Ask HN: Is your company still hiring junior engineers?

I find that the bigger problem is that hiring is broken. There are tons of fraud on the applicant side, so companies (for the lack of a better option) adjusted and now ratchet up their requirements to keep up with the fraud. (There’s also of course fraud on the hiring side, but that’s a different thing).

It doesn’t mean junior positions don’t exist, just that “senior” is the new junior, because now everyone (even if they just followed a tutorial and built a bog-standard Next.js website) is a “senior” who “delivered a high-performance scalable website using all best practices and buzzwords”.

This makes it hard for honest talent to brand itself, so now the only option is to follow the trend, lie and hope you get lucky.

And don’t get me started on outright fake applicants who sling ChatGPT’d resumes without even being able to follow the aforementioned tutorial at all, or boiler rooms in third-world countries who turned this into an entire business, often alongside their tech support scamming business (never put all your eggs in one basket!)

My advice for any talent, whether junior, “senior” or actually senior is to skip the front door and talk to people instead. Reach out to people on LinkedIn, meet people at conferences/events etc or even target non-tech people who might need or benefit from tech work. Talking to people (ideally in person) will generally prove your actual worth much better and allow them to get a feel for your skills in a way that no resume will ever do (because resumes now have zero signal over the noise since anyone can ask ChatGPT for a senior-level resume, and reference-checking is not possible with the amount of applications going around).

> Reach out to people on LinkedIn

Not to nitpick, but can we stop peddling LinkedIn. All I've seen from it is spam and self righteousness.

I’m not saying use the feed/social media part of it. I’m saying use the messenger part. Hiring managers actually don’t mind people reaching out at all because they too are aware of the issue and (at least for now) someone reaching out is still seen as a good enough signal they’re more than happy to engage with.

If anyone randomly reached out to me unless they had a specialized skill I was looking for - and no “full stack development”, “mobile development” is not specialized, I would just tell them to use our ATS.

Anyone reading this. Ignore all opinions. Experiment on LinkedIn ymmv. It can be good.

Yes and that’s where you find contacts and recruiters. You may not like the game just like you might not like gravity. You can either deal with LinkedIn or not find a job. Just like you can accept gravity is a thing and not jump off of a building.

Not sure what world your in, but LinkedIn never helped me found a job.

Word of mouth is much more powerful than trusting something like LinkedIn, which also has been pwned how many times?

It's a useless service that doesn't actually replace job listings, personal connections, job postings, etc. It's basically Facebook for people who think being a 100% worker is everything about life, or a way to get spammed by recruiters.

I have gotten my last three fully remote jobs based on LinkedIn - including working at AWS and two subsequent jobs.

Linkedin helped me too. It might be a SF bubble thing. In SF you talk to your classmates and the guy in the bunk above you, then go on a founder hike and meet more people. It probably feels too easy there why struggle with a crappy Facebook for suits?

Rest of the world tho... you use LinkedIn.

There's tons of fraud on the company side too. Ratcheting up the requirements only increases the likelihood of fraud on the candidate side since you now have more people who think it's unfair and are desperate. It would be better to increase the validation than to raise the bar.

Nah. I’m actually a senior (in your own words) and I got a decent job using the traditional methods: search on linkedin and submit cv. The only thing is that I care deeply about how my cv looks like (prose, typeface, organization, succinctness, etc). It still works.

I don’t do conferences or meet people in real life because I’m interested in 100% remote positions (and I don’t live in a big city)

I think you must’ve gotten lucky. I’ve been on the hiring side recently and the amount of suspected trash we got through the front door is insane, but there’s no way to tell trash from treasure in a scalable way. It put me off from applying at all, and nowadays I exclusively target non-technical business owners that may need tech (they have their own scammers to worry about, but surprisingly that segment seems less polluted, probably because a lot of it still relies on in-person communication and so hard for boiler rooms to exploit).

I suggest reconsidering your opinion on real-life events. It’s not necessarily about finding a job now (which I concur is difficult if you want full-remote), but still, you’ve made a connection and proven to the person that at the very least you’re not just a monkey operating ChatGPT - this may be useful down the line. They may know someone who’s hiring and is open to full remote.

My son has been looking for an entry level position ever since graduating (last year, in 2024) with a Game Development degree at a pretty decent school. Right now he's teaching kids programming in an after-school program to keep from going crazy. Before that he did an unpaid internship. Things are looking pretty grim for him - I wish I knew how to help him. :(

The layoffs in the games industry are one of the worst [0] by far. Really terrible timing, it's so unfortunate.

[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/topics/layoffs

First mistake was a game development degree. I tell everyone who is interested in that field it isn’t glamorous, they overwork you and under pay you because they know want to be game developers are “passionate”.

