The Broken Senior-Only Developer Market 

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

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

“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

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.

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.

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!!!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

time for juniors make our own startup

There are Junior openings. Until you read the job description...and realize it's still Senior.

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!

As a senior, in more ways than one, it's broken for seniors as well. It means doing junior work and being down skilled. Companies get a rude awakening when they discover how cranky seniors get when faced with idiocy from the company.

I dont think become an end-to-end developer is good advice , it is good to know every aspect of development but being specialized in one will get anyone further than being mediocre at all of them. No serious company will let one person to build a full scale production ready app , that is basically mobbing.

so in few words, graduate from colledge, work at mcdonals for 3 or 4 years studying harder, try to know it all and become all mighty, then may be after 8 years, you have to study even harder because the bars has risen again. BullS...!

This is the logical consequence of companies not investing in employees.

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.

Companies in Japan are hiring a lot of junior devs atm. Absolute Pay is much lower, but relative to the local price not that bad. If you’ve always wanted to live in Japan, this is one of the best time. Japanese IT is quite behind so ironically a lot of devs are needed.

I have this exact issue. I just got my degree a year ago and couldn’t find a single software job without “5+ years experience.” Yet there’s tons of posting for senior positions not getting filled. My uncle who is a IT president said it’s 100% “false” listing to make it look like they’re hiring.

As a team lead who has hired several people in multiple jobs over the past few years, I wasn't sure if I'd agree with this video. But your analysis is spot on, and the advice is solid. One of the biggest issues with AI, and the fantastic dev tools we have today is that you kindof have to be an expert to know how to use them. If a senior dev is 3x of a junior dev (sometimes it's higher if the application is even more complex), then AI and high end tools can easily double that productivity factor. Which means in about 10-20 years we're gonna have a problem when the "old guard" retires.

Yup. (sigh) 15 years of doing this as a hobby. Knowing my abilities, and I just get immediately looked over.

Had an argument with my company the other day. They put out an ad for a "Junior" DevOps engineer, requiring 3-5 years experience. I argued with them that this is not junior, it's just a DevOps engineer. Then they tried saying "well they don't know our stack and blah blah blah". I'm like look even someone has 15 years experience they don't know our shit. That's called training. They won't listen to me, it's been so frustrating.

I have a few tips that worked very well for me. Git repo with some big project. It shows that you are into programming and that you are willing to learn in your free time so they do not have to pay you for learning. Second tip is to get your first job no matter what, do not care much about salary, just make them to hire you. Once you realize that you are an important member of a team and you do a lot of stuff for the company you can ask for a raise. Once you survived your first year in the company the entire job market opens for you, personally I refused many great offers ( because I liked the company I worked for ) but eventually there was an offer that I simply could not refuse ( money ). This is my experience, it may differ based on what area of programming you are interested in. Edit: I am talking about job market in Europe.

This strategy is good in short term but in long-term companys will struggle with lack of senior developers because juniors are the one who become seniors.

The industry is unkind to newcomers now, or anyone short on senior-level professional experience. My one friend who has been coding informally in his free time for years and years needed over a year to finally land a job. Before that, he technically only had about a year and a half of formal job experience. His new job now pays him significantly less than he made teaching in China where I still currently live and work.

Just lie about it, seriously, if you're being honest in the job market you're the only one, i assure you the company sitting across from you is not being honest in any of their dealings with you.

In other words be a engineer that can more work for less pay

Why would LinkedIn show a senior developer a junior developer job? It's called 'Jobs based on your profile' for a reason, isn't it?

Let's also talk about the problem of hiring teams not knowing what to do WITH their senior developers - e.g. having them do junior / intermediate level work, and literally wasting money because everyone wants a senior, yet no one actually knows the type of work seniors are capable of....

I grew up in France, where the demographic pyramid was pushing the situation you describe for all industries: lots of 40,50+ people, lots of young enterers, relatively fewer 5y exp workers. Added to a corporate culture where companies do not accept the fact that they need to invest in their employees, and want a ready to use workforce from the get go. The first result was what you describe to an extreme: looking for a junior, 1200 euros a month, with a Master’s in the field and 5 years experience. The end result was that everyone’s strategy was point 3 you mentioned: all of this is bullshit, so let’s sell them bullshit; my company is not investing in me, so I won’t invest in it; technical jobs don’t pay as much as management, I’ll skip the technical studies and go straight to business. It basically drew everyone to a lowest bidder strategy, with a high supply of useless business study people - that still get hired. From a cynical perspective I can understand the move: driving competition at the entry will lower the first pays, and will lead to engineers costing lower throughout their careers. But I think the long term costs of this trend will outweigh the mid term benefits. Bottom line: I feel sorry for people entering the market now, and grass in greener in Japan.

