Ask HN: Is no one hiring junior devs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32400928

by ianbutler • 4 years ago

61 152 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a senior dev but I'm in a position where I happen to know a few junior devs through my gaming hobby, after talking with them it seems like they're having a hard time.

I know my company hasn't hired juniors for over the last year at least, and that seems to be the same at a lot of places. I've been talking with those juniors recently and most of them are having a hard time getting anything.

This is going to make the senior dev situation worse in a few years since there doesn't seem to be any pipeline to make new ones.

misiti37804• 4 years ago

I am, send them my way!

abhorrence• 4 years ago

How?

Smaug123• 4 years ago

I mean, if this was the entrance exam, you failed it. It's really not hard to work out some way to contact them, and what entity they're probably hiring for.

(OK, that was snarky given that you're asking on behalf of people you'd like to recommend, rather than being an applicant. Sorry.)

misiti37804• 4 years ago

added my email to my profile.

blbuford• 4 years ago

I'd love throw my name in the hat. Where are you taking applications?

misiti37804• 4 years ago

added my email to my profile.

exikyut• 4 years ago

Add a throwaway email to your profile!

(For the sake of whoever else might want to respond)

misiti37804• 4 years ago

added my email to my profile.

valbaca• 4 years ago

This is going to make the senior dev situation worse in a few years since there doesn't seem to be any pipeline to make new ones.

What situation is this referring to?

frankbreetz• 4 years ago

That fact the senior devs can make 500k a year.

zingplex• 4 years ago

As a senior dev, I don't see the problem with that. If anything the number is a bit lower than it should be.

IshKebab• 4 years ago

A tiny number of them that live in America and work for FAANG can make that. Most don't make anywhere near that.

karamanolev• 4 years ago

Lack of enough humans to be senior devs, with many companies having tons of vacancies. They're saying that you need an influx of working juniors who become seniors, but if everyone is only hiring seniors...

rr8885• 4 years ago

My FB/Instagram keeps showing me that pretty but loud woman about learning to be a "Front End" or "Back end" developer. It seems everyone wants to be a developer these days and why not, seems easy.

verdverm• 4 years ago

They sell it as seeming easy, like so many other things. Lots of edutainment going around too

It makes it harder to filter, so the bar is raised a bit

dimgl• 4 years ago

You're getting downvoted, but I've gotten messages from three different people trying to "be in the tech industry" even though they "don't care about code and don't care about understanding it" and just want to get to "six figures as quickly as possible". Not joking.

throwawaysleep5• 4 years ago

Yeah, I know a lot of people who have no interest in tech besides the salary. And it is so obvious in their resumes.

nsxwolf• 4 years ago

Is it Sally Struthers? You can become a Back End or Front End developer! Or, earn your degree! You can major in safe cracking or gun repair!

rr8885• 4 years ago

Its this ad I'm talking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Oc2acTvvYo

ramesh31• 4 years ago

It’s a whole new world now for junior devs from what it was 10 years ago. The market is absolutely flooded with young CS grads, and self taught/bootcamp devs are facing unimaginable competition for entry level roles as a result.

We are still hiring plenty of juniors, but they are almost exclusively CS grads at this point. I honestly worry that software is going the way of law and finance, where credentialism is rampant.

xGrill• 4 years ago

On average, the CS grads we hire are so much further along in their journey than a bootcamp dev, yet the starting salary asks are about the same. I know there are some organizations that are a bit more desperate for anyone who has the capacity to learn to code, but we also have been exclusively hiring CS grads with far better results.

bsedlm• 4 years ago

you're absolutely correct. a colleague working on getting all the certifications he can get was telling me how his boss explained that is what the consultancy actually sells.

this seems to always happens, is this the commoditization of skills?

All work is done with some kind of a redundancy: no particular individual's skills are permitted to really move the scale/balance. All work is done by teams; only the whole team matters such that the individuals are replaceable across all teams.

Any team member can fuckup, drop the ball, get hit by a bus such that the work carries on unimpeded.

throwawaysleep5• 4 years ago

Every person and their dog is headed to bootcamp now or is taking Udemy courses.

One of my companies gets people who don’t know what Git is interviewing.

After a while, yeah, trying to filter through all the crap becomes too much work and we rely on degrees and other hard to obtain stuff.

laichzeit0• 4 years ago

It really depends on what types of problems you’re looking the devs to solve. Sometimes having a self-taught or bootcamp junior is not going to cut it. They lack so much theoretical knowledge that they will need constant supervision and guidance to not screw things up or make really bad decisions. Knowing a programming language is the least of the problems. I’ve seen so many self taught devs not even understand something basic like what a race condition is or trying to do something stupid like parse XHTML with a regular expression (XHTML is not a “regular language” you’d immediately know this is impossible if you studied CS and wouldn’t even attempt it).

