4 ms·

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the in

by kredd 2y ago

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do the same work. In the previous years even C-level companies had internship-to-full-time pipelines, but now it looks more scarce. I kind of imagined these tech companies could convince investors about upcoming growth, where they can launch a new products/features, which would require new engineers and etc. With higher rates, investors seeking "what's hot right now", and uncertainties in the near future makes it a bit harder (I might be wrong on this note). And all these companies have a massive advantage in terms of hiring, as there are quite a lot of talented people who got laid off in the last couple of years. Most of them are willing to take significant cuts as well. So, why choose an average, when you can shoot your shot and get the best out there?

nickff 2y ago
>” It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do the same work. In the previous years even C-level companies had internship-to-full-time pipelines, but now it looks more scarce.” I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late. It’s just not worth training someone up if they’ll either leave or require a salary that could have bought you someone experienced in the first place.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  The idea is that while the newly trained junior could leave they would choose to stay to continue receiving the benefit of further training. It pertains to the build vs exploit cycle of managing opportunities, it’s in the workers interest to stay in the build phase, it’s in the companies interest to stay in the exploit phase. A case could be made where the difference would be split where the worker on average spends some time in the build phase and some time in the exploit phase. Accepting a lower salary for continuing training is one way to do that. Training isn't supposed to be one and done, with a single build phase followed by a constant exploitation. What companies are trying to do now is even worse by starting in the exploration phase and staying there.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  > I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late. If juniors can consistently hop to another job that pays them more in a year, then the job market for SWEs is strong and employers don't have this ease of hiring seniors that is being described.
  - kredd 2y ago
    They used to in 2020-2022 cycle. I don’t think they can right now, but the social contract of employees staying at the company for a long time has been completely broken. So now everyone just expects short retentions, and market forces drive for senior hires.
    - Vegenoid 2y ago
      > So now everyone just expects short retentions But again, this expectation was driven by the market forces - employees in very high demand. If it is actually harder to get a job / easier to get an experienced dev, then juniors won't be job hopping quickly because they won't have another job to hop to.
      - nickff 2y ago
        Yes, but there is a bit of a problem when things change and there are mismatched expectations. The employers are probably feeling a bit risk-averse right now, while the potential employees are getting desperate.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- xp84 2y ago
  Not to mention ai. Copilot works much better for the kind of things I would have asked an inexperienced developer to do: very well defined and documented tasks that aren’t too esoteric or requiring of obscure company-specific domain knowledge. While it’s true that some of those green juniors would mature into tomorrow’s seniors, who can do things that Copilot can’t (yet?) the short-term mindset that rules business makes it hard to justify hiring these entry level positions, sadly. I really feel for the young people who made a completely rational decision in 2019 to get a cs degree and be a developer. They really didn’t expect this.
devwastaken 2y ago
Years ago I was talking about exactly this issue and how the U.S. is producing far too many degrees than the market can receive. As usual the truth is ignored in favor of a comfortable lie, at the cost of others lives. Don't go to university. Their value is no longer what it used to be, and they have figured out how to suppress students under a thousand pounds of administrative grift. We need to strip all public funding going into universities to force the bad ones to go out of business. Industry will fund their own education, or they don't deserve it.
- ThrowawayR2 2y ago
  Don't go to university if you don't actually like CS but are just going into it for the money or are going into a career trajectory that doesn't require knowing CS, which is more than 80% of the industry. The knowledge university provides is priceless to those who need it but you aren't among them. You are also in the category that, if it ever happens, is most easily replaced by LLMs because there's an enormous corpus of training data for boilerplate tasks. Do go to university if you're interested in CS and programming itself and would have been even if it paid poorly or you're intending to hold out for jobs that make use of CS knowledge, like FAANG, platform companies, or other hard tech companies. Should hard times occur and you need a job in a hurry, you're also much better equipped to outcompete one of the people in the former category for one of their jobs.
- kredd 2y ago
