably put a hold on recruiting at many companies as they were busy with other things or trying to work out how to do interviews. I wouldn’t want to have been graduating into that environment. 6. There definitely are companies that don’t hire junior devs but those are small companies who can’t afford to train them rather than large companies who are relatively flush with cash. Regarding the definition of junior: I generally think of someone trying to be hired into a junior dev position as a recent university graduate (in CS or maybe something related) who already knows how to program to a reasonable level. Perhaps the curse of so many programmers being self-taught is that people are typically expected to be able to do the job to some extent right when they start. Where I work almost all junior developers we hire are recent university graduates (we don’t have some strict filter on the university but our on-campus recruiting is reasonably targeted to places that are considered top institutions or where we got many good hires from) It seems that the article is talking more about someone who might be changing career or who came out of a bootcamp or who didn’t go to university. Such people would require more training and there might be a higher variance in outcomes. I would imagine they would mostly be hired by small companies and not big tech companies like Google. And they might well be having a much harder time getting hired now than a few years ago. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/L3/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
victorronin 5y ago
A lot of unorganized thoughts: - I really didn't like that seniority equates to creating value in this article. I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior. - Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Bootcamp is usually much shorter and very narrow. CS is longer and much broader. Software engineering became complicated enough to require some breadth (even junior engineers need to have some understand of SDLC, source control, language, main framework and couple of other things). - On another hand, I agree, everybody wants senior people, because senior (+good) engineers create way more value than junior (and unproven). - I think for junior engineers who don't come from the top schools it would be hard to get into a pipeline of hotshot companies. However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity? The first company where I worked had 5 people and a dog and a tiny salary. It didn't stop me from finding the next company and gradually getting to a decent place. - If I was in junior engineer shoes, I would try to find absolutely non-glamour company (big old consulting company, something small and local, government, etc, and apply there). Get a couple of years of experience and after, expand the search to include better companies. Also, I would challenge the core premise of this article, looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900.
- arnvald 5y ago
  > I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior That's a good point, there's a lot of nuance to that, but when I hire junior devs I still think of them as an investment, where for the first X months I'll spend more time training them than I would spend doing all tasks that they take > However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity? I don't think I made this article FAANG-specific, in fact I've spent majority of my career in small companies and I always tell entry-level candidates to reach out directly to small companies because they might be open to hiring even if they don't advertise it > looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900 Yeah, I tried a few searches like that too, and I was wondering why people find it so hard to land interviews if there's so many junior positions. So I started looking into that, I checked the first 100 or so results and a lot of them required 1-2y of professional experience, meaning the number of entry-level roles is smaller. > Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth Yeah, that's a generalization on my side, of course CS grads will have much easier time finding their first job, but unless they come from a top school they still might have problems getting interviews these days. And with the higher demand for developers in general, I would imagine that the number of entry-level opportunities should be much higher, and it should be easy for both CS-grads and other people to land interviews, but it's not happening.
ranguna 5y ago
> nobody hires junior developers And yet, 100% the people of the university that I graduated from get a job. And, it's just a random public university with just a few connections with the industry. Moreover, the company I'm currently working with also hires people without a degree.

147 points by arnvald 5y ago

> Why nobody hires junior developers There are some companies out there that hire junior developers. I know because I was one of them. After a few days, you will find out the hard way why no senior developer wanted to work for your brand new employer.

siva7 5y ago
Funny how this is one of these things one probably won’t understand as a junior but first gets clear when turning into a senior
huetius 5y ago
This is funny, and has a lot of truth to it, but I like mentoring juniors. Watching “my” juniors step up to a big challenge and win, or rise in the organization (even above me!) is more rewarding than most of my day to day work.

avodonosov 5y ago

Statistics to support the claim?

lanecwagner 5y ago

I've been talking about this for a minute. Boot camps are pushing the "you can make tons of money in just 4 weeks" narrative. CS skills are ironically becoming a huge differentiator. that's why I've been indiehacking on https://qvault.io https://qvault.io

new_guy 5y ago

Because going to a 'bootcamp' for a couple of weeks doesn't make you anymore of a 'developer' than playing operation[0] makes you a surgeon. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_(game)