User23• 4 years ago

Which is odd, because a reasonably intelligent person could spend a month on the first part of Sipser[1] and get all the theoretical computer science they'll probably ever need to work in tech. The latter half is quite interesting too, but not only has knowing what EXPSPACE is and what its properties are never come up in my career, I've never even heard of it coming up in industry at all.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/400716.Introduction_to_t...

rr8885• 4 years ago

Actually the other part is everyone wants to work from home and training juniors remotely is just too hard.

siscia• 4 years ago

I wouldn't say "hard" but I would definitely say different.

Even as somehow experience dev, getting on board in a new team is quite hard if everybody is remote.

actually_a_dog• 4 years ago

"Different" is it. We've onboarded fully remote interns successfully at my company, so it can be done and done well. I do have to say, however, that my company's onboarding experience is, in my experience, absolutely top tier for the size of the company (Series B, ~100 employees), but that's just because someone decided a year or so ago that they were going to put in the effort to make it so.

gbpz2• 4 years ago

My previous team had zero problem onboarding people remotely. The steps are extremely simple:

1. Have a collaborative culture. This is difficult at some places. But an environment where people are free to spin up zoom meetings and ask questions goes a long way. RTFM culture is the worst. Yes there are devs who don't bother reading the docs, but I find they often don't know how or where to look.

2. We had watercoolers in the afternoon. People could just chat. It may seem like a hugely ineffective process BUT... about 30%-40% of the time it would be about work. Knowledge would be distributed to multiple people, social bonds would form, and blockers would often be resolved. This led to high trust teams with multiple SMEs some of whom were "JR" devs.

3. README or wiki. Currently working at a FAANG company and several repos have no README. Wiki's are out of date. Knowledge is fragmented. I don't blame other devs, but it's kind of insane how much technical debt there is.

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

Have a collaborative culture. This is difficult at some places.

Yeah, because that sucks for the senior engineers who are expected to spend 100% of their time mentoring junior developers, 100% of their time attending status meetings, 100% of their time closing JIRA tickets and the other 100% of their time fixing production issues.

gavinray3• 4 years ago

Also seeing this problem, I have friends in dire life circumstances trying to make a better life for themselves and their families by studying on top of a full-time job and I've not had luck trying to get them referrals.

One of them is a mid-30s handyman who turned out to have one of the best knacks for UI/design I've seen.

It's a shame because he's a very decent junior React dev that'd be a great combo UI designer but can't find an in anywhere

I feel like you've really got to do something to stand out or make connections

jklm4• 4 years ago

Has he considered putting up a portfolio on a personal site or Dribbble and linking to it on his resume or LinkedIn? I’ve found it to be the highest signal thing, above education, work experience, etc.

gavinray3• 4 years ago

Huh, the Dribble thing is a good idea, I'll pass that suggestion on

jhoelzel• 4 years ago

I believe this largely has to do with the push for remote and that juniors do in fact need guidance in the beginning of the carreer. My brother in law just started software dev through a bootcamp and he got hired, but only with an onsite requirement. Having lead people myself, this makes perfect sense.

This however does not seem to be the case with smaller companies that actually do have offices, in my experience.

idlehand2• 4 years ago

Maybe we will see some proper differentiation where mentorships comes with perks to offset having to lead people in person.

teknopaul• 4 years ago

We hire Junior devs and its hard working remote with them. They can get stuck for days without knowing if its something they should work out for themselves or something they should ask about.

I'm happy to travel and work together but senior manglement like the look of their travel budget post covid.

fuckcensorship• 4 years ago

Another contributing factor in my opinion is that companies would rather outsource entry level dev work to foreign countries with cheaper labor. I have a feeling this will backfire in the coming years as companies struggle to find sufficiently experienced senior devs.

KMnO4• 4 years ago

This probably wasn’t even considered a few years ago, but now that most companies have figured out their remote workflows it’s just another line item.

solar-ice4• 4 years ago

No, people aren't hiring junior devs, and haven't been for a long while. What they are hiring is people who have seriously built stuff; not "a webapp", but stuff in specific niches where they've essentially got past what would otherwise be the first year of industry training on their own.

And even then you have to hustle. Get yourself tickets to conferences (if you've built stuff, many niche conferences have free/subsidised tickets for open-source devs) and talk to people who are hiring - not the people who have the booths, but the people in the audience.

The idea that most people can just apply to jobs cold and eventually get one is essentially a lie, ime.

idlehand2• 4 years ago

If you're targeting well paid jobs at interesting companies, maybe. But we're at the point where practically every municipality, every government subdivision, and every corporation has IT development needs.

Developing and maintaining these boring systems is the primary source of employment in my corner of Europe.

solar-ice4• 4 years ago

In my experience, the companies that are developing these things are either about 5 developers and can barely keep the lights on for them - so aren't hiring - or have standardised their employment procedures so much that they probably won't hire you unless you hit every point on the job listing (including experience in arbitrary tech that only they and 3 other companies use) and can talk about your personal SWOT analysis and a bunch of other stuff that is more about signalling a specific cultural background than ensuring you're able to do your job and learn quickly. If you have that cultural background, cool, if not...