  As much bad rep as schools get nowadays, if you get into a good university (think of top 50 in the world), it will open up a lot of doors for you. Very anecdotal, but I have open offers from people whom I know from uni years. Connections matter, especially in bad market days. Everything else (bootcamps, diploma mills and etc.) are just noise though, I would say it’s not worth the money. It’s also easy for me to say, as I have about 10 YOE, but I would still prefer a candidate who went to a rigorous school. Mostly because it’s an indicator that they can figure out and learn whatever is needed.
  - devwastaken 2y ago
    People don't realize that in just the last 5 years admins have seized control of uni's, doubling costs across the board and have put it all onto the students. It is no longer possible to get a degree without parents paying for it while you're paying on private loans while being rejected for few scholarships while being rejected from training and working in your field of study. Student drug abuse and suicide rates are skyrocketing while opportunities to apply their study are gone. It's time to remove these systems, they are predatory and don't work any more.
PheonixPharts 2y ago
> It really sucks right now For me, it's been the opposite: the last 2 years have been the best time I've had working in tech since the early 2010s. Around 2019 I was seriously considering leaving the field (if it didn't pay so much) as the entire industry had turned into a bunch of leet code grinding, TC chasing, mediocre drones. It was incredibly hard to find people working on actual problems let alone challenging/interesting ones. Nobody I worked with for years cared one bit about programming or computer science. Nobody learned anything for fun, nobody hacked on personal projects during the weekend, and if they were interest in their field it was only so they could add a few more bullet points to their resume. But the last two years I've worked with several teams doing really cool work, found teams that are entirely made up of scrappy, smart people. Starting building projects using a range of new tricks and techniques (mostly around AI). Right now there are so many small teams working on hard problems getting funding. So many interesting, talented and down right weird programmers are being sought after again. People who like to create things and solve problems are the ones getting work again (my experience was these people were just labeled as trouble makers before). I'm probably getting, inflation adjusted, paid the least that I have in a long time, but finally work is enjoyable again. I get to hack on things with other people who are obsessed with hacking on things.
- gotaran 2y ago
  I agree. Despite high compensation and a hiring boom, or perhaps because of it, 2020-2022 was the worst time to work in tech. I knew interns in 2012 who could code circles around those bootcampers turned “staff engineers” in 2021. Everyone at my series B employer turned into a “manager” or “leader” overnight. Being a shitty B2B SaaS meant that sales ran the show and our product was absolute dogshit. 2023 was awful too because everyone stayed put — we somehow avoided layoffs — even though they were absolutely miserable. Now in 2024, I’ve just started a job search and things seem much better. There’s actual innovation now and I feel a sense of optimism about the future of tech that I haven’t in 10 years.
  - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
    > I knew interns in 2012 who could code circles around those bootcampers turned “staff engineers” in 2021. Everyone at my series B employer turned into a “manager” or “leader” overnight. Thought it was just me seeing this. The title inflation is out of control. "Senior" titles lacking basic fundamental "table stakes" skills.
paxys 2y ago
Nowadays a lot of companies are hiring new grads through their internship pipeline only. So to be able to break into the industry you have to start looking for jobs in your ~sophomore year of college and hope to keep getting return offers.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  Worse when you can't land anything for internship... :/ I'd be willing to work unpaid even
- hadlock 2y ago
  I wish high schools taught this more. If you do 3 internships in college, you'll likely (if you didn't sleep through them) have at least 1, if not 2 job offers when you graduate. Plus some actual job references, and three years of "work experience". Don't sleep on internships
  - QuercusMax 2y ago
    I graduated with a BS+MS in '04, and my school (Kent State) had basically no CS internship program when I was there. There was something like 1 internship opportunity per summer for the entire department, which is just absurd. I lucked into a few campus jobs even as I was in high school where I got to do some real sysadmin / webmaster work along with some custom web dev stuff that gave me the chance to actually collect some requirements and build real systems for users, and see what their problems were. I'm sure I'd cringe to see the ecommerce site I built back in 1999 for a friend of the family! Had I not had these opportunities, with no internship I probably would have been in much worse shape going into the job market 20 years ago. Today I can't even comprehend how screwed a newgrad with zero experience outside the classroom might be.
electromech 2y ago
> why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price That's how it used to be. Now it's more like, "pull the job posting altogether and make your existing seniors work harder because they know they don't have options." I've had multiple positions that I applied/interviewed for get pulled, and at least two of my friends said the same is happening at their employers -- in one case a team of 5 is now a team of 2, running a critical service for an airline. :yikes: So, I agree that it sucks for new grads, and it's maybe worse than you think.