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Yet somehow we have all these people calling themselves "engineers" who couldn't code themselves out of anything more complex than a CRUD app.
- akudha 5y ago
  That is because most of the “jobs” require just that skill or some other very limited skill. I was asked to hand over the stuff that I was working on, when I left a job. It was interesting to find out the girl I was supposed to train, didn’t know even the absolute basic programming stuff. She had been in the company for five years and was well liked. She was doing just one specific thing all those years, and she was very good at it. She got raises every year, the company had a perverse interest in keeping her that way. I have worked in a dozen places in my life. Though tall promises are made during interviews, not one of those companies gave a shit about employee growth etc. only way to do something interesting was to leave and find another job - rinse and repeat. It is not just the employees fault their skills stagnate. Employers also contribute to it.
- walshemj 5y ago
  And how does CS degree where your learning just the Math Heavy theory do that? if you did an EE, Mech or Civil Degree maybe those are more appropriate.
paulcole 5y ago
Serious question then, how does someone become a ‘developer’?
- WalterSear 5y ago
  Write code. Create stuff. Schooling can only ever provide you a starting off point.
- adventured 5y ago
  There's nothing wrong with using a bootcamp to get started. Everyone has to start somewhere. The bootcamps have often gotten a bad reputation for pretending they prepare you to dive right into a serious job as an experienced developer. Many of them are guilty of misleading people to pull customers, doing the typical thing of promising overly fast results. Bootcamps, self-education, go to school for it, internships; a combination of things. There are plenty of ways to get started and keep progressing.

angarg12 5y ago

This is bogus. Every week I'm interviewing a handful of people for internships and junior roles. This is also simply not true: > top companies (big tech, high growth startups) figure out that they don't really need to hire a lot of junior developers, they'll just hire the best seniors from other companies Not only it is insanely hard to hire senior devs, but also this doesn't make sense. We have plenty of work to go around and not all of it is at the senior scope. There is always room in big tech to hire and train juniors.

joe-collins 5y ago
Maybe I've been looking at the wrong companies, then. It seems like the majority of openings are looking for formal educational attainment or years of on-the-job experience that, as a self-taught programmer paying bills via a different field, I simply don't have.
- ummonk 5y ago
  If you can make it work, I'd recommend going the bootcamp route (with a bootcamp that pays a stipend and uses an income share agreement).
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  Don't be afraid of applying. If they find you a good problem solver, who is eager to learn, is humble and has reasonable cognitive skills, many companies may decide to extend an offer, even if they don't have an opening exactly to your profile at the moment. I've seen this happen with friends of mine applying remotely during the pandemic.
jnwatson 5y ago
The vast majority of dev jobs are outside “big tech, high growth startups”. FAANGs can’t train nearly enough juniors to make up for the rest of the industry.
- dasil003 5y ago
  Also a surprisingly non-trivial number of FAANG engineers can’t operate without the world class tooling and technical leadership support they get inside those companies.

c6451b 5y ago

Having been on the hiring side and interviewed plenty of juniors I've found there seems to be a general lack of "try" anymore. I remember when I started 10 years ago I felt like the average junior I was competing against was a very talented problem solver. Perhaps I'm just being given bad candidates. The majority of them seem to come from bootcamps these days rather than Bachelors or Associates programs. They're trained in a single stack and without the formality of problem solving you learn in a degree program the average bootcamp developer seems to be too linearly tracked to really succeed at least in the mid-grade startup world I am in. They're capable of brain dumping cracking the coding interview, can solve very trivial (e.g. linear) problems, but when asked to think outside the box they seem unable to because it doesn't fit into any nice little box they learned at the bootcamp. I suppose this could also be a function of people trying to "break into" programming from a field that is completely unrelated expecting easy money and a comfortable job. I suspect it's a shell shock for them as much as it is for me the interviewer. Bootcamps, in my opinion, had good intentions but ended up not only lowering the quality of developer but also increasing the pool of applicants. After getting burned by say 30% of your junior hires it makes sense you'd be more cautious. For every solid graduate from a program in IT or CS, there are 20 "graduates" of a 4 week, extremely expensive, and borderline worthless bootcamp program. Programming is quickly going the way real estate did in the early 00's. The experienced guys will continue to make money and the people trying to get into the industry make almost nothing. ABET accredits CS programs, perhaps there should be an accrediting body to stop all these fly by night money sinkholes we call bootcamps. Lord knows the only people making money on bootcamp education are the frauds that run them.