I could not get hired through most companies' cold interview processes - not "we make internal widgets in C#" companies, not "we're changing the world" companies. The most competent devs I know can't get hired that way. The only way that it's worked in my experience is to get someone internal to the company to champion me.

welshwelsh• 4 years ago

I generally agree with most of what you said but I also think cold applications work.

I'd like to use the cliché "finding a job is a full time job."

Many people interpret this to mean "jam as many keywords as possible into a crappy resume and spend all day spamming it to every job posting you see." That's not gonna work well for juniors (although the most dedicated will still find something).

Applying to a job is more complicated than that. First of all, you need to understand the job you are applying for. That might involve researching the company and the project. You should make sure you are comfortable using the tools listed in the description and performing the role described. If you aren't, you need to practice before applying, which usually means building something.

When I started job hunting after graduation, it took three months before I sent out a single application. That's because every job posting listed responsibilities I didn't know how to perform or tools I've never used. Of course I'm not going to apply for Angular Frontend Developer if I've never built any frontends using Angular, that would be unprofessional. But after I made a couple simple projects in Angular, I would apply to these roles and got callbacks even from postings asking for 2-3 years of experience.

solar-ice4• 4 years ago

I wish I could say I had the same experience. I don't know what to say. My experience of applying for jobs that were well within my skillset, where I had projects showing off my non-industry-specific skills, was... either silence or being chucked out of the pipeline after the first interview or two, repeatedly. I'm not the only one.

Maybe this works if you live in a tech hub where there's venture capital to spend on masses of junior devs?

ManlyBread2• 4 years ago

Many people interpret this to mean "jam as many keywords as possible into a crappy resume and spend all day spamming it to every job posting you see."

But this is exactly what landed me my first job back when I was a junior. As someone with no experience I could not afford to be selective and the more I spammed my CV the more interviews I was getting. It also works because the person who does the initial screening is usually not technical and is actually doing nothing more than matching the keywords.

First of all, you need to understand the job you are applying for. That might involve researching the company and the project.

My experience is that the average job posting has close to no information about the project and the company does so many different things that it's impossible to get this information through your own research. Even if you do find some information it is utterly meaningless because this is NOT what the company is looking for when posting a job advert and this is NOT what the average candidate ends up doing. The company not looking for "someone who understands the company or project" - they're looking for a software engineer. That's it and nothing more.

You should make sure you are comfortable using the tools listed in the description and performing the role described. If you aren't, you need to practice before applying, which usually means building something.

I've learned most of the tools I know on the job. Trying to learn something you don't know for the sake of the company that might not even give you an interview is a waste of time. Either they won't mind you learning on the job or they want someone with actual job experience. Large companies are also notoriously slow when it comes to organizing everything you need to do your job so the first week or two are usually filled up with nothing which is a perfect opportunity to learn something new.

ravenstine• 4 years ago

What they are hiring is people who have seriously built stuff; not "a webapp", but stuff in specific niches where they've essentially got past what would otherwise be the first year of industry training on their own.

I have no idea what this means. What makes web apps not serious?

solar-ice4• 4 years ago

What I mean is that putting together a webapp without learning about something /other/ than how to put a <pick-a-technology> app together in the process isn't going to have anyone interested in hiring you.

If in the process you learned about something you could actually go up and do an interesting lightning talk about, that'd be worth it. Maybe you learned something about a specific industry and the challenges that developing something for it has that other industries don't have - maybe you accidentally spent weeks/months deep-diving into the technical details of HTTP/3 or some browser API and worked out you could do something that nobody has done before outside of Google.

VoodooJuJu2• 4 years ago

Going to second this. I'm a self-taught (non-bootcamp) dev who's making a serious webapp (without the quotes). It's serious in the sense that it's a real product of a real company (my own) on track to make real money from real customers.

If you won't take that seriously, then what?

mythrwy• 4 years ago

Agreed. Plus, isn't that like 80%+ of what we do today?

I realize some people do cutting edge programming, but the bulk of us probably spend much of the day shifting strings and filling in model fields and chasing webpack configs. Or maybe I'm just a sap and everyone else is doing cool stuff idk.

jollyllama• 4 years ago

My city used to hold at least two big, good, dev conferences a year. Neither did anything this year, even remotely. I'm not sure how new folks are supposed to get started in this environment. Very difficult. But I would add that networking correctly at a good university, by building connections with young, industry-connected instructors, was how I got my start. Ironically they were impressed by my attendance at these conferences.

Glawen• 4 years ago

It was like this in the last recession, junior profile were shunned because senior profile were available on the market.

dominotw• 4 years ago

This is what i am seeing. companies are now eyeing seniors for the same price as juniors just a few months ago.

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

don't say you're a junior dev

pushingice4• 4 years ago

We are. Most roles can be remote even if not explicitly called out: https://finra.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FINRA/jobs?jobFami... Feel free to contact me if any of them need a resume put on top of the stack.

thaumasiotes6• 4 years ago

We are.

Are you sure? Your link lists 32 jobs. A very large majority explicitly qualify themselves as "senior", "lead", "staff", or "principal" positions. There's also a "director".