Oh I get it. I tried to convince him of the same thing. I figured the skills would be transferable to something less brutal once he inevitably burned out on the games industry. He started looking at less game-oriented programming jobs but he's now questioning his whole career path and considering going into teaching/education instead.

Good teachers with technical backgrounds are hard to find. Things might be falling into place for him.

Maybe he should try to publish a game on his own or with some friends for iOS/Android or on something like Steam? The act of getting something out there can inspire further ideas and may open other doors.

Have him look into computer security. Developers are always sought after. Web app testing is a good start

https://portswigger.net/web-security

> Have him look into computer security. Developers are always sought after.

Many of these jobs are being outsourced overseas.

When has that not been the case?

You'd be surprised how many young people entering this field didn't know that.

Of course we are still hiring juniors. We have an intern program as well. I work at a Fortune 500. Nobody in our leadership has been stupid enough to suggest that we could stop hiring junior people, indeed we want them to help us learn.

Sometimes I think Fortune 500 has the best funnel. Hiring goes all the way down to scholarships, plans are decades long.

Some of the companies in the Fortune 500 have been around for over a century, they understand everything moves in cycles.

Yes, but they call them senior. My company is bad at hiring.

Which company? Curious because I'm looking for a junior role

Probably one of the WITCH companies.

TIL - Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL

Why do these companies sound like cleaning chemicals?

We’re a small team, but we recently brought on a junior hire primarily because of the lower cost. For certain client contracts, a lower billable rate is preferable. They had the job opening open for a day, and had to shut it down due to so many applicants. Rather than sift through them all, they picked a friend of a current employee, sigh.

> Maybe I'm wrong and the market oversaturation has pushed most of positions "underground", where people get hired through their network, and the position is never advertised. It might also be due to me only looking in Trondheim, which is not really that big of a city (150k, but considerable technical market due to the biggest technical university in the country being located here).

100% of my empmloyer's hires are through connections, and we never hired juniors.

Junior engineers are getting hired but there are definitely fewer positions available. It’s scary for sure but it’s also a normal part of the boom & bust cycle that is inherent to the tech industry.

If anything, AI investment is propping us up as some money is still getting invested even though money is expensive at the moment.

In 2002 friends of mine that graduated top 10 at UC Berkeley were struggling to get interviews, never mind jobs. That was the worst dry spell I’ve seen in my career. But they stayed busy and were under employed for a bit and eventually got thier first jobs. One even got picked up by a growing startup named Google.

I think most industries are like this. In hardware engineering we definitely get clobbered roughly once a decade for one reason or another.

My company hasn’t hired juniors in a very long time I feel to its detriment. If everyone you hire is a senior engineer, then they’re all effectively juniors, and there’s little opportunity to grow into different roles.

Of course people self organize into roles themselves, but there’s not much change after a little while.

The other issue with only hiring seniors is that they all try to bring their culture and ways of doing things from past companies, which can create a lot of chaos and mess, without strong leadership to rein it in.

Not a real senior (20+ years) they have been around every type of situation and have realized no one true path exists and are open to all ideas. Those 7 year seniors have reached a point where they know their framework/area methodology better than anyone and will push for what they know works best for them. Those are the ones who need solid leadership or cargo culting is likely.

Companies often hire seniors to replace seniors who have moved on. They need people to hit the ground running and this comes with experience.

Juniors on the other hand have a much higher management overhead (which itself is a skill) and once they've been trained - gained experience - they'll likely move on for a pay bump significantly higher than a promotion if they stayed.

My employer takes on a handful of juniors each year and retains them due to lack of competition in a fairly large geographic area.

People stay because their options are limited when they prefer to live close to family. Many staff have 15, 20 even 30+ years service!

Sadly, and unfortunately, no. I think it's a huge moral and business and leadership failure, but my employer is a contractor and our clients will not accept junior engineers. I really wish they did.

I recently hired a senior who left their previous company in large part due to them not hiring juniors. A huge part of being a senior is supporting the growth of junior/mid-level engineers.

I agree, I think any company that stops hiring juniors is shortsighted and it will bite them in the ass soon.

Those company execs that do think all hiring of juniors should stop are showing how little they understand the current landscape of AI and it makes you wonder what else they are so wrong about.

I think it's a symptom of much larger ailments to our society and species that we appear (to me, for now, at least) to have abandoned trying to address through systemic approaches.

My employer is a federal contractor, and our clients are federal agencies. I could excuse this mindset at an early-stage startup, maybe, but... we feds and contractors should be out on the street corner begging junior engineers to join us. We could field an enormous, sustainable, well-compensated, healthy workforce. Follow best practices, focus on quality and longterm sustainability and maintainability, and work for the public. What's not to like?

smdh. Sorry this turned into a rant.

