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

Of course people self organize into roles themselves, but there’s not much change after a little while.

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.

Edit: I must qualify that this is for software developers only, we did hired juniors for things like data engineers, security, IT and such.

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.

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.

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).

As a general rule the higher the barrier of entry for an opening, not tech stack related, the more mature the job/peers will be, even for juniors.

100% of my empmloyer's hires are through connections, and we never hired juniors.

Juniors on the other hand have a much higher management overhead (which itself is a skill) and once they've been trained - gained experience - they'll likely move on for a pay bump significantly higher than a promotion if they stayed.

My employer takes on a handful of juniors each year and retains them due to lack of competition in a fairly large geographic area.

People stay because their options are limited when they prefer to live close to family. Many staff have 15, 20 even 30+ years service!

It seems to me that the plan is to reduce headcount through attrition (increasing PIPs and stuff) as the adoption and quality of AI supposedly increases while replacing lower devs with outsourced devs.

Anecdotally, and from the companies I know that do have a graduate program, they've reduced the number of available positions, so there are still positions, but it's just much more competitive.

My advice would be to find any role roughly related to your target job and then pivot to what you really want. The difference in interviewing a candidate with no experience vs 12 months is night and day.