__loam 2y ago
The under hiring of junior employees and the unwillingness to invest in training is a problem across the economy. It's a kind of tragedy if the commons but also the unfortunate result of insisting we need more software engineers for 10 years.
- shagie 2y ago
  (note I'm going to refer to a "regular company" as a stable non-tech company ... one that is privately held and isn't making a tech product. It is profitable, and somewhere not within 200 miles of the ocean. It has a wage band is $50k to $120k) The large difference between the pay that a regular company is willing to pay a junior and what a startup or tech company is willing to pay someone with 1-2 years of experience (that is why more than the stable non-tech company can afford) has lead to a "if we can't hire them and expect them to stick around once they become useful - we won't hire them." If a regular company can hire a junior at $50k, and a year later the junior has now applying for startups and companies that are paying them $150k ... that regular company can't compete. What's more, they've lost money on the time it has taken to train up the junior, maybe send them to a local conference, gotten them trained on the local CRM that they're going to be making changes to... Well, now that junior has left. At the end of the year, when they look at the costs and such it cost them a net $5k to hire the junior. Its better to put out a job posting for a mid or senior level developer at $75k or $90k who will stick around for a while than it is to hire another junior. It the companies that are going to pay $150k for someone with a year of experience are going to keep pulling the juniors away, its better to reset expectations of development speed for changes to that CRM that works and wait to hire someone who will be there long enough to learn the business than it is to hire junior after junior. The problem is that you can find jobs for someone with the same skills for $50k and $250k depending on the industry that the company is in. It used to be that the companies that paid $50k had people stick around for a while. One can't make the regular companies big tech profitable. And big tech companies are going to be competing with big tech dollars. The regular companies that used to be the source of junior -> mid developers can't do it anymore if it is a reasonable expectation to be able to get a job that pays 2x more than the top pay band for the regular company after a few years of experience somewhere else.
janalsncm 2y ago
If you check H1B salaries, some companies are paying under $100k for supposedly senior-level engineers. In Silicon Valley. The government allows this to happen because people aren’t paying attention.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I think for junior engineers the other thing that's made it much harder is that there is much more near-shoring/off-shoring than there used to be given how much better Zoom etc. are now compared to a decade+ ago, and how everyone is used to remote work. I've worked with great engineers in Latin American and Eastern Europe, and these days the experience is almost exactly like working with a US-based engineer: they have great English skills, there is plenty of time overlap (especially for LatAm, and in direct contrast to the nightmare that was India offshoring in the mid 00s), and given I pretty much interact with everyone 99% of the time on Zoom/Meet anyway, it doesn't really make a difference to me where the person is. So it becomes hard to pay a junior dev a US salary when you can get a great senior dev for that amount or less in LatAm or Eastern Europe.
tabigarasu 2y ago
Any advice for juniors in this market? I'm seriously considering saying "YOLO" and going solo. Sounds like a stupid risky idea but I've always kinda wanted to do this anyway and the job hunt is driving me insane. Selling myself to humans almost sounds easier than trying to get my resume through a dozen AI filters with 10000 other applicants
- hoosieree 2y ago
  Starting your own business has always been and will always be risky, but W2 jobs aren't as safe as they once were. How about starting a "lifestyle" business that doesn't need to grow but is sustainable, and that lets you solve a real need for real people while providing stable income?
alexey-salmin 2y ago
> There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. I don't know about CS grads but I definitely don't see an overproduction of Junior Engineers, or at least what I expect of them. Junior Engineer in my understanding is someone who knows algorithms and data structures, knows at least one programming language really well and can quickly write small programs in that language. He lacks any real experience, he probably never worked on a project bigger than 10k of code, he may not know what CI/CD or docker is, BUT he can code. If you add some curiosity into the mix, he'll have a solid growth path in front of him. Most of the people I interview for Junior positions cannot code, just can't write 5 lines (sic) of code on the interview on the language they claim is their favorite. I honestly don't understand it, would you apply for a junior cook if you can't cook a ham sandwich? A junior taxi driver if don't know how to drive a car? Junior means "lots of knowledge but no experience" but somehow in IT many people assume that it means "no knowledge, no experience". If you know where to find overproduced Junior Engineers let me know please and I'll hire them with pleasure.

