Ask HN: Is your company still hiring junior engineers?
I'm studying IT and want to enter the market. Along with a friend from school we observed that it's very difficult to land a job interview and that there seem to be quite a few openings for Junior Engs. My case would be junior Linux admins, for my friend - junior data engineers.
I hear from many friends outside the industry, that according to people they know in IT, some companies have stopped hiring juniors. It's just better to use an LLM instead. This would correspond with the reduced amount of junior positions advertised on the market.
Can you share your experiences? Does your company still hire juniors? What do your friends in the industry say?
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).
Previously asked (2024): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40905701
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).
Not to nitpick, but can we stop peddling LinkedIn. All I've seen from it is spam and self righteousness.
I don’t do conferences or meet people in real life because I’m interested in 100% remote positions (and I don’t live in a big city)
I suggest reconsidering your opinion on real-life events. It’s not necessarily about finding a job now (which I concur is difficult if you want full-remote), but still, you’ve made a connection and proven to the person that at the very least you’re not just a monkey operating ChatGPT - this may be useful down the line. They may know someone who’s hiring and is open to full remote.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/topics/layoffs
https://portswigger.net/web-security
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.
Of course people self organize into roles themselves, but there’s not much change after a little while.
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.
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.
Isn't 3-4 years kind of a standard length of employment time in software engineering?
> burnt-out for-profit veterans who wanted a better life balance and good benefits
... are y'all still hiring?
Edit: I must qualify that this is for software developers only, we did hired juniors for things like data engineers, security, IT and such.
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.
I agree, I think any company that stops hiring juniors is shortsighted and it will bite them in the ass soon.
Those company execs that do think all hiring of juniors should stop are showing how little they understand the current landscape of AI and it makes you wonder what else they are so wrong about.
My employer is a federal contractor, and our clients are federal agencies. I could excuse this mindset at an early-stage startup, maybe, but... we feds and contractors should be out on the street corner begging junior engineers to join us. We could field an enormous, sustainable, well-compensated, healthy workforce. Follow best practices, focus on quality and longterm sustainability and maintainability, and work for the public. What's not to like?
smdh. Sorry this turned into a rant.
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