Get good at something and just lie. Companies will lie about literally everything, there is no reason why you should not either, just get the skill to back it up.

Meaning STOP LOOKING FOR A FREAKING JOB AND START A BUSINESS that solves a problem. Companies want to hire those people

I almost predict The Great Developer Crash. A moment in time where too little seniors are available, and lots of junior developers are oppressed from being hired.

Essentially, the market for SW developers is becoming increasingly saturated. Partly due to market changes (layoffs and less start ups => less job opportunities), as well as more people wanting to work as SW developers (=> higher competition). This forces/allows companies to be increasingly picky with their choices of SW developers. To mitigate hiring risks, companies are playing it safe by going for "proven in use" senior SW devs, or only highly achieved junior devs with a good profile with many high quality commits to high value repositories @ your favorite cloud repository storage webpage. Just doing a short SW boot camp is most likely not going to cut it anymore when there are so many out there that have a huge passion for coding. The SW developer market is becoming cut throat.

You need experience to get a job but you need a job to get experience.

Good summary of the current problems. And it's not just for regular jobpostings, for freelancing work as well. I don't know how many times I've talked with recruiters over the last 2-3 years or so trying to get the point across that if their clients don't get fresh minds onboard, there will be a time where all those seniors leave and noone can fill the gap. What worked a couple of times, but is certainly not for everyone, freelance + team up. "Of course you can get senior X, but only as a team with A & B.. yeah, I know, they are still considered juniors by YOUR definition, but all three combined form a very productive team". Got a couple of projects where that worked out and slowly the juniors are not labelled as that anymore buy the people out there (in the end, it also ridiculous what & who decides what a senior actually is and what isn't)

Welcome to how all other job markets work

An extra tip: Read other people's code, specifically, senior developers, that way, you'll see how seniors think and solve problems and also how they structure and organize their code. P. S: I'm a junior developer too who is currently struggling to find a job 😢

I've been pointing this out to every single person going around indiscriminately yelling "learn to code" at every single person talking about issues with economy/pay.

3:42 Can't agree more. I was hired recently for my first Frontend developer job and was picked by the company out of (literally) thousands of candidates only because I have a solid grasp for Linux and Node-backend.

As someone who was recently looking for a job, I've learned a LOT of tech jobs aren't hiring anyone who are new in the field. Don't know if it was always like this, but 95% of the jobs required at least 3-5 years+ of experience. As someone who was getting their foot in the door, it really limited the job market for me. Ended up getting a decent job, but I consider it luck instead of skill.

Halfway through my sophomore year of college in computer science and this keeps me up at night :(

I find the job market today to be utterly hopeless. It used to be that I just picked one company, applied to it, did a couple of interviews and was hired. But nowadays there are oh-so-many interviews and coding challenges and what not to go through. And after jumping through all the hoops I still don't get an offer because e.g. I didn't look excited enough about the job. Well of course I'm not excited after a month of interviewing. I can't imagine how bad it must be for Junior developers.

I messed up leaving my job, to move to Canada with no job, came home and now I am struggling to get a role again in Ireland with 2.5 years of experience and a masters. Most of these same companies with job offers/interviews early 2022 won't even give me an interview with a referral. Most jobs you look now want such specific skills.

US can easily be explained by university recruitment cycles. Most entry-level positions won’t be approved in their budget until late January, which means jobs won’t be posted until mid-February.

I am a data scientist with 2 years of exp specialising in NLP. I have spent the past years to learn as much as I can about all other software technologies that help me ship end to end application to the cloud. In my team I work as a one man army. I own the whole pipeline. I no more write models that live inside my Jupyter notebooks but maintain my own python packages, write APIs, CI/CD pipelines, Docker containers. Right now I am studying towards the Kubernetes developer cert to ship a whole cluster setup because I am also building a full fledged react app right now that we needed to build. I spent a few weeks in my free time learning react and then just told my team I'll build it by myself. Was kinda risky at first but looks not too bad right now. Next step is learning more about dbs. The goal was always to know enough after a few years to start my own company some day, even if I do not do it I pretty sure this whole journey lets me be quite employable. But you really have to enjoy learning new things and have an environment that lets you. If its not fun you will burn out easily

I'd like to point that it's open to seniors, but with juniors salary and 5-years recruitment process with 6392 stages.

