Who Killed The Junior Developer? (medium.com)

Melissa McEwen, writing on Medium: A few months ago I attended an event for women in tech. A lot of the attendees were new developers, graduates from code schools or computer science programs. Almost everyone told me they were having trouble getting their first job. I was lucky. My first "real" job out of college was "Junior Application developer" at Columbia University in 2010. These days it's a rare day to find even a job posting for a junior developer position. People who advertise these positions say they are inundated with resumes. But on the senior level companies complain they can't find good developers. Gee, I wonder why?

I'm not really sure the exact economics of this, because I don't run these companies. But I know what companies have told me: "we don't hire junior developers because we can't afford to have our senior developers mentor them." I've seen the rates for senior developers because I am one and I had project managers that had me allocate time for budgeting purposes. I know the rate is anywhere from $190-$300 an hour. That's what companies believe they are losing on junior devs.

Comments

H1-Bs did

[rsilvergun]

at least in the States. The H1-B program requires companies try to hire a local employee first. The rules say they can only have an H1-B if no qualified applicants are available. So everybody becomes a "Senior" developer and since there aren't enough people with the necessary credentials (there never are) they can always apply for an H1-B. This is also why companies don't pay to train anymore.

Interships

[HockeyPuck]

Companies take interns, and after their internship period is over, decide to hire them. Now the company isn't taking any risks with a fake junior developer, they can hire one that has proven themselves.

Killed themselves

[Spazmania]

Junior developers seem to all want to jump on the technology du jour they've heard about from Google or Facebook. The problem is: Google and Facebook have only a limited number of junior developer jobs available. Other companies have different technology needs, more often than not needs for projects operating at much smaller scales. These needs are poorly met by technologies designed to operate at Google or Facebook's scale.

Got a guy like that where I work now. Great guy but he just won't shut up about Kubernetes. We have 36 servers in the production environment, each of which does something different using different software. Kubernetes is the wrong tool for every job we have.

Until they get past the compulsion to use the Latest Greatest technology, developers limit their usefulness.

Re:Killed themselves

[Spazmania]

I didn't become the lead devops guy by failing to automate repetitive work. I also didn't get here by trying to surf each new wave that comes to shore.

Docker and Kubernetes do some very interesting things. And they don't attempt to do a number of things that their predecessors eventually figured out were essential to reliable cost-effective operations. They will or they'll fade. When they do, I'll notice.

I hate to say it, but right now Docker is primarily a way for developers to stick their fingers in their ears and say "la la la security la la la." Require the same attention to security that the OS gets and suddenly Docker is massively more complex to work with than older techniques.

Conceptually I like docker, but unless I'm building something at a scale sufficient to justify the expense of doing it well, it doesn't meet my needs. And guess what? Most positions open to junior developers don't involve building something at high scale.