halo-and-talon 5y ago
This is an interesting observation and I think part of what makes it so hard to hire developers. What you really want are people that are very good at learning and problem solving in a practical way, but that's a really difficult skill set to evaluate. Data structures and algorithms are important tools, but they're only that: tools. So we do the equivalent of figuring out whether someone can swing a hammer, but that's a weak proxy for the skill we really want. To be fair to bootcamp grads, I think plenty of "experienced" hires have also just managed to stick around and are not necessarily great developers either. It's a really tough to pin down skill.

ragona 5y ago

This article neglects to understand the massive college-hire pipelines that top companies set up. It's not that companies aren't hiring junior developers, it's that they _only_ hire from their college recruiting pipeline for their entry level roles. It's become a common policy to not make "industry" hires at SWE-1; that's basically the college hire rung. Tell you what, I would not want to be a brand new developer without university connections trying to get a role right now. If you start looking without top internships and a degree from a school with connections it seems like it'll be rough.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nostrebored 5y ago
I made this mistake. I did undergrad research instead of internships in school and was sure I wanted to do a PhD -- until my final semester. I ultimately wound up having to do a much worse internship than I would've gotten partnered with my school. It took me nearly three months to find it. Big mistake that I recommend anyone in University reading this right now to avoid. Diversify your experiences!
bluefirebrand 5y ago
I basically did that out of a small university with no internship experience or strong university/personal connections, in 2013. It was definitely a struggle at start and I've had to struggle through some really crappy roles, but I'm doing pretty solid now. Making almost double now than I was when I started out, I'm a team lead now and very happy with the company I am with now.
arnvald 5y ago
Hi, author here, that's a very fair point that I didn't consider. It totally makes sense that the number of available jobs looks smaller than it is, because some of them are never really advertised in public. Thanks for sharing that!
- joe-collins 5y ago

headphoneswater 5y ago

I screen resumes for my team and pick up one or two juniors a year honestly it's hard to wade though the 20-30 identical resumes we get a week from bootcamp grads with the same copy and pasted example projects listed under their completed work Now I've worked with some bootcampers who excelled and turned out to be fantastic developers so I'm not aginst the concept but you've got to differentiate yourself a bit

moonchrome 5y ago

Software development gets marketed as an easy desk job that pays well. Reality is you either need a certain mindset (sitting in front of a computer 8 hours a day and trying to figure out how to get it to do something is not something most people find fulfilling) or need to be prepared for a really boring mentally taxing grind that's going to take years. I've seen people trying to get into development from bootcamps and just break under the requirements just to contribute to a modern project. Not to mention that the bare-minimum approach to problem solving is going to slow down your learning process (you can only get so far with copy pasting and Google).

Zababa 5y ago
> need to be prepared for a really boring mentally taxing grind that's going to take years. Isn't this most jobs these days?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- moonchrome 5y ago
  It can be, that's why aptitude/affinity are important and why I don't think software is the right choice for a large % of people I see getting into it recently.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Very true.
datameta 5y ago
> Not to mention that the bare-minimum approach to problem solving is going to slow down your learning process This is a very useful reminder for myself
throwingtt 5y ago
I'd add that there are now so many bootcamp candidates that want a J-O-B and have a passing interest in computers that just filtering them out gets old. The only realistic option for a small team is to reject bootcamp candidates from the get go. You will of course have a few exceptions, but good luck finding them. A comp sci degree really is a much better filter for junior devs.

devwastaken 5y ago

1. Those on top naturally don't see the problem. Or they do and are intentionally disengenuous. People like their 150K paycheck and know that they're replaceable if we allow more workers. 2. Companies made their bed and are lying in it. They refuse to invest into devs because they know they're gone in 2 years. They're gone in 2 years because companies don't give incentives to stay. They would rather hire someone else and pay them more than pay an existing employee more. Lots of made up reasons as to why, it's become culture and everyone goes along with it. 3. Software work is exported to India and elsewhere. That's not a new fact, it's been going on since the 90's. Cheap global labor pushes out domestic labor. But no senator with the superpac's to get elected would ever dream of restricting global markets. Their salary depends on them not doing so. 4. A company will never say their market isn't in demand. That's like saying your company is unprofitable or that it makes bad products. It may be true, but you always say you're viable and make the best. Same as how you say your jobs are in high demand. More applicants = more control, you can pay less with less benefits. So while those in power do nothing because they're not affected, graduating students are met with little to no jobs, and we yet again see more socioeconomic decline. If dev work was in high demand there wouldn't be an unemployed compsci student in the U.S. yet I know multiple. Companies and those with the incentives are lying.

