The market is always harder for juniors whether times are easy or hard. The unfortunate difference this time is that today's juniors might have spent their las

The market is always harder for juniors whether times are easy or hard. The unfortunate difference this time is that today's juniors might have spent their last couple of years reading stories on sites like HN and levels.fyi about starting on six-figure salaries at big name companies and maybe doubling that with the other perks. They might have also been exposed to some of the most mercenary attitudes to career development I can ever recall seeing where loyalty is a dirty word and jumping ship every few months for a pay bump is the norm. At the same time they still have the usual conceit of most new grads in this industry and don't understand that at best they will probably contribute little real value to begin with while taking up a lot of time from other people who could. In other words juniors almost always have negative immediate value to their employer. In the boom times we have enjoyed in tech for the past few years a lot of newbies could get away with that and make a lot of money but really that has been the exception and it's not normal. Now the reality is setting in that you can't reasonably expect an employer to invest a huge amount of money to pay you to cost them even more money and then leave before you get better and make them enough money to become a net contributor. In a world without the weird employment market dynamics of the recent boom times that just doesn't make any sense.