>” It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do the same work. In the previous years even C-level companies had internship-to-full-time pipelines, but now it looks more scarce.”
I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late. It’s just not worth training someone up if they’ll either leave or require a salary that could have bought you someone experienced in the first place.
> I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late.
If juniors can consistently hop to another job that pays them more in a year, then the job market for SWEs is strong and employers don't have this ease of hiring seniors that is being described.
They used to in 2020-2022 cycle. I don’t think they can right now, but the social contract of employees staying at the company for a long time has been completely broken. So now everyone just expects short retentions, and market forces drive for senior hires.
But again, this expectation was driven by the market forces - employees in very high demand. If it is actually harder to get a job / easier to get an experienced dev, then juniors won't be job hopping quickly because they won't have another job to hop to.
Yes, but there is a bit of a problem when things change and there are mismatched expectations. The employers are probably feeling a bit risk-averse right now, while the potential employees are getting desperate.
The idea is that while the newly trained junior could leave they would choose to stay to continue receiving the benefit of further training.
It pertains to the build vs exploit cycle of managing opportunities, it’s in the workers interest to stay in the build phase, it’s in the companies interest to stay in the exploit phase. A case could be made where the difference would be split where the worker on average spends some time in the build phase and some time in the exploit phase. Accepting a lower salary for continuing training is one way to do that.
Training isn't supposed to be one and done, with a single build phase followed by a constant exploitation.
What companies are trying to do now is even worse by starting in the exploration phase and staying there.
Not to mention ai. Copilot works much better for the kind of things I would have asked an inexperienced developer to do: very well defined and documented tasks that aren’t too esoteric or requiring of obscure company-specific domain knowledge.
While it’s true that some of those green juniors would mature into tomorrow’s seniors, who can do things that Copilot can’t (yet?) the short-term mindset that rules business makes it hard to justify hiring these entry level positions, sadly.
I really feel for the young people who made a completely rational decision in 2019 to get a cs degree and be a developer. They really didn’t expect this.
I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late. It’s just not worth training someone up if they’ll either leave or require a salary that could have bought you someone experienced in the first place.