itake 5y ago
> People like their 150K paycheck and know that they're replaceable if we allow more workers. can you elaborate? as a senior dev myself, I am def replaceable, but my role in the company is completely different than what is expected of a junior engineer. There is zero chance I could/would be replaced by a junior engineer and I love have junior talent on my team to do the work I am not interested in. > 2. Companies made their bed and are lying in it. no... companies love hiring junior engineers directly from college because they are wayyyy cheaper than senior talent, it doesn't matter if they leave after 2 years. Training up an employee only takes a few months.
- m00x 5y ago
  > Training up an employee only takes a few months. Uh??? No it doesn't. There's a huge skill discrepancy between senior devs and junior devs. You can train them to be somewhat useful, but it'll take years for them to champion complex projects by themselves, and even then, it takes years on top to be able to gather reqs, ask the right questions to stakeholders, and make a scalable, solid implementation. Juniors are great if you have low hanging fruits, or you want to invest in a great hire.

wilde 5y ago

Most companies are running some sort of copy of Google’s hiring pipeline, which doesn’t evaluate the ability to learn (the key to finding good junior candidates). The startup I used to work at tried to fix this by pair programming with the candidate for an hour on a trivial feature in the codebase. I felt like it did a reasonable job of finding people who learn quickly, though it didn’t often select for strong problem solving.

varsketiz 5y ago

I work in a unicorn that has 300+ developers and we run a bootcamp program every year ourselves that lasts 3 months. We give offers at junior level to basically every motivated and capable participant (50%+). We dont source from specific schools. Other top startups in my country have similar programs. I would say that people tend to hire juniors for better salaries and with less requirements than when I was starting out.

prhn 5y ago

We just hired two junior devs, and we could have hired more if we had the recs. Please tell me where all these seniors are coming from, because we certainly couldn't find a single qualified one during twelve+ months of interviewing. I also haven't observed "remote work makes onboarding and training more challenging" in companies that are dedicated to their remote workforce (which is basically everybody right now?). I've been remote for almost 10 years. Attrition of senior devs will always be a problem because managers don't properly incentivize sticking around. Most senior devs will never put in the long hours to reach Staff Engineer. I don't blame them, but there needs to be a way to see professional and financial growth for senior engineers who are doing their jobs well. And lastly "everyone's understaffed" because management never lets the calendar breathe. There's always more work scheduled in a given quarter than there are engineers, but management doesn't adjust the schedule accordingly. You could hire 5 senior engineers and they would still make this mistake.

whitepoplar 5y ago
What's the compensation range for senior devs your company wanted to hire?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Tarucho 5y ago
  And what age range?
  - nsonha 5y ago
    there is no such thing, sure if you look 60 (regardless of real age), there COULD be ageism.
    - Tarucho 5y ago
      ·Saying "there is no such thing" does not make it true. What are you? 10? ·You should be able to look whatever you want, even old. ·I`ve been in lots of situations where the first thing the hiring manager asks is the candidate age and drops the CV as soon it finds out is older than 35.

fishtoaster 5y ago

I feel like this article describes the problem well without making any headway on the solution. It doesn't make financial sense for companies to train juniors so they should... just hire juniors? Honestly, I think this is going to be a self-correcting problem. Seniors will become more and more expensive until it is cost-effective to hire juniors. If you can hire a senior for the price of 1.5 juniors, you probably do. If you can only hire a senior for the price of 5 fresh grads, you start looking real hard for ways to make those juniors effective. It certainly sucks for people trying to enter the workforce now, but it seems like it'll ultimately reach a new equilibrium.

