[DeBraid]

Very few firms want to hire juniors, while nearly all firms desire senior-level talent.

This manifests inflated job vacancies because so many firms have an evergreen job posting for "Senior Full Stack". Because talent is scarce these roles rarely get filled (hiring managers expect million-dollar candidates to accept $100-200k compensation).

Also, because lots of software requires specific expertise, there are vacancies that can't be filled because of a knowledge gap (novel industries / projects, etc). For example, how could SpaceX possibly fill all their engineering roles? Surely money is not a limiting factor, but rather the limited supply of qualified expert rocket engineers?

[NullInvictus]

Worse, many firms are put off by juniors for entirely preventable reasons. In their minds, juniors are undesirable because the moment they are trained up, they tend to jump ship for senior positions elsewhere. Why train your competition, right?

The reason they jump ship is because the firm refuses to re-evaluate them for what they are worth, and keeps them on work meant to free up the company's existing senior staff (i.e., dead-end grunt-work that results in burnout). If you, as a junior developer, want to be re-valued, you need to jump ship.

This creates a feedback loop. Companies view juniors as a cheaper developer you _might_ get 2 years of low-cost work out of (after training) before they'll leave, creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

I've watched (and experienced) this loop multiple times. It's utterly baffling how firms would rather go through the cost and drain of finding and replacing talent rather than re-evaluate and pay their existing, proven talent what they are worth on the open market.

Workers would rather not move around. Workers would rather have a stable position in a job they like, in a community where they can purchase a home and build lives and/or families. Once you get past 35, playing the required musical-chairs needed to advance your career is a real drag. It does not need to be this way.

[cactus2093]

> Workers would rather not move around.

I really disagree. These junior engineers you're talking about are mostly in their early 20's (even if they're older and switching from a different career track, they're by definition new to the industry and still have a lot to learn). In my experience, they definitely do want to move around. And even if there is a great track for internal promotions and the compensation is going to be the same whether they stay or leave, it honestly is usually in their best interest to move around every couple of years anyway early in their career. They'll meet more new people to grow their professional network faster, work on new problems, see different ways of how teams operate and what works better/worse, and gain more experience faster.

I do think that for the very top performers, most companies should probably be much more aggressive than they are. If someone is really crushing it, like in say the top 1-5% of performers, be ridiculously proactive and promote them from junior engineer to Staff Engineer within 18 months or something. I've seen a couple of people over my career that actually were performing at that level, and no external company is going to give them that big of a boost, so it's a good chance to use your inside information to be more competitive. Otherwise, for the majority of folks that are learning/advancing at a more normal pace, I don't think there's really much a company can do to keep them longer. (Not that you shouldn't even try, it's still a continuum and if you do a really bad job at career growth internally you'll lose even more people faster. But you shouldn't expect to be able to keep most people beyond 2-3 years).

[ItsMonkk]

Hiring Juniors is a positive externality that the company does not see a penny of. They only see a penny of that externality if they don't give a raise, and that Junior chooses to stick around anyway. You get to exploit that he made friends or is stuck in your part of the city due to a lease or otherwise makes a poor financial decision.

It's interesting that the worse the interview process, the less the Junior will want to go through it, the more the company benefits. You make your process painful so your competitors make their process painful so both of you hold onto your Juniors for more time.

If you can fix the externality problem this goes away, but that's not easy.

[wccrawford]

I work at a fairly small company that hires juniors. We pay them well, and give them more responsibility in pay as we see them improving.

Most of them still want to move on, usually to change technologies or gain more responsibility even faster.

Sometimes they want to move cities for almost random reasons, and they're willing to just find a new job and do it.

So while I somewhat agree that devs don't want to move jobs, juniors devs often do, and I think they're a lot more likely to move jobs than senior devs.

[longhairedhippy]

Honestly, I think having engineers come and go is a net win for companies. I've worked at places where the "old guard" has been around forever and they are inevitably stubborn, obstinate, and convinced there is no other way to solve the problem. By changing jobs and environments, you get to see in practice that there are many different ways to implement a solution. Only seeing one set of systems (unless they are a FAANG, which is large enough to have the breadth to counteract it), would ultimately cause those architectures to stagnate, injecting new blood is also injecting new ideas.

I do however, agree with your sentiment, those junior folks that are getting all the work done only get rewarded with more work to do.

[shados]

> Very few firms want to hire juniors

It's not that they don't want to hire juniors, it's that you need a solid ratio of mentors to mentees.

I've worked at a LOT of companies, and for the more well known one, the ratio of junior resumes to seniors was easily 1000:1.

We hired entire cohorts of juniors, often interviewing HUNDREDS of them in a couple of weeks, hiring dozens. That still meant that from all the resumes we got, only a few % made it through.

What choice did we have though? We can only train mentors so fast, and hiring them is hard and expensive. You can't ask someone with 5 years of experience to train 30 people at the same time.

People often underestimate just how many people are entering the field right now, vs how many were 10-20 years ago. Add in people who EXIT the field, as well as people who are poor fits to be mentors, and it gets really dicey.

[dimitrios1]

To go in line with firms not wanting to hire juniors, I think generally firms do not want to invest heavily in employee training or education. I would, for example, happily make a shift from CRUD webdev and distributed networking to hardware and embedded and more lower level type work, but I doubt a firm would hire me near my current level and train me up.

[aNoob7000]

I think you hit it on the nose. Companies don't want to invest in training their new hires. They just want someone to hit the ground running with as little hand holding as possible.