Same boat here, with 6 months of internships experience, Bachelors, certifications, projects, and its now been 7 months since I graduated and no luck. This will hurt them in the long run. As managers want to retire, senior engineers will have to take up the management positions, and the company will want to move the juniors up for a senior position, but wait a minute, there are none because they decided to be greedy, following the AI buzzword hype for profits (although 8/10 the ai models don't apply for their business model). I graduated with Data Science degree, and ML internship. Seeing the AI hype going around, where fucking mechanical engineers want to hop on the waggon (and get the job bc they have 5+ years of experience apparently) is annoying. Alright that's my rant. Who's next

If you struggling to find a job as junior, become an end-to-end junior. You will become an all rounded spoiling machine. Instead of breaking just backend you will be able to break the whole infrastructure 🙌 I think I have opposite opinion on that.

Well, soon enough AI will just replace most of us anyway. The current devs who managed to get experience won't even retire before that happens. It starts with juniors

Here’s one thing I will say to all the juniors/students out there. Yes, things are getting more difficult. But there really isn’t a clearly defined definition of “Senior Software Engineer”. It’s all about experience and that doesn’t mean years worked. That means things built. If you’re just starting out, here’s what I would suggest: 1. If you’re new to a language take an online class to learn the fundamentals of the language. Learning the fundamentals will save you a ton of time in the future. 2. Build something. It could be anything. If you’re new, start out building small web components like a todo list or maybe an accordion menu or basic api calls. Once you get familiar with building basic things, try to focus on building something that genuinely interests you. Something that you legitimately get excited to work on. When you’re actually engaged with something because it provides meaning to your life or because it involves a passion or something you legitimately care about it will galvanize you to improve and motivate you to build something. Motivation is a key part of software engineering. All of the senior engineers out there know what I’m talking about. When you work on projects that are boring as shit or that don’t have any inspiring stories or ideas behind them you start to not give a shit and development becomes more of a chore than a fun, but challenging activity. 3. Network. Meeting cool people who are inquisitive and creative in the software world is also a huge opportunity. There are many developers out there who have some really interesting ideas and are constantly trying to build cool shit. Talk to those people. Ask them if you can potentially work on their projects. Even if you can’t, look at their GitHubs. See what they’re building. Analyze the architecture, the folder structure, the key components, the logic of those components, and how all of that culminates into a functioning app. Learning from other really smart people through just seeing what they’ve built can inspire you and give you insight in ways you may not be aware of. You can extrapolate from other people’s work and use that to build something for yourself. 4. Perseverance, patience and grit. The market is rough but it’s not impossible to land a job as a junior. Really just focus on standing out. Cultivate an insatiable appetite for knowledge. Never stop learning and just realize that it’s all one piece of an immense puzzle that will eventually get you hired. This may take months, it may take years depending on your life situation. Be patient. If you put in the work and effectively learn how to build things, a potential employer is gonna notice. Grit is also a huge part. There’s gonna be times along this journey where you feel like giving up. There’s gonna be some problems you encounter that’ll be real frustrating as fuck. Don’t get discouraged. The stronger you are and the more tolerant you become of things extremely difficult problems the more you’re conditioning your ability to work in challenging settings on challenging problems. Anyways, I doubt any of you read the whole thing, but if you made it this far just know that there is hope, even if that hope is ever fleeting. Grab the bull by the motherfucking horns! You can do this shit!

Modern corporate leadership is a low information monoculture where everyone is both short sighted and tunnel-vision on unlimited stock growth. Two things which are actually counter to each other in the long term, but nobody cares. Profitability matters less than growth, velocity over quality. Struggling to be the next Facebook or Amazon when the market is so different than 2008. There's no way you COULD be by using the same playbook as 15 years ago, it's maddening.

Contrary to popular belief Senior-only job posts are not exclusive to IT industry. This is quite common to other industries such as trade jobs. This is why it's common for people in construction to possess different skills in carpentry, plumbing, electrical installations so they can maintain empolyability with good wages.

This is just the same regurgitated advice and I don’t mean this as a dig at all because you’re trying to help. But I feel this is just a mix of an over saturated market, AI, and Economical issues. Unfortunately we can’t all “Build projects” are way into a senior dev position. The reality is someone or some company is going to just have to take a chance on you for the most part. So definitely keep trying but what I want everyone to know is that Coding MAY NOT BE FOR YOU. Ask yourselves do you LOVE CODING?? Do you spend your free time naturally doing this stuff?? I got my computer science degree saw the market and switched to UI/UX and I genuinely enjoy design so much more. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy coding to a degree but only when I’m trying to bring something to life myself.

Some senior positions are misleading. It just means ideally senior and they are open to more junior candidates too. However, you will likely need a recruiter or referral to be considered.