There are a handful of postings that don't ask for seniority in the job title (and some are duplicate titles, strongly suggesting that each posting is a single opening). But all of them require at least two years of industry experience. Where are your junior positions? Did you mean to link something else?

pushingice4• 4 years ago

That's all IT roles. Anything with no prefix (e.g. "Developer") is a junior role.

pushingice4• 4 years ago

You can get two years of experience as an undergrad. I don't take junior to mean "zero experience".

olyjohn4• 4 years ago

Not a single Junior position listed. If you're willing to hire juniors, maybe don't put "Lead" and "Senior" on every single position.

itsdrewmiller2• 4 years ago

https://finra.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FINRA/job/Jersey-C...

https://finra.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FINRA/job/Rockvill...

https://finra.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FINRA/job/Dallas-T...

https://finra.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FINRA/job/Rockvill...

(TBF I don't even know what a "senior associate" should mean, but "associate" usually means "entry level")

pushingice4• 4 years ago

Hey man, I didn't design the page. That's the tightest filter I could get. Here's an example: https://finra.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FINRA/jobs/details...

throwawaysleep5• 4 years ago

I don’t know why anyone would hire a junior. I was an utter loss for the first two companies I worked for.

They basically paid to train me and then I went off to a far better paying tech company that doesn’t hire juniors.

In a highly liquid market like tech, you can’t really afford to invest in people as they cost the same as just hiring off the market to retain/replace.

rcurry2• 4 years ago

Sigh. I just had this experience a few months back. I went out on a limb, hired a junior guy, and after six months of getting him up to speed on a fairly complex fintech application he resigned and went to a a random web development job that paid more.

throwawaysleep5• 4 years ago

I was that person. Twice.

Not six months, but about a year for each.

cecilpl2• 4 years ago

The problem is that junior devs increase in value very rapidly in their first 2-3 years, much faster than any company is willing to increase their salary.

jahewson2• 4 years ago

The solution is to pay more.

gavinray3• 4 years ago

  > "and after six months of getting him up to speed on a fairly complex fintech application he resigned and went to a a random web development job that paid more."

Sounds like he wasn't the brightest

The immediate payjump from hopping from bottom-of-the-rung where you're at to some random CRUD web dev job, I'd wager is far outweighed by the potential returns for senior experience in Fintech, specifically.

That's a much harder niche to get into than building CRUD apps from what I hear.

olyjohn4• 4 years ago

Who wouldn't leave for more money? What did you expect? Did you give him a counter-offer? Now that you've invested time into him, he should be worth more to you as an employee. Now you get to suck it up and train someone else, and spend hours interviewing replacements. Probably would have been cheaper to match the other offer.

itsdrewmiller2• 4 years ago

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve... is a good start on why.

troops_h8r• 4 years ago

This is unfortunate to hear, I'm still crawling through a chemistry PhD and I was hoping I'd be able to transition into software and get as far away from touching any more glass as possible.

Do you think the situation is different in more specialized niches (i.e. would I be able to reasonably compete with a CS grad for a job at a biotech firm?)

icapybara• 4 years ago

I finished my PhD a couple years ago, and my PhD friends that transitioned to software went into ML. Teach yourself some tool like Pytorch and some basic CS skills. ML’s barrier to entry is a PhD, but it doesn’t particularly matter which field it’s in so long as you can sell it right and pass the technical interviews.

type0• 4 years ago

Do you think the situation is different in more specialized niches (i.e. would I be able to reasonably compete with a CS grad for a job at a biotech firm?)

If you want to go biotech and software, I'd say try to pivot into a data scientist position

jahewson2• 4 years ago

This is the way.

young_hopper• 4 years ago

Do you think the situation is different in more specialized niches

Yes, but honestly it really depends on what you want to do.

As an example, I'm currently starting to hire for a small tech company in the life-sciences space. A candidate with real lab experience would be significant differentiator though its not super necessary for the position. On top of that having a PhD is a strong signal in favor of a candidate. That being said, given my position I would likely just pick a more-technically competent candidate if one is available, though that won't be the case everywhere you look.

The closer you get to the bigger biotechs, I'd imagine the more your PhD will be worth in terms of differentiating you as well. If you need to talk to scientists on a daily basis, you'll need to know how speak the same language, and thats not something you can get from a bootcamp.

My best advice would be to learn a breadth of technical skills and to start honing the ones that make sense for you personally. Don't let any tell you "you need to focus on X to be successful in biotech." There is a lot of innovation going on in the space right now, and if you look in the right places I'm sure you'll find that niche that makes sense for you.

isoprophlex• 4 years ago

I guess it depends on what kind of job at a biotech firm? SRE isnt the same as a data science/ML job...

I did something similar to what you describe ten years ago, finishing a chem phd and pivoting to data science (back when data science was still the coolest job around)

My first job was at a big consulting outfit, they hired me no questions asked. I did do ~ 2 years of high-volume DFT calculations on a computing cluster during the phd. Ensure you have some edge that makes it believable that you can operate a linux box/do scripting, and you'll be fine.

