Ask HN: Why Is Nobody Hiring Juniors?

Degree doesn't matter much except for your 1st job may be. Since you have 2 years of experience, question is what is that experience in ? Only then we can give you a better answer on why is it so hard to find a job. But in general, employers prefer experience and that is a fact. Due to the nature of employment these days where there is no loyalty on both sides, no one wants to "invest" in a junior anymore. May be very few places.

Here is my suggestion on how to stand out as a Junior:

- Have a kick ass Resume that is not more than 1 Page where you list your skills/jobs/learnings clearly

- If you worked for 2 years but have changed 5 jobs, that is not a great indicator for a future employer that you will be reliable. Not sure in your case but as a junior, you need to stay at once place at least 3-4 years in the early years because anything less, you are not exposed to real world problems.

- Be willing to work in an office and relocate wherever. This may be controversial in 2024 to mention but in my experience and opinion, juniors need to learn with their peers/seniors in person and actually lose out if everyone is remote.

- If you are willing to work for startups or very small companies, make a list and reach out to the founder's directly (email/linkedin/twitter etc). Make a case for why you. If you have a profile with anything interesting, you may get an opportunity for at least an interview.

- Always respond quickly to any emails you get from potential employers. Send a thank you email post interview if you do have an interview. Call me old school but if I interviewed 2 people and if everything else was equal, I would prefer the person who bothered to send a thank you email. Thank you is not just being grateful etc but also about summarizing what you learned in the interview about the team/company/product and why you would be excited to work with them.

- Find recruiters on Linkedin by keeping your profile up to date. Sometimes a profile update can trigger you bumping up the queue in recruiter view.

- Reach out to people you know who are in higher positions and ask for advice if they are willing.

All the best

Companies don't want to train or mentor. They want to hire someone "to hit the ground running from day 1" for a specific technology stack or domain. The idea that they could hire a good junior programmer and train them up on whatever their specific needs are seems to have disappeared in the software development industry.

There is much advice on the web that you should change jobs regularly to get salary raises fast. It is potentially a good advice if you are very good at what you do and your employer is not investing enough to reward you properly. But I’ve seen many cases where a mediocre developer finds a slightly better paying job and your 1+ year investment in training and teaching goes down the drain. Also with LLMs you usually achieve the same as 3-4 juniors.

I am very much pro-training and teaching juniors but there is (was at least) a sense of entitlement and lack of commitment that is detrimental to those efforts.

Don’t sell yourself as junior. Companies blindly hire anyone who knows how to sell themselves.

I think it is the economy. Companies have been firing and scaling back hiring.

Junior positions are usually the first to go.

Mid level engineers make like 40k more and are twice as efficient