Excellent video, I just got my first role as a full stack developer in the UK, 5 months ago (made a video about my experience). My advice would be look for full stack or end-to-end developer positions in small towns working in office, thats a great way to get in. Manufacturing companies are screaming out for developers so definitely look for the companies you least expect. You don't have to start at a tech profit centre!

Been made redundant from two junior jobs within 18months. Been unemployed for 6 months this year (well from developer jobs). 2023 sucked, but we must use it as fuel to become better.

Dev of almost 2 decades here: Nobody wants juniors because the OG programmers were getting into it out of passion. Then word got around it's profitable. People who get into it for the money rarely get far. There's just a certain mindset a programmer needs to really be good at it, and it's also a challenging job meaning you need larger satisfaction than just making money to avoid serious burnout. As a result the junior brackets are overcrowded with incompetent money chasers and actual young talent gets drowned out and hard to fish out. On top of that college tries to teach an unreal "scientific" perspective on programming which fails bad in real world which is why all the worst programmers I've ever met were all college grads.

idk how about lying on your resume? market is broken at the moment, also companies almost always lie in job description

The #Learntocode movement of the mid 2010s really fucked up the industry bad.

The reason is the stack for web has kind of stopped changing. Fast change is the junior's friend, giving a chance to leapfrog the set-in-their-ways senior. In 2016 the most modern way to develop software with a UI was a node server compiling a react app, version controlled by git with a git-flow branching strategy managed through pull requests to a github project, using CICD defined by yaml files in the repo manipulating docker containers. This is now the dominant approach. Some movement in apps but react is big their too. The juniors who came up at that time are seniors now and the stack hasn't much changed except to have professionalised further.

I can just speak for germany. In all major working fields professionals are missing or the professionals are so old that the retire soon. So the whole workmarket will change soon. I wonder how good HR is prepared for that. Cause if you dont hire juniors and the professionals will retire soon who gonna train the junior about the code the old senior once wrote. This will be a bad wake up. But hey HR is not my business.

Unpopular opinion: companies used to see hiring junior devs as a long-term investment, but most devs don’t stick around at companies for more than a few years anymore, so there is less incentive to hire someone less capable who still has a relatively high salary expectation.

As much as I know it will help, I really hate the idea of "becoming end-to-end developer" as a solution. Yes, you are going to be more competitive, but you likely going to work for those company that want you to fulfill multiple roles and expecting you to be one man engineering team.

Given that you gotta train and coach most junior developers for a couple of years until a you get something good out of them, it makes more sense for a company to get one senior instead of 2-3 juniors. You still get more productivity. Also, 1 senior salary could be cheaper than 2-3 junior salaries. And if you wanna save even more money you can get a cheap and super talented senior developer abroad from the Ukraine, Brazil, Mexico, etc. It is a crappy situation.

I think those companies should make their own unis, see if they can land 5 years of experience juniors.

But if seniors don't hire juniors anymore, then how is any of the work going to get done??? 😈 I'm not gonna do it! That's why I hire juniors to do it for me!

Just got my junior developer position. Had to absolutely work my arse off developing a portfolio and spending every minute of my free time applying for jobs but I got there in the end

end to end here means from design->code->cloud -> network->customer support->train users😂

This was really useful, thank you!

As a new dev, I was able to get my first job due to a very compassionate HR team and being able to border mid level proficiency in coding. Without that, I'd be browsing linkedin for the last 9 months still

If I was in college seeing this video I would just study something else. The field is obviously oversaturated. Study accounting, nursing, or another type of engineering.

Predicting the future .No juniors - less seniors in Future . The less paid money now will cost more paid in future by much higher amounts since demand on soft wont go away

This is speculation, but also mixed with real life experiences. I have a feeling, at least in a corporate world, there is a shift to outsource software development when possible to cut costs. Particularly India is what I see brought up more. There will always be a need for U.S. based programming jobs, but the cost savings is crazy compared to hiring in states developer (16-20k vs 100k). Yes im aware of bugs being more prominent, issues, etc, but it will only get better over time. Scary times.

Sometimes I feel like all this time I spent learning, literally no-lifing it was a waste of time. Now I'm still stuck working a minimum wage night shift job, with added debt. The problem with this, is that I genuinely enjoy programming. I already don't need (or want) socialization by default, and there are times when I literally do nothing but code whenever I have the chance. Honestly, at this point, I believe I've already gone beyond what is expected of a Junior. I'm still nowhere near what I would consider a "good" programmer, but I'm not stopping. I'll be fair here: when I was applying to jobs I was a lesser dev than I was now, so maybe I should try again. If Junior devs don't get hired, then the industry kinda eats the shit down the line, no?

