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).

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.

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. :(

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.