Maybe the market is different now, but if I'm hiring people right now, having completed a STEM-ish PhD seems to signal intelligence and perseverance. Just don't come off as an academic know-it-all. Noone cares if you're right in industry, your shit just has to be delivered on time.

thankful69• 4 years ago

I never called myself a "junior" engineer, even at the beginning of my career, that is lowballing yourself at best. You are an engineer with 6 moths or one year, etc... of experience. You need to sell yourself to employers, clients, etc... no one will advocate for your success or a fair compensation. If you are really unexperienced, let the interviewer to assess that fact. No need to lie on your resume or interviews, just don't put yourself in a position where recruiters/hiring managers will have very easy to give you a worst compensation for the same work you would otherwise do at a better rate.

racl101• 4 years ago

Well said.

Giving yourself the junior dev label just makes it easier for them to place you in an unwanted pile.

EgoIsMyFriend• 4 years ago

this.

people need to value themselves based on how much value they can bring to a company, not if they have x year experience writing js syntax.

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

We do, but we don't advertise. We get them through networking (some of my best developers we found through word-of-mouth referrals by current and former employees vouching for them). And even more so, we dip into the pool of former interns every year and hire a batch of them.

rr8885• 4 years ago

Another issue is that I've spent a lot of time and effort in the past to train up graduates on our grad program. Previously you would train up people and they'd train 2 years then work for at least 2 years after.

During the boom the last few years, people left after a year or 18 months. Only one stayed a full 2 years largely because he wasn't that great. Honestly can't be bothered any more.

itsoktocry• 4 years ago

Honestly can't be bothered any more.

This is an interesting point. For better or worse, the people in the tech world aren't "loyal", and salaries are so crazy they are often looking to leverage their experience into a new position as soon as possible. How do you train people up if you're nothing but a feeder trough for bigger companies?

jklm4• 4 years ago

Expecting anyone to stay 4 years in any 1 place is at best unrealistic and at worst sacrificing their potential for the team’s success.

We shouldn’t be surprised when people fly the nest, and for what it’s worth this happens at even the best companies - people leave to start their own businesses.

What we can do is aim to have them do the best work can, build a good rep for our team, and (selfishly) invest in a strong personal relationship with them so that in 10 years maybe they look back and pay back the favor.

Palomides• 4 years ago

if only there was some incentive a company could use to retain employees!

anonymousDan• 4 years ago

Pay more?

throwawaysleep5• 4 years ago

Even in a senior only org, it is a constant hamster wheel of training people with the current rates of turnover. One of the few long haulers is rapidly burning out supporting everyone else on the team who is green.

obviouslynotme• 4 years ago

That's how orgs die.

neon_electro4• 4 years ago

I can respect this, but if people are leaving sooner, perhaps the employer wasn't doing enough to retain them? Is it exclusively the employees' fault?

olyjohn4• 4 years ago

You mean, a business might have to... gasp... compete with other businesses to retain employees?

justin66• 4 years ago

train 2 years Honestly can't be bothered any more.

Between two years and zero days, there's an awful lot of room to adjust a training period.

hedora• 4 years ago

This happened in the 2000 crash. There were a lot of people with CS undergraduate degrees that couldn't write a for loop.

A letter from an undergrad advisor was usually enough for the strong coders to cut through the noise.

These days most decent coding academies have relationships with hiring pipelines (check before you enroll!), and write recommendations for the strong students. That might only get you an entry level stepping stone job, though. (A letter from a professor with relevant publications is worth much more than a letter from an unknown coding acadamy.)

thaumasiotes6• 4 years ago

These days most decent coding academies have relationships with hiring pipelines (check before you enroll!)

This may be of limited value; my personal experience with a company that hired from bootcamps was that they hired from just one bootcamp, they were very excited about that bootcamp, and the bootcamp's value proposition to the company was that it didn't admit men.

rednerrus• 4 years ago

Get a job as an entry level QA. This is the way.

cephei• 4 years ago

I have seen this work several times. In many cases, it's easier to change roles inside a company than to switch to a dev role at a new place when you have no developer experience. Starting out in QA is a great way to develop domain knowledge, which can be more important than programming skill in many businesses.

galdosdi3• 4 years ago

Or entry level Developer in Test (takes no less skill actually, but it's less desirable) or entry level sysadmin or tech support, even helpdesk etc. This is what people were doing in the last recession. If you are good at coding, tech support and other entry level IT stuff at the right company can be a great playground to advance your career, because there is so much opportunity to practice

porcoda• 4 years ago

There is an oversupply of junior developers, especially in spaces where bootcamps and other quick, nondegree training was creating them. I can certainly sympathize with people who saw development as a route to make a living, but there are only so many developers needed out there. Honestly I think the industry did a lot of people a disservice by making it sound like learning basic coding was guaranteed to yield a good job, since that didn’t take into account the finiteness of the job landscape.