ghaff 5y ago
And/or you provide better incentives for people to stick around. Without getting into the specifics, the dynamics are that many companies assume that people are going to move on in a few years anyway so there's no real point in investing in existing employees so existing employees do indeed move on in a couple years.
arnvald 5y ago
Hi! Author here. You're right, I don't think there really is a solution - in such a large and global market it's impossible to convince enough players to start contributing more towards common good. On a macro scale we'll go back to where we were (that's also my conclusion in the article), but it's possible that in smaller scale some companies who never considered hiring juniors will start doing it, or compans will start collaborating more with bootcamps or others non-traditional schools to improve the skills of entry-level candidates

jopsen 5y ago

> it seems that the golden days for bootcamp graduates and self-taught devs are over. Going to a bootcamp (or being self taught) and getting a job at big tech was probably never easy. Breaking into those jobs is easiest if you go through the internship pipeline (which starts at a university). Also let's not pretend that a bootcamp compares to a 3-5 year CS degree. Don't get me wrong I think there are lots of jobs where bootcamp training is more than enough. But most CS graduates will struggle with the kind of dynamic programming questions you risk getting asked at a job interview with big tech. (I know I struggled) So it's IMO no surprise if bootcamp graduates gets filtered out on questions like amortized complexity, big-O, computability, dynamic programming, or computer architecture questions.

austincheney 5y ago
I had absolutely no problem starting my career at a major tech company as a self taught developer. The severely disadvantaged were actually the CS grads. They really wanted everything to look like OOP Java and until somebody mentored them otherwise their code was either verbose Java or (if not writing Java language) some kind of mysterious curse. The big employers preferred to hire CS grads to write Java even if it’s garbage because they were easy to find and you knew what you were getting.
- rhines 5y ago
  In my experience, the worst CS grads are worse than the worst bootcamp grads, but the best CS grads are better than the best bootcamp grads. Bootcamps self-select for people who actually tend to have some interest, and force them to learn to graduate. So all bootcamp grads (or at least those from decent bootcamps) learn a decent amount during the bootcamp. University often gets people who are just there for the degree. When I was in university I marked for many classes, and also helped students, and there are many people who simply have no interest in the material and do not learn a thing. They can still graduate by doing the minimum amount of prep for tests, relying on others for projects and assignments, and cheating. However, university is also a 4 year long process where you can choose to take challenging courses in a variety of subjects, pursue cutting-edge research projects, and do whatever else you want in your free time. A motivated university student can graduate with not only what they learned in class, but accumulated knowledge from the books they read, courses they took, and projects they worked on outside of class. Plus a deep understanding of all the theory and such covered in class. Which isn't to say they're better in any sort of judgemental sense - give a bootcamp grad another 3.5 years purely dedicated to learning, and they'd be just as capable. Unfortunately, relatively few people actually make the most of their time in university, or even come close. (At least, in terms of learning - perhaps they value other things more, which is fine, but we're speaking of employable skills.) Maybe 10% of students at my university graduated with a level of skill equal to or better than a motivated bootcamp grad.

codr7 5y ago

May I recommend my previous employer; who likes to hire infant developers, teach them a framework and sell their "services" for piles of cash.

throwaway45886 5y ago

You could "fix" hiring juniors if there were a school that taught real world professional software engineering by immersion. Colleges don't do it, boot camps don't do it. I want every junior dev to work on a fake team building a fake product for 24 months, with a senior (not a "professor", but a real senior dev) shadowing and pointing out common pitfalls and how to avoid them. I know they wouldn't write amazing code, but I could trust they would do everything else right. (My dream would be that CompSci was taught more like a trade school)

Nextgrid 5y ago
Computer science is only vaguely related to software engineering. Having CompSci knowledge helps but isn't enough by itself, and similarly, not having it isn't a big deal for the majority of projects. We don't need to change CompSci, what we need is a proper "software engineering" trade school that focuses on actual day to day software development (including soft skills and dealing with project management, etc). The fact that a lot of companies only hire senior people and want experience suggests that there's a lot of stuff people only pick up with experience that's not being taught anywhere - something that a proper school should be able to fix.
- Macha 5y ago
  > We don't need to change CompSci, what we need is a proper "software engineering" trade school that focuses on actual day to day software development (including soft skills and dealing with project management, etc). There are plenty of "software engineering" degrees that do focus more on these areas than traditional computer science. As an industry we look down on them and quiz textbook knowledge of algorithms to keep them out. This is something that needs to change or it turns it into a self fulfilling prophecy that these courses get seen as second rate (because the good candidates know they're making getting their first job harder by selecting such a course).
- smolder 5y ago
  The software engineering track has long existed separately from comp sci at my tech school, at least. They discouraged people from taking CS who aren't primarily interested in theory.

