[vizeroth]

You hire junior developers for those roles because you can pay them less and find the people who work well in your environment, get rid of the ones who don't, and leave the rest to decide for themselves whether they can find something they like about the entry-level work (and somehow continue to live on that wage) or go somewhere else once they have more experience on their resume.

I've been through so many long cycles of trying to find someone to fill a developer role where it would have been so much simpler if we could have started with someone who understood the environment and work load up front, rather than finding people who went back to the job search 3 or 4 weeks into it because it wasn't working out (but they were usually smart enough to get another job offer before they quit). I would almost prefer to take someone with little or no programming experience who works in my office with a desire to learn and a strong work ethic and give them the programming job, hire 2 or 3 more people to answer phones on a help desk, and save everyone the pain of reading resumes and interviewing for a developer who ends up negotiating a higher salary, socializing at the help desk from 8 to noon, managing their social media empire from 1 to 5, and either quitting or (somehow) getting fired after a few months so we can start all over again.

Yes, I have to train someone, perhaps even more than I would have to train someone who comes on board with some applicable experience, but the alphabet soup that goes out on my job postings isn't easy to replicate on resumes, and doesn't guarantee that I won't need to review the material with them anyway.