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

did a lot of people a disservice

Although really, the people who were done the disservice to should have stepped back and realized that if something can be mastered (well enough to do it professionally) by any random person in three months, it wouldn't be a valuable skill. Unless they're so arrogant they think they're just that much better than everybody else.

superchroma2• 4 years ago

We sure aren't. I advocated for it multiple times and instead we got given a team in india to outsource excess work to. :(

Jaygles• 4 years ago

High chance that team in India will have some junior devs on it though

superchroma2• 4 years ago

They're really raw, yeah.

Test0129• 4 years ago

Depends on skill set. A lot of people suggest projects, conferences, etc but I don't think anything like that works at scale.

From my seat as a staff-level and involved in hiring:

1. The average "junior" is really a code camp graduate with skill in one very, very specific thing. The skill is limited however and typically insufficient to call them a full software engineer.

2. From (1) the pool of code camp graduates dramatically outpaces people with degrees. In my experience approximately 1 in 5 people I've interviewed have graduated a full program. This creates a few problems. Namely, the low-skilled pool is significantly higher which allows companies to be far more choosy. Additionally, the majority of software engineering roles these days are "wide" meaning you may be expected to do work that requires more than the formulaic approach a code camp gives you.

3. Degreed hires are still being considered and generally speaking aren't having any problem getting jobs. Not only is a degree a value signal it generally speaks to your ability to adapt. While the industry has been slamming degrees as not necessary the variance is significantly higher with non-degreed hires.

This all sounds like I am trash talking code camps and I guess in a way I am. My interviewing has given me this opinion. Despite specifically avoiding algorithmic puzzles people graduating these camps are just typically insufficient. I feel bad for them because code camps generally feel like the modern take on ITT and other for-profit scams from a decade or more ago. A lot of these people simply want the money. Understandable. However, it's simply not enough to get your foot in the door without help from the inside.

All of this adds up to the general consensus that hiring is getting harder. The code camp pool is taking the brunt of the lack of hiring, the code camp pool is large, so the noise they make about the hiring situation is proportional to their experience. As for senior devs this is largely a good thing going into a potential recession. However, getting promoted above that position may get more difficult.

adamrezich• 4 years ago

a few years ago I had a lot of trouble find a "junior" or entry-level programming position anywhere. eventually I found a remote web developer position. then various family circumstances occurred causing me to temporarily leave the position for awhile to deal with things. this was right as the covid stuff was ramping up. when I was once again ready to work, the developer unfortunately instituted a hiring freeze due to covid, so it was back to the job search once again.

I ended up finding work at my local school district. the two programmers who are in charge of our district of some 12,000 students are both over 50, and they were more than happy to hire me to learn how to keep everything running. it's not a glamorous job, and there's no doubt that my salary, even adjusted for cost of living, is not great compared to many other people who post here… but the benefits are great, and being the future of keeping my childhood school district running on the technology side keeps me feeling fulfilled at work. plus, I have incredible job security going forward.

for any "junior devs" looking for work: I recommend seeing if there's any local government positions like this that are available. my district can't be the only one run by programmers who are closing in on retirement, desperately searching for younger people to learn how to take the reins first. I'm mostly self-taught but even a self-taught level of understanding of SQL was sufficient to get hired—I've since learned quite a bit more on the job but a CS grad should have no problem at all.

geraldwhen• 4 years ago

Me personally: no.

Before Covid, I had an excellent setup to train developers using pair programming and working closely together for months.

Now, training is impossible. I cannot train a junior dev remotely, and the job is remote.

202206241203• 4 years ago

What is the benefit of hiring them? Mentorship takes time away from seniors and code needs a thorough review if not full refactoring.

spmurrayzzz• 4 years ago

Speaking for myself, I am always open to hiring non-entry level juniors that demonstrate they can punch above their weight a bit. I have a philosophy of keeping the front end of our hiring funnel as wide as possible, my recruiting staff will screen almost anyone thats had at least one professional gig or an active github. And the folks that don't meet the experience expectations we have often still get a chance to show us what they can do if they check other boxes.

But the frank reality is that the definition of "junior" has changed significantly compared to 5-10 years ago. The education options for becoming a software engineer have broadened dramatically. As a result, the barrier to entry for simply submitting a resume to any given req is much lower. And while this is manifestly a great thing for inclusivity outcomes, it has disproportionately worse impact on the signal-to-noise ratio in the hiring funnel.

I think many orgs are still in the process of evaluating their risk tolerance for bringing on unproven talent. I do think _some_ risk is warranted, but its very easy over time to accidentally index too far in either direction.

mrwh2• 4 years ago

This is one of the many stark differences I found in moving from London to the Bay Area. In London and the UK in general no one wants to hire junior devs, the first job is very hard to get. The attitude is: I don't want to pay to train someone up who'll then probably leave. I come to the Bay Area, and FAANG in particular, and it seems like most hires are junior devs, and in fact the whole hiring process (undergrad-algorithm based) is geared towards it. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this difference in attitude explains a decent amount of the UK's dire productivity growth this century versus its peers.

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

A curious old-school mentality. I'm baffled that London hasn't figured out junior devs can be fooled into throwing themselves into a project, working insane hours while taking low pay. It's the backbone of Silicon Valley.

