Who Killed the Junior Developer?

There isn't much of a "raw mercenary economics" argument for training (which the MBA types prefer), you've got to talk about intangibles like loyalty, goodwill, social connections, etc.

1. The junior dev market is flooded. It’s also flooded with people that cannot code. We’ve done quite a bit of analysis, and we’re talking 10% can write fizzbuzz.

Bootcamps are pumping people out as fast as they can collect money, and while some are solid juniors many are just completely lost. I’ve seen some code bootcamps with It’s also 95% of the same people who can’t code applying to every single job in existence. Remarkably many somehow get hired. Bootcamps as a whole have 100% earned their negative reputation. I can only imagine the learning curve encountered by some bootcamp grads.

As an aside, it’s not only bootcamps that pump out people that can’t code. Some CS programs are equally guilty, but probably not as many of them, and having four years to write code if you’re even a tiny bit self motivated is an enormous advantage. You give me a moderately intelligent person and I tell them to write code for four years and they’ll be hireable by the end for sure.

2. Many excellent companies, especially startups, have no appetite for junior developers whatsoever. Junior devs take a long time to integrate by definition, and rapidly moving companies don’t have the resources to care. It’s much, much easier to place juniors at mammoth companies that actually dedicate resources to training. A lot are just paying huge recruiter fees and bonuses to go after the people with experience.

3. Once you get even six months of experience the whole world opens up. I’ve never seen job security so quickly gained as a developer that has spent one year anywhere. Promotions come fast, offers come faster, and the big companies that actually are dedicated to investing in juniors see them poached for $30-50k extra by companies that don’t.

4. People that can still code absolutely do get hired, and quickly. We are dangerously close to 75% of the class that graduated 3 weeks ago being hired or contracted.

All that said, we take it for granted that we’re in an industry where people go from cold start to 6 figure salaries in 3-6 months. I’ve not aware of that ever having happened in the history of the world. It’s no longer write a couple lines of code and raise your hand for a job like it used to be, but software development is still an incredible industry to be in, and with a couple of years of experience you’ll reliably be complaining about salaries and working situations that almost any other industry would kill for.

Not to say this would or wouldn't justify various tuition rates - but it's definitely part of the equation.

"Junior developer" used to refer to someone who can program but who doesn't have a lot of practical experience.

Today "junior developer" refers to someone who can't program but who has a CS degree or went to a bootcamp, and there are more of those today as a proportion of the talent pool than there have ever been.

I think this failure of academic institutions to teach practical skills is diluting the talent pool, causing companies to favor more experienced engineers because they've been getting burned and don't trust their own (or academic institutions') ability to determine in advance whether a candidate will be a productive programmer or not.