pyb 5y ago

Where it would make sense, I am interested in consulting with companies on this problem. I'd be pairing with your junior developer full-time to help them onboard more comfortably. Please reach out if that sounds interesting.

dionysus_jon 5y ago

Anecdotes without any data

zz865 5y ago

I work for a big corp that hires lots of grads and it really isn't working out. The first year they take a lot more work than they produce, but start to get useful. People used to stay for 2-4 years so it was worth it for the company, recently people have been leaving pretty much after those first 12 months (this is pre-covid too). I used to spend a lot of time helping the grads but it really isn't worth it.

arnvald 5y ago
I agree with you - I regularly see advice on Reddit, Twitter and other forums to change jobs after 12-18 months, often people recommend juniors to jump ship as soon as recruiters reach out, that the first job should be just foot in the door to get to the industry. It means that companies hiring for entry-level positions are at a disadvantage
BlargMcLarg 5y ago
There is information missing here. Why are they leaving? What work are you giving them it takes that long to play even? What kind of juniors are you hiring to begin with?
- mattm 5y ago
  FWIW Ive heard the same thing from someone I know who ran a consultancy. He said it was 50/50 of whether a new grad would be up to speed and productive enough after 8 months. Basically the first 8 months the company was likely to lose money on the new hire. Your comment seems to insinuate that the blame falls with the company. There is just a long ramp up that needs to happen with junior hires. There is so much technology and processes to learn about.
  - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
    Let me turn it around: in what world would you find it acceptable for a paid professional to take 8 months before they stop being a liability? Especially in today's jobhop heavy environment? Humans learn incredibly fast when motivated, so yes, I am quite skeptical when someone throws such a vague statement as if we should just accept the problems lie with juniors and not any of the many things a company could be doing wrong. In your case, "so much technology and processes", I'm already skeptical an individual needs to know that much to be productive in a junior role, for a few contexts only.

freework 5y ago

There's a couple things this author didn't mention that is important when you analyze the software developer labor market. First off, the overwhelming majority of developers are senior developers. If it takes X years to transition from a junior to a senior, then that means every single developer is a senior, except for those who started within the last X years. I think a lot of articles like this make the mistake of assuming that senior developers make up a small percentage of the entire developer population. Another thing to keep in mind is that the average age of a software developer is very young. The very first generation of developers are only now starting tor retire and leave behind job openings. Other industries, for example doctors, don't have this problem. There is a rate of doctors who graduate medical school, and a rate of doctors who retire, and that rate differential determines the ease of getting hired right after medical school. The retirement rate of developers is extremely small. In 2018 I did an onsite interview at Google, and I was blown away by how young everybody was. I was 35 at the time, but it seemed the average age of people that I saw there seemed to be about 22 years old. Eventually, after a decade or so, the retirement rate will increase, and job openings for juniors will return, but it's still a long ways off. One more thing. My personal experience is that it was easier to land a job as a junior developer back in 2010-2012 than it is to land a job today in 2020 now that I have 10 years of professional experience. It always bothers me to see people post about how its so easy to get a job if you're a senior developer, because I just don't see it. Its as hard today as it's ever been. Year after year I experience more difficulty finding a job than ever before. Every single interview I've done in my entire career since becoming a "senior" (sometime around 5 years into my career), never once have I felt like I'm being treated like I'm a valuable resource. For instance, with my last job hunting stint, I made it a policy to turn down all interviews where I was asked to do either a whiteboard problem, or a take home project. Without exception, every single company said "fine, bye". If senior developers are such a rare resource, you'd think at least one company would try to negotiate with me and try to make it work out, but no. Every single company was fine with letting me go after refusing to do the whiteboard/take-home. Even in 2010 when I was first starting out, I felt more respect coming from companies during the interview process. I don't believe in this idea that there is a huge demand for senior developers, and extreme low demand for junior developers. It only makes sense that both would track the same level of demand. There is no fundamental difference between a junior developer and a senior developer. They are both developers. With the senior, you get a little bit more productivity, but the junior gives you productivity too. I would believe it if seniors had good demand, and juniors slight less, but still good demand. Or Senior developers low demand, and junior slightly worse demand. But I don't believe senior is high demand, and junior is low demand. That just doesn't make sense.

