The Broken Senior-Only Developer Market

How to find a job as a junior programmer? Getting a job as a software developer has become more difficult than ever before. Let's find out why and learn how to maximize your chances of getting hired as a developer.

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📚 Resources:

🕒 Timestamps:
0:00 Current software-development market
0:42 Why is the market so bad?
2:02 Everyone like senior developers
2:56 How to succeed as a junior developer?

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[SoftwareDeveloperDiaries]

Are you a beginner software developer?
What do you think of the current job market in your area?
Feel free to share!

[MrGonci]

Basically, your advice is: to succeed as a junior developer, become a senior developer. Awesome.

[hung]

“Go to college to get a good job!” Now it’s “go to college, maintain a repository, get 5 years of experience then maybe get a interview!” Yeah Lmaoo the world is failing young adults

[CarKiller]

Not only you need to be a senior dev, you need to have THE EXACT SAME skillset they need, be that the exact same stack, exact same field knowledge, everything. If they have to teach you anything, then you are not a senior dev in their eyes, instant rejection with 'we are looking for someone more senior'. This is why the IT job market is insane, most companies are looking for unicorns for junior dev salary.

[ItsRyanStudios]

What's worse is that senior positions often involve management, and many of us just don't want that, we just want to write code.

[nickwoods]

Reminds me of what I know about being a pilot. The airlines neglected their employment pipelines for years to cut down on costs; a new pilot would have to go through an extensive training process only to get a crummy job for a regional airline with low pay and long hours. A lot of older, more senior pilots were forced out due to the lack of air travel during the pandemic, and there's no one to take their place now, resulting in a major labor shortage. The airlines screwed themselves by focusing on short-term profit rather than the long-term viability of their labor market.

[quyiter]

As a senior dev, the cloud team I'm on opted to hire contractors over junior devs. I pushed to get juniors we could train on our systems, but ultimately, it came down to budget and ramp up time. For the price of a junior dev that would need time to get ramped up and trained, we could hire a contractor that didn't need to be trained and didn't need to learn our systems since they'd only be there for 6-12 months anyway. Every dev on our team that is an employee is a Senior Developer. Were all seniors with 0 juniors. When I started 8 years ago I joined with a group of 30+ juniors and we got spread out across several teams. Completely different now.

[mediamanager]

The sad thing is that this scenario seems to be affecting all IT roles. I have been hunting for a junior network engineer role for over 9 months now. Haven't managed to come across a single junior role that is asking for less than 5 years of professional experience and their skill requirements are typically that of a senior network engineer. In over 50% of the junior roles I have applied to I had 90% of what they were asking for but it seems that they get scared when ever it comes around to actual professional experience.

You can know how to do everything, prove it, and they still won't hire you simply because you've never had an official job. Looks like the only way to get the job that you want is to already have the job you want.

[Biffcutwtright]

Step 1. Devote every waking hour to learning the skills of a senior, full stack developer
Step 2. Do tons of work for free to build experience, make sure you neglect any other hobbies and/or relationships otherwise you literally are not grinding hard enough.
Step 3. Make sure to grind on l33tcode as well, doing completely irrelevant algorithm puzzles which will come in handy on interview day then never again
Step 4. Apply to 1000+ jobs (keep your head up champ!)
Step 5. On (the first) interview day, assuming you passed the technical interview (unlikely) prepare for a week of additional redundant interviews where different members of the staff check your vibe

Congratulations, you are now qualified to make the nav a different shade of blue

[sdwone]

We're on a ticking time bomb here because ALL industries relies on new blood to come on board as older employees retire. And if we are foolish enough just to leave it all to AI, then we are willingly diving head first into the Abyss!!!

[luckerooni]

That's what happens when tens of thousands of people with the same skill but are more experienced get released to the job market at the same time.

[vectoralphaSec]

This is how it plays out. No company ever hires entry level/ junior devs anymore. The current devs are senior devs or become senior devs. Then those senior devs retire and the company doesnt have any more employees and they cant hire anyone because they are all juniors who never got a chance to get professional experience to eventually become senior so the company collapses. That is what would happen.

[nagytamas]

How to get a job: Give up your life and learn everything (very realistic). If that's true, the industry is fucked and beyond repair.

[Hersatz]

As one of the two juniors in the world who found a job in the past 2 years, I am quite happy to know that there will be no competition for senior positions in 30 years due to everyone else changing profession in between.

[logan]

These companies should not be allowed to lobby Congress for H1B visas if they're not hiring junior devs.

[etakarinae]

MAJOR TIP: become a software tester first. No developer wants this position BUT you'll get a lot of experience which will be rewarded.

[chrisalexthomas]

Having no life... this is basically how you become a senior developer. You have to sacrifice your social time to do projects on your own and then use that experience to justify why you're more experienced than everybody else. This is basically how I did it. The 20-26 year part of my life was effectively "don't have friends, stay at home, learn everything about everything, build your own projects" and even then I was still classified as a junior for years afterwards

[noriller]

You have seniors, then Staff, Principal and whatever other naming.
If everyone is senior+, then no one is senior there.

Or better yet, senior is the new junior.

[bettybunbun]

Yeah most companies don't give a shit about what private repos you have.

Even as a mid/senior with almost 5 years professional experience in Django and React I tried to also show some interesting little projects I had worked on, in my cv, in my cover letter, and they just don't care. In fact, in all the job interviews I had I was never asked about my personal projects even once!

[lxsniper]

I think the trend is more they want junior roles filled with senior level skills ie "junior dev role" requires 5 years experience, xyz certifications, masters or phd $65k base lol.