In fact, a non-junior dev (not senior but anyway) could be defined as somebody who has figured this out.

mrwh2• 4 years ago

I agree! And in fairness I left ten years ago so... maybe it's no longer true? Interested if anyone has a more recent perspective...

isubasinghe• 4 years ago

because recruitment for software eng roles is lazy imo. The least effort is to look for someone with experience.

I am personally of the opinion that experience isn't a good indicator of programming ability, but it may be an indicator of software engineering capability. See here https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programmi... (links to a study and talks about this point more)

I've worked with masters students who were far better programmers than senior engineers I've worked with.

davnicwil• 4 years ago

At Stacker (YC S20) we have 4 Junior engineers in a team of 15 engineers (so ~25% but a higher % of new hires), all of whom have started in the past year.

We're not actively hiring new Junior positions right now due to having the right balance across the team - but just to provide some anecdotal evidence that some companies indeed have been hiring Junior engineers recently.

Temporal_Trout• 4 years ago

As a Junior who graduated BSc Computer Science in June this year I haven't been able to find anything. I don't want to leave Canada (Although I am willing to relocate within Canada) but a lot of my fellow alumni who have found jobs are going to be working in the US.

I worked a lot of hours through my degree in a non-tech position (Bills/Tuition are expensive) and as a result don't really have much in the way of a portfolio outside of stuff built in class. That seems to be a big limiter but at least something I can work at.

I did take a volunteer position for a local non-profit over a few summers when I had the time but it was more sysadmin/helpdesk style work and nobody seems to care. I've had such a hard time I'm actually looking into joining the Military.

Mc91• 4 years ago

It may be useful to think of companies as categories - Fortune 1000 companies, startups, and consulting companies, although categories these can overlap.

From what I've seen a lot of startups seem to need "full stack" programmers, who can program ReactJS. Especially before a series A these companies usually can't afford to hire senior programmers, or even regular programmers, so it is a good place to get your foot in the door and get some experience, although probably at the worst pay.

Then there are consulting companies. As you are going in on a team, and the companies you are being placed at often do a mini-interview before you go in, and your placement contract can be for just a few months, companies you are placed at are less worried about taking a risk bringing you in. The trick is the level - the consulting company might not care much what level you're at, but the company you are being placed at generally wants someone who can bang out features cleanly and with little to no help. I have seen 22 year olds just out of coding boot camp being placed as "senior" programmer for a three month stint, which they are generally not reupped for - and I have heard this happens in other places too. It gets you in the door but it's hard to stay there. If you're not reupped and on the bench, the consulting company might show you the door fairly quickly too.

Some Fortune 1000 companies have internships, generally for college students, and the ones who managers and mentors are happy with can get offers as a junior/associate when graduating. It's probably good to try to intern at a different company each summer and to keep in contact with managers and mentors. It also depends on the job market - people who graduated in 2000-2001 or 2008-2009 or maybe now probably have worse luck than graduates at other times.

llaolleh• 4 years ago

It sucks due to how the current market incentives are laid out. Why the hell would a company want to invest in a junior dev, when they're going to bounce in two years?

Training junior developers is hard and timeconsuming. It also hurts that the variance of quality of software engineers starting out is so wide. There is so much risk involved with someone with 0 experience. More often than not, you get guys who cannot code their way out of a box without you holding their hand every step of the way. Every once in a while you get a crazy whale who can probably code Optimus Prime from scratch.

mouzogu• 4 years ago

High saturation of entry level coupled with automated filtering of applications.

A lot will tell you, you need to do X,Y or Z but I think that's the real picture for a large majority.

tenarshins• 4 years ago

We absolutely are, but we don't advertise it.

notnotdee• 4 years ago

I graduated from a bootcamp last year with no previous industry experience, and was one of the few lucky people in my class to have a relatively easy time finding a job (I was hired through an early career engineer program).

Many many people in my class took six or more months of applying constantly to eventually receive an offer. It's doable but it's a full-time commitment, and I see a lot of unconscious bias in who ultimately gets a job v. who doesn't.

tick_tock_tick• 4 years ago

On-boarding and training a remote junior is a horrible experience for both the mentor and the junior. With the additional ramp up time it's just so much easier to hire someone more experienced. As more and more companies return to the office hopefully this issue will clean itself up.

comprev• 4 years ago

With the abundance of material available for people to self-train as a developer, the pool of candidates has exploded - bootcamps, self-paced university courses (CS50), etc. all mean the bar has been raised for what is considered a junior.

YouTube, Udemy, Exercism, TryHackMe - these allow anyone with an internet connection to learn, perhaps with the aim of entering the industry.

AceLewis• 4 years ago

Just to add for anyone reading this thread and aspiring to be a dev and being demotivated this is not the experience I witness (in the Netherlands). There are jobs for junior devs. One of the problem might be not wanting to advertise to hire very junior devs as I have seen people apply at the company I work for that have just completed a bootcamp or udemy course and nothing else and think they are qualified. If you advertise hiring at a low level you will get lots of spammy applications.