stevev 5y ago

If you are a new dev, here are a few things to consider: Many companies hire most during the first and last quarters of the year (Feb-Apr), (Sept-Nov). Last quarter: New budget for next year allows us to increase devs. Early training opportunity during the slow season. First Quarter: Things are picking up, we need more devs for the new projects. Trying to get jobs outside of those periods may be challenging. You’ll likely face a competitive hiring process to fill vacant positions. The easiest way to get your foot in the door in this industry is either you know someone personally that can refer you to an open position, or seek tech recruiters. (I’m not including individuals that graduates at top colleges as they should have no issues getting jobs). Tech recruiters does have a bad vibe in our industry due to many reasons, but due to the challenges of securing that first tech job as a brand new dev, the opportunity is a fair trade. Tech recruiting firms work closely with actual hiring managers. They know what managers are looking for. The hiring process can be fast. Fulltime positions with benefits: Expect harder interview and bias skill aptitude from hiring manager. Contract to hire: Easier interview. Higher initial hourly pay due to no benefits. Things I didn’t include but are equally important, have finished personal github projects, good resume detailing your projects tech, purpose and value. Brush up on algorithms, OOP and designs. Data structures. Work on acing the interview process. If you live in an area/city that does not have the available framework/tech that you are interested in, move or suck it up and learn it. (Things are better now, in the US that is) Be sure to ask what’s the salary range of the position(s). Don’t sell yourself short. And be firm on a potential salary transition. Negotiations can always happen after the 5-6 months contract. Be reasonable.

shahbaby 5y ago

Other fields have organizations which artificially keep their supply low in the form of licenses, certificates, degrees, etc. Not only does that keep their salaries high, it ensures a certain calibre of junior applicants. But in the software world, we scoff at the idea of any regulation as gatekeeping. Tech companies say everyone should learn to code. Bootcamps are happy to sell the dream. No regulation. No standard. Open to everyone. They've succeeded in increasing the supply but have diluted the quality to the point where being a junior developer today doesn't mean anything. Reap what you sow.

donretag 5y ago

Even before the pandemic, when searching for a new role, I would avoid what I call the "senior trap". When everyone on the team is senior, the new person by default is the junior developer. With the senior trap, the new developer not only gets the "junior" tasks, but also theoretically is the last in line for promotion. Senior is not just about a bump in pay, but also expanding your responsibilities. But you cannot have too many cooks in the kitchen. I would constantly see the phenomenon over and over again, teams with nothing but senior developers. Nowadays, I am in the market for a lead/staff level position, and I would see job listings at companies where everyone is a lead. How can that be? One company I spoke with said they basically have a flat organization and higher mainly very senior engineers. I've worked remotely for years before the pandemic and I can demonstrate my value to potential employers. Can hit the ground running with little direction. It must be very difficult for those that are just starting out right now. To add to the article: companies, but wary that some developers might want to work in mixed (jr/sr) environments.

baron816 5y ago

I know people here are going to hate this idea, but non-competes could help alleviate this problem. Non-competes are clearly terrible for experienced employees, but I think for those who are just trying to break into the industry, it can be helpful. If a company knows that their junior engineers aren't just going to up and leave as soon as they've completed spending a bunch of money to train them and are now useful, they'd be more willing to hire more of them. It took me three years from the time I completed a bootcamp to when I finally got a real software engineering job. Had I signed a contract that would've required me to work for a company for three years, I would've been in a much, much better situation.