by kredd 2y ago

nickff 2y ago

>” It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do the same work. In the previous years even C-level companies had internship-to-full-time pipelines, but now it looks more scarce.” I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late. It’s just not worth training someone up if they’ll either leave or require a salary that could have bought you someone experienced in the first place.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
The idea is that while the newly trained junior could leave they would choose to stay to continue receiving the benefit of further training. It pertains to the build vs exploit cycle of managing opportunities, it’s in the workers interest to stay in the build phase, it’s in the companies interest to stay in the exploit phase. A case could be made where the difference would be split where the worker on average spends some time in the build phase and some time in the exploit phase. Accepting a lower salary for continuing training is one way to do that. Training isn't supposed to be one and done, with a single build phase followed by a constant exploitation. What companies are trying to do now is even worse by starting in the exploration phase and staying there.
Vegenoid 2y ago
> I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late. If juniors can consistently hop to another job that pays them more in a year, then the job market for SWEs is strong and employers don't have this ease of hiring seniors that is being described.
- kredd 2y ago
  They used to in 2020-2022 cycle. I don’t think they can right now, but the social contract of employees staying at the company for a long time has been completely broken. So now everyone just expects short retentions, and market forces drive for senior hires.
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
    > So now everyone just expects short retentions But again, this expectation was driven by the market forces - employees in very high demand. If it is actually harder to get a job / easier to get an experienced dev, then juniors won't be job hopping quickly because they won't have another job to hop to.
    - nickff 2y ago
      Yes, but there is a bit of a problem when things change and there are mismatched expectations. The employers are probably feeling a bit risk-averse right now, while the potential employees are getting desperate.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
xp84 2y ago
Not to mention ai. Copilot works much better for the kind of things I would have asked an inexperienced developer to do: very well defined and documented tasks that aren’t too esoteric or requiring of obscure company-specific domain knowledge. While it’s true that some of those green juniors would mature into tomorrow’s seniors, who can do things that Copilot can’t (yet?) the short-term mindset that rules business makes it hard to justify hiring these entry level positions, sadly. I really feel for the young people who made a completely rational decision in 2019 to get a cs degree and be a developer. They really didn’t expect this.

devwastaken 2y ago

Years ago I was talking about exactly this issue and how the U.S. is producing far too many degrees than the market can receive. As usual the truth is ignored in favor of a comfortable lie, at the cost of others lives. Don't go to university. Their value is no longer what it used to be, and they have figured out how to suppress students under a thousand pounds of administrative grift. We need to strip all public funding going into universities to force the bad ones to go out of business. Industry will fund their own education, or they don't deserve it.

ThrowawayR2 2y ago
Don't go to university if you don't actually like CS but are just going into it for the money or are going into a career trajectory that doesn't require knowing CS, which is more than 80% of the industry. The knowledge university provides is priceless to those who need it but you aren't among them. You are also in the category that, if it ever happens, is most easily replaced by LLMs because there's an enormous corpus of training data for boilerplate tasks. Do go to university if you're interested in CS and programming itself and would have been even if it paid poorly or you're intending to hold out for jobs that make use of CS knowledge, like FAANG, platform companies, or other hard tech companies. Should hard times occur and you need a job in a hurry, you're also much better equipped to outcompete one of the people in the former category for one of their jobs.
kredd 2y ago
As much bad rep as schools get nowadays, if you get into a good university (think of top 50 in the world), it will open up a lot of doors for you. Very anecdotal, but I have open offers from people whom I know from uni years. Connections matter, especially in bad market days. Everything else (bootcamps, diploma mills and etc.) are just noise though, I would say it’s not worth the money. It’s also easy for me to say, as I have about 10 YOE, but I would still prefer a candidate who went to a rigorous school. Mostly because it’s an indicator that they can figure out and learn whatever is needed.
- devwastaken 2y ago
  People don't realize that in just the last 5 years admins have seized control of uni's, doubling costs across the board and have put it all onto the students. It is no longer possible to get a degree without parents paying for it while you're paying on private loans while being rejected for few scholarships while being rejected from training and working in your field of study. Student drug abuse and suicide rates are skyrocketing while opportunities to apply their study are gone. It's time to remove these systems, they are predatory and don't work any more.