(I understand why these people are taking the shotgun approach and applying everywhere because some company will bite but it can be annoying on the receiving end)

My company is hiring junior devs all the time.

throwawybllion• 4 years ago

Nope, we just laid off the least experienced 10% of our team, and haven't hired a junior since 2019.

Best advice is that you don't need a job to become a mid or senior dev:

Go contribute to open source projects. It's the best hiring indicator we have and it's much better at teaching you real world programming than boot camps or CS degrees (I have a CS degree but learned basically nothing about how to actually build software).

kweingar• 4 years ago

My former employer is always hiring junior developers, but a degree is required. There were a few hundred new dev hires over this summer.

I left the company to take an L3 position at Google, where I will be starting shortly.

lakomen• 4 years ago

What is a junior dev? If I've done 11 years of PHP and 9 of Go and various undefined years of JS and would like to switch to a Java job, I know little about, bit enough to serve an api over http, am I a junior?

galdosdi3• 4 years ago

My definitions:

(1) Can you get things done unattended in the long term? If no, you are junior, if yes, you are not.

(2) Can you take charge of figuring out what things even should be done? If so, you are senior, if no, you are not.

(If you are neither junior nor senior based on those definitions, you are midlevel)

anxiousnewgrad2• 4 years ago

I just graduated and got a job as a data engineer, but want to be swe. How hard would it be to switch if I stay as a data engineer for 6-12months? Worried about being pigeonholed from the start.

poetril• 4 years ago

I don't think the switch would be hard. You're best bet will most likely be moving horizontally. In 6-12 months bring up moving internally to another team to your manager.

Otherwise you can probably look for a new job after you get some experience under your belt to put your ahead of the pack.

anxiousnewgrad2• 4 years ago

You think the experience will be beneficial even if it is unrelated? My current stack is all data engineering tooling, not as much programming as I would like.

lkrubner• 4 years ago

I’ve hired a lot of developers who were straight from dev bootcamps. Some of these were very good. I wrote about the candidates I hired from the Grace Hopper program here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-grace-hopper-divi...

In general, every project needs some experienced engineers and then a larger number of novice engineers. In any software project there is a large amount of work that is tedious and almost secretarial — you don’t want your most experienced engineers bogged down in that muck. It’s important to have some novice engineers who can handle that kind of boring grunt work.

Tsukiortu2• 4 years ago

It's not just Junior Devs. It's everywhere in the tech industry from my experience. Entry level jobs across the board in the industry want you to already have been in the field for years or want to pay you the same wage as my local McDonald's while requiring college and multiple certs. They want the benefits of having experienced workers without putting in the effort of creating that next generation of experienced workers. I gave up on doing programming a while back because of lack of being able to get a job and waning interest. I ended up going back to basic helpdesk (hardware) to get more experience on my resume, and even then still had about a year of searching I settled for a job I know I'm being underpaid for because I have to have the experience. You either are being heavily underpaid or you're not getting a job in my area for new hires in the tech industry. Nearly every job near me, even ones labeled “Entry level” in any way, want at least 2+ years of on job work experience.

Others may not have the same issues as me, but I know quite a few people near me who are in the exact same boat. It's really unfortunate. I've seen jobs in my area reject me for not having enough experience not even getting to an interview for me to check, and half a year later that position is still waiting to be filled.

galdosdi3• 4 years ago

What area?

Tsukiortu2• 4 years ago

Central/North Eastern Ohio, Cleveland area and east of that. Part of it is definitely due to being here, but there are always quite a few jobs up year round, never getting filled. Not planning on being here forever, but until I'm more on my feet, I don't have much of a choice.

hacym• 4 years ago

My consulting company hires junior developers if they show good initiative and attitude. If you are finding that you can’t get hired as a junior (<3 years) you might be looking at areas that are too niche.

As a junior, you gotta lower your standards and get into the field. This isn’t like 10 or even 5 years ago. Junior developers are abundant. Boot camps are pumping out “qualified” (I don’t mean this to be rude, but many boot camps are not qualifying people to do real enterprise work. There is a gap, you have to find a company willing to bridge that.) candidates en masse. Do something that sets you apart. Make contacts.

scorpioxy• 4 years ago

I am looking to hire, what I call, at least one mid-level developer for the company I am currently working for. A mid-level because the company needs them to be productive within a couple of months and it's not currently practical to train anybody who is too junior. There's a lot of work to be done and you need the experienced people doing the work rather than training the less experienced team members. I've been trying to set expectations and argue that you need to invest and train but I need to balance all of this with business needs at the end of the day.

As an aside, I find that labeling of junior and mid-level and senior very confusing because I've been interviewing people who claim they're experienced but don't even understand the basics. And I am not talking about algorithms or white boarding or live coding or any of that nonsense.

This is in Australia but may not be country-specific. The job ads I've been noticing for the past couple of years are asking for an increasing amount and level of experience for their roles so I agree with you that it will be a problem in the future.

Ask HN: Is no one hiring junior devs?

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