Even 20 years of experience do NOT help if the companies are strict in their requirements!

As someone who is actually going through this, you have to find bootstrapped startups willing to pay $ or equity. If equity, you need to think like a VC and put in bare minimum hours a week. Basically, maximize jobs. If people working physically can do 3 jobs at a time, so can you. It's unfair, but that's exactly what we have to do. You also need to consider other fields and think macro-economically. Like go into a different field or even politics. Think about higher education not in CS via scholarships. If you want to do higher education in CS, you need to aim for Phd not just masters. Maybe think about crowd funding a new idea? Recessions for people like us = opportunity to rethink if we are living in the right city, country and whether we should move and start businesses.

Great idea. Now, if you want to go for realistic experience, completely gimp yourself on permissions on all servers, hell even on local machine. Then try to deploy an app while sending emails to incompetent systems groups who only give you a few of the correct permissions per day.

The thing is, all of those junior devs turned into senior devs. Now, there's no shortage of senior devs. And I'm sure senior dev salaries are taking a hit too. The bar is just simply higher, and nothing will change until senior devs start retiring in 30 years.

Been studying like a freak for 2 years now, 0 jobs. Even enrolled in a well known local college. I can smell the burnout coming.

I had the task of hiring for a team where, 2 contractors were cut, 1 engineer was moved to a different department, and 2 engineers quit for a better job. This was in a span of several years but was a continual reduction. Eventually, we got approval to hire 1 person -- only one, and I should be happy for that. This was while the economy and company was doing good. This forced me to have to be very picky with who I hired. I was pressured to hire a more junior engineer but I rejected that. It is crazy to replace 5 people with 1, much less with 1 junior engineer. During the same conversation about how to keep our workforce low, I was asked about why we weren't getting more done and were always late. Yeah, no kidding. This kind of wishful thinking ends up producing counterproductive hiring practices. It hurts employees and companies alike.

I suspect, or maybe just hope, that the companies are putting more faith in AI. Improvements come in leaps. Racing up the hill until the next plateau where there tends to be a long pause. It will be interesting to see what happens when there are no more junior developers, the seniors retire and AI is not capable of replacing them.

What happens when those seniors retire and the juniors have given up on software and moved another sector, or are willing to take the software job but have had no experience?

"looking for 18 year old software developer with 20 years of experience" 😂😂😂

Also show the employers you can do things; have a blogspot with your project portfolio, open source a university project or get an internship and over inflate your role there if necessary (as long as you have the knowledge to back up your skills)

I think it was or becoming like this even before the layoffs, it's just that it was accelerated by the short term growth during the lockdown period. I think companies realized, a while back, that software engineers without experience are pretty much useless and can actually lose you money for serious projects. I vividly remember companies in 2019 being only interested in mediors (I guess as a compromise between experience, cost and ease of hiring). And I guess, the fact that they can now get a senior for the same salary as a medior is what ultimately shifted the hiring policy to senior-only.

one thing you didn't mentioned, which I think is very relevant is that hiring a junior developer is a huge risk to take. While there are for sure capable junior devs out there, but there is also A LOT of junior devs that doesn't have nearly enough technical knowledge to be useful, so they end up taking up a lot of time from the senior devs, basically becoming a very expensive burden

What's happening is that budgets are tight but the demand for software hasn't lessened. The layoffs and budget cuts are driven by a desire for greater profits, not a reduction in demand. The dam will break and companies will start hiring again but for now companies want to maximize the budget they do have, which means hiring experienced developers. It's a bit short sighted. Junior developers are a good investment for companies. You get them on a "rookie contract" and it only takes them so long to onboard. In my humble opinion, every team should have a junior developer on it at all times.

I have a year of experience in full stack programming and even though I've been applying for jobs for months now I've yet to have a single interview. Id happily accept a lower wage for a job but apparently no one offers that

You guys are all saying this as if we are pursuing a degree in Communications or something, that Computer Science isn’t one of the hardest degrees out there in university. Idk man I’m just really frustrated. I hear this advice all the time online and people say it as if I didn’t spend 4-5 hours a day for two weeks straight with no breaks working on my capstone project for one of my programming classes. On top of it takes me about 15 hours to complete my data structures assignments with me working on it throughout a week and getting help from TAs and the professor. Are we doing the same degree? Or am I just too slow at learning and should pick a different major.

we increasing the skill gap so much i feel sorry for graduates.. what graduates need to do to combat this is build their own business