Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

It seems like twice a week or more I read there is an industry shortage of devs, but I never hear about any companies, of any size, looking for junior devs -- or generally competent devs that might have a specific knowledge gap -- to hire and give on-the-job training to. Not even a contract-to-hire situation that leaves the company with very little risk if the developer isn't what they needed.

Is on-the-job training just flat-out dead?

I ask this because I'm 4-years-experienced as a front-end UI/interaction dev, nothing but glowing references, looking for another, similar, position (regular, not senior or lead) and have had...way too many interviews and rejections, and can't understand why companies are such sticklers for interested devs to have Every Single Box in their list of requirements checked when it would take days or a couple weeks to learn XYZ framework/library/whatever to the level of competence that is required for the position.

To further stack up the frustration, it's not uncommon to see the same position listed and re-listed on LinkedIn and Indeed for months: certainly somebody could have been hired and trained to the level needed in that time. (Maybe even me!)

There's also the fact that people sometimes dont hire until it hurts (they have too much work to do) and then there's little or not time to train.

There's also a flood of folks from the bootcamps that may or may not have skills but want the salary of a jr dev. These folks (understandably!) flood any jr job posting, making it hard to get through to the hiring manager. There's a bit of the flavor of the year 1999 in my opinion, where everyone wanted to be a programmer (and if you could say "Java" you were hired).

Finally, an investment of months of training makes sense if an employee will be around for years. But because of the erosion of the employee/employer social contract, there's no guarantee as to how long a trained employee will stick around. Better to wait and hire someone who can make an impact their second day.

That said I think there's an enormous opportunity to do this kind of training, create loyal employees, and improve the world by training more devs.

1) a good exit process 2) a good promotion process

1 brings serious culture issues/questions with it. See horror stories from people who went to grad school in the 80s and 90s where year two cut rates were 50% or worse. I don't know how you deal with this, but it will certainly deeply affect your work environment.

2 is easy on the face, but requires huge buy in. Realistically you're looking at a 2-10x increase in this person's compensation over a very short time frame or you'll lose your training investment as they jump ship.

I am a big fan of mentoring, but this is related to understanding the existing platform and getting productive working on it, not about teaching technology XYZ.

This opinion should actually go both ways and companies need to be willing to hire developers, even they don't have the 100% exact skills they need and then allow them to improve them on the job. If you got rejected by companies because they don't understand this, then be glad that you will not work for them.