PheonixPharts 2y ago

> It really sucks right now For me, it's been the opposite: the last 2 years have been the best time I've had working in tech since the early 2010s. Around 2019 I was seriously considering leaving the field (if it didn't pay so much) as the entire industry had turned into a bunch of leet code grinding, TC chasing, mediocre drones. It was incredibly hard to find people working on actual problems let alone challenging/interesting ones. Nobody I worked with for years cared one bit about programming or computer science. Nobody learned anything for fun, nobody hacked on personal projects during the weekend, and if they were interest in their field it was only so they could add a few more bullet points to their resume. But the last two years I've worked with several teams doing really cool work, found teams that are entirely made up of scrappy, smart people. Starting building projects using a range of new tricks and techniques (mostly around AI). Right now there are so many small teams working on hard problems getting funding. So many interesting, talented and down right weird programmers are being sought after again. People who like to create things and solve problems are the ones getting work again (my experience was these people were just labeled as trouble makers before). I'm probably getting, inflation adjusted, paid the least that I have in a long time, but finally work is enjoyable again. I get to hack on things with other people who are obsessed with hacking on things.

gotaran 2y ago
I agree. Despite high compensation and a hiring boom, or perhaps because of it, 2020-2022 was the worst time to work in tech. I knew interns in 2012 who could code circles around those bootcampers turned “staff engineers” in 2021. Everyone at my series B employer turned into a “manager” or “leader” overnight. Being a shitty B2B SaaS meant that sales ran the show and our product was absolute dogshit. 2023 was awful too because everyone stayed put — we somehow avoided layoffs — even though they were absolutely miserable. Now in 2024, I’ve just started a job search and things seem much better. There’s actual innovation now and I feel a sense of optimism about the future of tech that I haven’t in 10 years.
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  > I knew interns in 2012 who could code circles around those bootcampers turned “staff engineers” in 2021. Everyone at my series B employer turned into a “manager” or “leader” overnight. Thought it was just me seeing this. The title inflation is out of control. "Senior" titles lacking basic fundamental "table stakes" skills.

paxys 2y ago

Nowadays a lot of companies are hiring new grads through their internship pipeline only. So to be able to break into the industry you have to start looking for jobs in your ~sophomore year of college and hope to keep getting return offers.

StefanBatory 2y ago
Worse when you can't land anything for internship... :/ I'd be willing to work unpaid even
hadlock 2y ago
I wish high schools taught this more. If you do 3 internships in college, you'll likely (if you didn't sleep through them) have at least 1, if not 2 job offers when you graduate. Plus some actual job references, and three years of "work experience". Don't sleep on internships
- QuercusMax 2y ago
  I graduated with a BS+MS in '04, and my school (Kent State) had basically no CS internship program when I was there. There was something like 1 internship opportunity per summer for the entire department, which is just absurd. I lucked into a few campus jobs even as I was in high school where I got to do some real sysadmin / webmaster work along with some custom web dev stuff that gave me the chance to actually collect some requirements and build real systems for users, and see what their problems were. I'm sure I'd cringe to see the ecommerce site I built back in 1999 for a friend of the family! Had I not had these opportunities, with no internship I probably would have been in much worse shape going into the job market 20 years ago. Today I can't even comprehend how screwed a newgrad with zero experience outside the classroom might be.

electromech 2y ago

> why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price That's how it used to be. Now it's more like, "pull the job posting altogether and make your existing seniors work harder because they know they don't have options." I've had multiple positions that I applied/interviewed for get pulled, and at least two of my friends said the same is happening at their employers -- in one case a team of 5 is now a team of 2, running a critical service for an airline. :yikes: So, I agree that it sucks for new grads, and it's maybe worse than you think.