dan-robertson 5y ago

This article appears at least somewhat BS to me at a first reading but I think I have found the root of my disagreement: the definition of junior. Regarding the article: 1. One point made in the OP is that big companies don’t hire junior devs. For my definition of junior, this is false. Look at e.g. [1] where you can filter by YoE=0. I count 98 entries over a year and you can multiply that up to account for the other big companies and the fact that only a fraction of people add datapoints on that site. Not only do I think that this corresponds to a large number of people but I think it is sufficiently large to dispel the idea that only graduates from top universities can be hired at such companies (there aren’t enough graduates and many go into research or smaller higher-paying/hotter companies too). Google for one has tens of thousands of engineers. They won’t all be senior. And just look at how many internships people do. 2. The company I work for hires lots of junior devs (though we don’t call them that) and puts a lot of work into finding and mentoring interns for its size, though it is small. We seem to do an ok job of reasonably quickly getting them to the point that they are contributing more than they cost. 3. The impression I get from HN is that the job market is extremely hot at the moment and that lots of senior people really hate the “algorithms” questions or feel there is a lot of ageism. But my intuition is that someone fresh out of university who knows a programming language would be in a good position for that sort of question that is like homework and abstracted away from the real world. But maybe this impression is biased by certain people being more likely to post or me reading 20 posts from 'ChrisMarshallNYC and thinking I’ve read 20 different people. 4. When I look at how I found a job after leaving university (not so long ago) I don’t think I had too hard a time. I sent a mediocre CV to a recruitment agency and one company, did interviews with three companies (no idea how many the recruiter sent my CV to, probably more) got two offers and accepted one. This was a mix of smaller and medium-sized (think 200 employees in my country and 700 globally) businesses. Caveats would be: 1. I didn’t do CS at Uni. I didn’t do internships. But I did go to a ‘top’ university. I’m not in the US. This was before the rona. 5. I concede that the shift to remote work in early 2020 probably put a hold on recruiting at many companies as they were busy with other things or trying to work out how to do interviews. I wouldn’t want to have been graduating into that environment. 6. There definitely are companies that don’t hire junior devs but those are small companies who can’t afford to train them rather than large companies who are relatively flush with cash. Regarding the definition of junior: I generally think of someone trying to be hired into a junior dev position as a recent university graduate (in CS or maybe something related) who already knows how to program to a reasonable level. Perhaps the curse of so many programmers being self-taught is that people are typically expected to be able to do the job to some extent right when they start. Where I work almost all junior developers we hire are recent university graduates (we don’t have some strict filter on the university but our on-campus recruiting is reasonably targeted to places that are considered top institutions or where we got many good hires from) It seems that the article is talking more about someone who might be changing career or who came out of a bootcamp or who didn’t go to university. Such people would require more training and there might be a higher variance in outcomes. I would imagine they would mostly be hired by small companies and not big tech companies like Google. And they might well be having a much harder time getting hired now than a few years ago. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/L3/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...

victorronin 5y ago

A lot of unorganized thoughts: - I really didn't like that seniority equates to creating value in this article. I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior. - Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Bootcamp is usually much shorter and very narrow. CS is longer and much broader. Software engineering became complicated enough to require some breadth (even junior engineers need to have some understand of SDLC, source control, language, main framework and couple of other things). - On another hand, I agree, everybody wants senior people, because senior (+good) engineers create way more value than junior (and unproven). - I think for junior engineers who don't come from the top schools it would be hard to get into a pipeline of hotshot companies. However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity? The first company where I worked had 5 people and a dog and a tiny salary. It didn't stop me from finding the next company and gradually getting to a decent place. - If I was in junior engineer shoes, I would try to find absolutely non-glamour company (big old consulting company, something small and local, government, etc, and apply there). Get a couple of years of experience and after, expand the search to include better companies. Also, I would challenge the core premise of this article, looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900.

arnvald 5y ago
> I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior That's a good point, there's a lot of nuance to that, but when I hire junior devs I still think of them as an investment, where for the first X months I'll spend more time training them than I would spend doing all tasks that they take > However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity? I don't think I made this article FAANG-specific, in fact I've spent majority of my career in small companies and I always tell entry-level candidates to reach out directly to small companies because they might be open to hiring even if they don't advertise it > looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900 Yeah, I tried a few searches like that too, and I was wondering why people find it so hard to land interviews if there's so many junior positions. So I started looking into that, I checked the first 100 or so results and a lot of them required 1-2y of professional experience, meaning the number of entry-level roles is smaller. > Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth Yeah, that's a generalization on my side, of course CS grads will have much easier time finding their first job, but unless they come from a top school they still might have problems getting interviews these days. And with the higher demand for developers in general, I would imagine that the number of entry-level opportunities should be much higher, and it should be easy for both CS-grads and other people to land interviews, but it's not happening.

ranguna 5y ago

> nobody hires junior developers And yet, 100% the people of the university that I graduated from get a job. And, it's just a random public university with just a few connections with the industry. Moreover, the company I'm currently working with also hires people without a degree.