[runevault]

The problem is likely that most people are willing to learn on the job, but then take that learning and go get a better job. A large portion of this problem is companies not being willing to increase pay to match the value you add by learning that skill, but it does lead to the doubt about bothering to train.

[cwbrandsma]

that is true for firms that never hire juniors. For me, I have a small team, we can only absorb a small number of juniors at any given time, because I have to have people free enough to train them up. And now, having lost most my seniors in my team to attrition, I'm hiring more mid-level developers (and hoping to find seniors)

[nickff]

The problem is that nobody wants to pay you intermediate/senior salary for junior ability until you learn their field. More than that, even if you volunteer to take the pay cut, they may be afraid you'll jump ship quickly, or that it's just not worth the risk of doing something unconventional.

[tsywke44]

Why would any company spend 2 years to train a junior, only for that junior to jump ship?

Oh and it's not that easy to even find a "trainable" junior. Even if you have a fairly strict hiring process, at least 1/3rds of the people coming out of the edication system will be draft busts if using sports terms

[gmadsen]

which I think I'm fine with. I can learn skills on my own time. But I expect compensation to be commensurate with that

[colordrops]

Most software positions at SpaceX, even those working on critical flight code, do not require aerospace knowledge. And SpaceX is not a great example as they hire a lot of interns and junior people willing to grind.

[dfxm12]

they hire a lot of interns and junior people willing to grind

Is this a euphemism for an employer overworking and underpaying their talent?

[exdsq]

I find this insane and terrifying.

[ren_engineer]

seems like a chicken and egg problem

how are senior engineers supposed to be created if very few companies are willing to train junior engineers? Why aren't these companies offering paid apprenticeships if they are so desperate for workers?

[jethro_tell]

In part because you have to jave enough sr people able to mentor. There's not a great industry framework.

As a plumber, you pay your apprentice usually 60% sr/journyman salary with a 5% increase every 6 months to match the value of the skill up.

There are also industry standard, industry funded classroom settings, that teach things like building codes and industry standards and some adjacent trade craft.

Instead you just throw a Jr to an overworked mid/Sr and they can help with some design and questions and code review but that takes 10-20 hours per week so you have to pretty much have one or more per Jr. Position. Then, after 18 months when the Jr hasn't received a 15% pay raise to reflect the enormous amount of time an knowledge you've sucked out of a Sr position, they go elsewhere for a 20% raise and it looks like you've waisted your time.

In truth, it wastes the talent you've built to not be aggressively increasing their comp to match the skill increase you're providing.

[closeparen]

A sufficiently fast growing startup hires a lot of juniors and then due to turnover, general chaos, etc. leaves them with outsized responsibilities and little supervision. Those who “swim” in that environment are the next generation of senior engineers. It is not like you’ve been supervised for N years, you’re senior now. You get thrown into independence first and if you can hack it, the title and comp follow.

[908B64B197]

> This manifests inflated job vacancies because so many firms have an evergreen job posting for "Senior Full Stack". Because talent is scarce these roles rarely get filled (hiring managers expect million-dollar candidates to accept $100-200k compensation).

At a lot of non-tech companies, the trick is to get hired as a consultant.

[bern4444]

I take a different take here.

Juniors write a lot of code. Often significant amounts for a company's products and services. They're the ones who are implementing all the decisions that seniors spend their time making in all their meetings.

Most senior engineers I've seen have most of their days filled with meetings with very little actual coding time.

The seniors are valuable, making decisions, coming up with solutions, building frameworks etc, but it's the juniors who then take that and run with it and build everything on top of it.

So while some will still code, it's far less than what the junior engineers are creating.

Yes they require some more training, and clear direction, but they are the ones actually creating and executing the vision of the company informed by the seniors.

What companies really want, like others have said, are senior engineers who are willing to accept a junior salary.

[Hermitian909]

While of course companies would love senior engineers willing to accept a junior salary I'd say

> Most senior engineers I've seen have most of their days filled with meetings with very little actual coding time.

Is actually a symptom of the shortage of senior engineers. Big companies that can afford to hire as much talent as they want actually will let seniors write code all day (my company does) because they have the economies of scale that lets them afford doing so; no one else can.

[mamcx]

> (hiring managers expect million-dollar candidates to accept $100-200k compensation).

Wait, not even that.

Even if you are senior you can get that job (because, for example, you are from another country and suddenly you are "cheap" even if senior).

[908B64B197]

> because, for example, you are from another country and suddenly you are "cheap" even if senior

That's a red flag. Because we all know the top of the market, no matter where, is working at SV rates.

[ndesaulniers]

> Very few firms want to hire juniors, while nearly all firms desire senior-level talent.

Or many firms want to hire senior-level talent at junior-level prices.

[cratermoon]

> "Senior Full Stack"

Also why companies will hire someone with 3 years of experience into a senior position.

[trutannus]

Had this happen to me at my first official dev job. Had 'junior developer' in bold at the top in my resume, application, and in several emails to the hiring manager. Got hired, and quit within 2 months. Manager would become upset at times over knowledge gaps I had as a result of being a junior, and the solution they came up with was for me to dedicate my weekends to unpaid, self-directed training.

At some point I actually reminded the manager that I was a junior, which resulted in them acting shocked and saying something to the effect of "well, let's hope that's not the case", and was basically flat out told they have no time for a junior. This was the manager who interviewed me, read my resume, and recommended me for the position.

I was replaced by a university undergrad student on summer break when I quit. I don't think people realize how the problem here often isn't you. Organizations with deep dysfunction are more common that you'd like.

Happy ending though. Got a new position the week I quit, and all turned out well.