__loam 2y ago

The under hiring of junior employees and the unwillingness to invest in training is a problem across the economy. It's a kind of tragedy if the commons but also the unfortunate result of insisting we need more software engineers for 10 years.

shagie 2y ago
(note I'm going to refer to a "regular company" as a stable non-tech company ... one that is privately held and isn't making a tech product. It is profitable, and somewhere not within 200 miles of the ocean. It has a wage band is $50k to $120k) The large difference between the pay that a regular company is willing to pay a junior and what a startup or tech company is willing to pay someone with 1-2 years of experience (that is why more than the stable non-tech company can afford) has lead to a "if we can't hire them and expect them to stick around once they become useful - we won't hire them." If a regular company can hire a junior at $50k, and a year later the junior has now applying for startups and companies that are paying them $150k ... that regular company can't compete. What's more, they've lost money on the time it has taken to train up the junior, maybe send them to a local conference, gotten them trained on the local CRM that they're going to be making changes to... Well, now that junior has left. At the end of the year, when they look at the costs and such it cost them a net $5k to hire the junior. Its better to put out a job posting for a mid or senior level developer at $75k or $90k who will stick around for a while than it is to hire another junior. It the companies that are going to pay $150k for someone with a year of experience are going to keep pulling the juniors away, its better to reset expectations of development speed for changes to that CRM that works and wait to hire someone who will be there long enough to learn the business than it is to hire junior after junior. The problem is that you can find jobs for someone with the same skills for $50k and $250k depending on the industry that the company is in. It used to be that the companies that paid $50k had people stick around for a while. One can't make the regular companies big tech profitable. And big tech companies are going to be competing with big tech dollars. The regular companies that used to be the source of junior -> mid developers can't do it anymore if it is a reasonable expectation to be able to get a job that pays 2x more than the top pay band for the regular company after a few years of experience somewhere else.

janalsncm 2y ago

If you check H1B salaries, some companies are paying under $100k for supposedly senior-level engineers. In Silicon Valley. The government allows this to happen because people aren’t paying attention.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I think for junior engineers the other thing that's made it much harder is that there is much more near-shoring/off-shoring than there used to be given how much better Zoom etc. are now compared to a decade+ ago, and how everyone is used to remote work. I've worked with great engineers in Latin American and Eastern Europe, and these days the experience is almost exactly like working with a US-based engineer: they have great English skills, there is plenty of time overlap (especially for LatAm, and in direct contrast to the nightmare that was India offshoring in the mid 00s), and given I pretty much interact with everyone 99% of the time on Zoom/Meet anyway, it doesn't really make a difference to me where the person is. So it becomes hard to pay a junior dev a US salary when you can get a great senior dev for that amount or less in LatAm or Eastern Europe.

tabigarasu 2y ago

Any advice for juniors in this market? I'm seriously considering saying "YOLO" and going solo. Sounds like a stupid risky idea but I've always kinda wanted to do this anyway and the job hunt is driving me insane. Selling myself to humans almost sounds easier than trying to get my resume through a dozen AI filters with 10000 other applicants

hoosieree 2y ago
Starting your own business has always been and will always be risky, but W2 jobs aren't as safe as they once were. How about starting a "lifestyle" business that doesn't need to grow but is sustainable, and that lets you solve a real need for real people while providing stable income?

alexey-salmin 2y ago

> There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. I don't know about CS grads but I definitely don't see an overproduction of Junior Engineers, or at least what I expect of them. Junior Engineer in my understanding is someone who knows algorithms and data structures, knows at least one programming language really well and can quickly write small programs in that language. He lacks any real experience, he probably never worked on a project bigger than 10k of code, he may not know what CI/CD or docker is, BUT he can code. If you add some curiosity into the mix, he'll have a solid growth path in front of him. Most of the people I interview for Junior positions cannot code, just can't write 5 lines (sic) of code on the interview on the language they claim is their favorite. I honestly don't understand it, would you apply for a junior cook if you can't cook a ham sandwich? A junior taxi driver if don't know how to drive a car? Junior means "lots of knowledge but no experience" but somehow in IT many people assume that it means "no knowledge, no experience". If you know where to find overproduced Junior Engineers let me know please and I'll hire them with pleasure.