Total over saturation of that end of the market, and given it seems CompSci and SoftEng degrees are still in vogue it seems the trend will continue. Coupled with companies cutting back and wanting to maximize value they end up focusing on the upper end of the market (experience-wise).

Anecdotally, and from the companies I know that do have a graduate program, they've reduced the number of available positions, so there are still positions, but it's just much more competitive.

My advice would be to find any role roughly related to your target job and then pivot to what you really want. The difference in interviewing a candidate with no experience vs 12 months is night and day.

Recently changed from no to yes because many others are not - there are a ton of super talented junior engineers on the market right now, it's much easier to hire for than seniors.

Still hiring juniors

While an LLM can make your developers more productive the reaction I'm seeing is more like "great, each dev now makes even more for the company, now we can grow faster and hire more."

Companies which see software development as a cost rather than a source of competitive advantage may see this differently but even they haven't given up on junior devs. Junior devs are cheap.

We are not. We did hire a few junior people in the past 5 years and it did not work out well for us in any of those cases. We spent a considerable amount of time and money training them to no avail. It is very possible that our stack is complex and that makes juniors an ill fit in this specific case.

They've stopped doing that for about two years but recently hired a bunch. AI did not impact this in the slightest, it was the combination of the post-pandemic slowdown coupled with rising the interest rates that impacted their decision to stop hiring juniors.

2/ out of 3 of the last batch of software development interns were hired.

I don't think we had any last summer.

The one individual in our current batch still has another year of school left, but I'm fairly sure they've earned an offer if they want one.

I don't have as much visibility in the IT and security interns, just my department.

The last batch of juniors we hired just completed 4 years in the company, which I would say is a pretty successful batch, but sadly we haven't hired juniors since.

Edit: I must qualify that this is for software developers only, we did hired juniors for things like data engineers, security, IT and such.

Yes, my employer and many more are still hiring juniors. Look for jobs that require a security clearance and require certifications.

As a general rule the higher the barrier of entry for an opening, not tech stack related, the more mature the job/peers will be, even for juniors.

The company I worked for, a not-for-profit, didn't want to hire juniors because after training them in modern software development techniques, etc., that they didn't get in their undergrad, they'd leave after about three or four years since they were no longer junior, and the for-profit sector paid better. Admittedly it wasn't sexy or used bleeding edge techstacks. From what I've heard, that's still the case there.

Instead they went after burnt-out for-profit veterans who wanted a better life balance and good benefits who'd already made their numbers and needed medical.

> after training them in modern software development techniques, etc., that they didn't get in their undergrad, they'd leave after about three or four years since they were no longer junior

Isn't 3-4 years kind of a standard length of employment time in software engineering?

> burnt-out for-profit veterans who wanted a better life balance and good benefits

... are y'all still hiring?

Your question made me realise that my company never hired junior developers. It's always mid-senior level hires. But again we are a small company and so far this is working really well for us.

My company is pretty big and we are hiring very few junior devs. The few we hire are exclusively for the leadership pipeline. Instead we are outsourcing to India.

It seems to me that the plan is to reduce headcount through attrition (increasing PIPs and stuff) as the adoption and quality of AI supposedly increases while replacing lower devs with outsourced devs.

Not in the US. It’s much better to hire senior developers based out of LatAm for the same amount of money in US based time zones than hire juniors domestically.

My company stopped hiring. Period. But when it did hire juniors were definitely hired, some even fresh out of school or internship programs. AI is not affecting us to the level you are worried about, we are far from a time where AI will replace engineers or even reduce their numbers- at most it will make junior engineers more productive.

the companies who think they can replace juniors, who learn, adapt, and improve, with llms, are going to have a nasty shock - some already are, others are banking their shocks for later

my company hasn't hired juniors in years, and the ceo is adamant that he only hires seniors, but i think they're missing out - juniors offer new perspectives and opportunities for seniors to improve their social skills via mentoring

also, the number of times i've seen something like "help, I need a coder to finish this project I started with chatgpt - 16k lines, and it nearly works" - good luck, throw that garbage in the trash, where it belongs

In the US, north east. Yes, two of my family members just graduated with CS degree and got job offers before the ceremony.

Yes, we are. South African company.

Yes, but we do hire more seniors.

My company hired a couple of Jrs last year. But in Asia.

s/quite a few/few/

Do not expect to have a career in IT or software engineering in the US. If the market does improve they'll do their best to crush you with immigrants.

Yes, seniors who haven't reskilled were put out to pasture over the last few years, and I think we're scooping up juniors on the cheap. That said, I work at a place that lags the industry by about 10 years on average.