No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031 (opens in new tab)

At every place I've ever worked that hired juniors, the juniors always have to leave by about 2 years, because the company will never (roughly) double their salary to what they can get on the open market.

That first year, the juniors are probably a net drain in productivity - for their work and the time other devs spend teaching them. Then the 2nd year, they're underpaid for as long as you can hold on to them. But the good ones will be out the door pretty quick.

The system always seemed kind of broken to me. But a shop without any junior devs is also kind of sad. If you hire the right person, it's rewarding to the other devs to teach them and watch them grow.

> I have been tracking junior software-engineering listings on LinkedIn and Indeed since late 2024.

I don't think such a short timeframe is indicative of anything at all. This data could be interesting if comparing to say before Covid or even before 2008, but as is, this is far too short of a timeframe to draw any actual conclusions. How would you know whether we're currently under hiring juniors or we were previously just over hiring and are now returning to the norm?

Oh, this is talking about the junior to senior pipeline. I thought it was going to be about improvements in AI capabilities.

I think it's reasonable in 5 years that most of what I do as a senior dev (yes, even turning vague notions into concrete deliverables, giving high level ideas of tradeoffs, and so on) will also be automated away.

Does anyone have interesting blog posts on what that means? Ideas about what the new world may look like? Will existing software engineers be running "dark factories"?

For what it’s worth, I’ve been in companies not hiring juniors in 2016-2020, 2023-2024. My current company just hired a few, plus interns.

This is not new.

IMO: This says more about companies than the market. Companies are willing to spend more on salary rather than improving their internal processes.

Is a corollary to this article that if you get into IT now and you manage to land a job, you'll make bank in 2031?

LLM written slop article about LLM slop in bigtech

The points raised may be interesting, but the ai-slop writing here really detracts.

2031 is in 5 years. There will be plenty of seniors even if the influx of juniors is exactly 0. Not saying 0 influx of juniors is good, it harms young people. But it wont cause lack of seniors issue in 2031.