Why No One Is Hiring Junior Devs
It’s not just because of AI…
Many people think this is a simple economic cycle and that the market will just bounce back. That may be partially true.
But here’s the thing: there are some structural reasons why we’re in a bad place, too. Let me list them off:
- Easily accessible education (Jr. Devs are a dime a dozen)
- Automation is cheap (AI is replacing people, proveably)
- Senior devs are cheaper than Jr. Devs.
That last one might seem impossible.
How could a senior developer possibly cost less than a junior developer? To understand this, we have to look at the situation from the position of the companies. If you compare salaries, junior devs often start off at around 50–60K, and Senior devs often start off at around 100K+. However, what we don’t see is that junior devs cost around 100K just to train, and it can take them a year or two before they’re really producing useful code. Not to mention the fact that a senior dev has to take time out of their productive day to teach and help train these Juniors.
When you add up all the costs of bringing on a junior developer, you can see it's way more expensive. And plus, junior developers are more likely to job-hop once they receive training. And if they job hop, it is like handing 100K over to your competitor. So you can see, there isn’t much of a benefit to hiring junior developers these days when there are so many senior developers who need work.
Now consider how AI has been able to increase the productivity of senior developers, and you can see how it wouldn’t be unrealistic for one senior developer to do the job of multiple developers, thus leading to lower market demand. We’re at a tipping point.
This is a very sad state of affairs for all those who went to college and majored in something tech-related because they were told that it was a sure thing that they would get a high-paying job. It just goes to show there are no guarantees in life. You can pick the most safe path and still get blindsided.
Do what you love because you’re probably boned either way, but at least you can go down doing what you enjoy.
