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!

If you become end-to-end developer work for yourself and create own product.
Like a farmer who have own land and produce some food and sell to the market.

This is true and it was long time coming, the rate at which unis are pumping out new devs economy just cant sustain so over 90% will remain jobless and the 10% that got the job gonna get a fraction of what their predecessors got paid$. Remember companies dont give a F about your skill and experience, the way your employer is looking at you is "can this guy do the X job at our company and how cheap can he do it ?" I predict that in a decade or so programming jobs will go down to a minimal wage salary and only top senior talents with many years of experience will get that minimal wage position. All is not doom and gloom tho, because as programmers we have a unique ability to do temporary/side jobs and I think that kind of approach will become "default" for new grads or people interested in coding, basically work at mcdonalds + do coding side jobs to earn good $.

more seniors than a retirement home. RIP grandma.

stop failing incoming generations

"Learn everything" - that's a shitty advice, tbh. It only works for people who already have decent experience and want to broaden their skillset to get better/more offers.

Junior devs have next to zero real skills and thus are almost unhirable. Trying to get more surface level skills all across the board is a shitty tactic to get an entry level job. If and when you actually need that skill, you will be able to get it much faster, if it's actually your job to do so.

My advice is: aim low, your goal is experience. Two years of shitty experience is far better than two years on bootcamps. Your revenue is also positive, not negative.

In fact, two years of working on Big Ball of Mud systems might improve your skills more than working on state-of-the art systems that have already solved and have protected themselves from all the mistakes and pains you don't even know exist yet.


My first job was at a software consulting company. The conditions were not great, the salary was way below the market average, I got stuck with a shitty tech stack and peers I couldn't respect as equals. But it buys food and most importantly it gets you experience and years on your resume.

It's not hard to understand the economics. Senior devs can produce orders of magnitude bigger better results than juniors, but you only have to pay them a few times more. And no, you can't achieve results similar to 2 senior devs by putting 5 juniors under 1 senior.

Dear camarades: code side projects. It's the best way to get experience while you built an attractive portfolio and get some extra money if you decide to monetize it. Today's world is very unstable to continue believing in old advices.

Work your butt off and become a good developer & you won’t have an issue. Everything else mostly sounds like excuses from people who don’t want to admit that maybe they’re just not doing enough

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.

or get a job in another field

Companies are now valuing formal work experience much more than academic qualifications. I don't have a university degree, but I've been working as a programmer for 5 years (starting as a hobby at 14), and my seniority is not Junior!

So, you're suggesting that companies are making the mistake of neglecting entry-level devs, yet we are expected to take action. No thanks; if they continue this way, they might end up bankrupt, and I'll be the one laughing in the end.

Most senior developers I've seen so far, they usually are good with the very specific domain of the company they are working in, I mean they got themselves in the company quite long ago and they start learning of history of company's product and witness it and they have view of things as much as they have used, from tech stack point of view, they are not that bright. Also they know how to make themselves market material. Simple equation do once, make it look like hundreds...

I have actually been trying to get employed as a junior developer for over a year now, and while some places did give me a genuine chance and it is entirely my fault it didn't work out, most companies either act like you're applying to be the recruiter's boyfriend and reject you before even considering giving you a chance, or expect you to actually be a mid/senior developer working for a junior wage

With 3+ years of experience you are productive and independent from the first day on the job. You are 10 times faster than a junior while being cheaper cuz u need no training.

Just git good

The supply and demand part is definitely not quite correct, as you state here. While it has indeed shifted a bit in recent years, there are more than 140k software developer positions which have not been filled in Germany alone. The demand is still significantly higher than the supply and will most likely stay this way for quite a while. The issue is rather with companies not wanting to invest in junior developers anymore when it is as much of a hassle for them to find a senior as it is a junior.

This is the same issue I faced in 2011 in Italy when I came out of school. I wanted to search for metalmechanic CAD designer (even just turning paper doodles into official CAD documents, not necessarily a "designer" itself). But when I came out of school, all positions of that kind were only senior, senior, people with experience, senior. I then had to go for production job despite clearly not being neither a job I enjoy, nor the one I was best at.

7 years later, I was working as a component prototipist. The company I worked for was hiring people left and right as a CAD designer. Including grabbing this 19 years old from the assembly line and put him to work for such task. I asked for the same. I underlined how someone who has experience in the production line could benefit the designing area as I could see production issues right away (since I was already bashing engineers for overcomplicated components and giving them solutions for that). Got told "you have way too much experience in machining. We need you there instead."
To add even more irony, the very 19 years old that was randomly chosen for CAD designing was coming to me to ask for tips about rules of mechanical drawing as he knew none. The blueprints he was making were a complete disaster. Sometimes stuff that if sent to mass production would cause dozens of thousands of Euros in defective designs. I was literally teaching the guy how to do the job I wanted while forced to do one I hate. I felt so cheated in life.

I left 2 years later and went freelancing for completely unrelated stuff. So far so good. Companies with their incompetent managers and their obsession with nepotism can forget about me for good.

I'm so confused rn. Here you claim we should be as complete as possible, but I've seen other videos when people claim that you should focus on frontend as nobody hires backend entry level or junior devs.

In my case I'm working with a rather niche stack and I'm trying to change to a job with another stack.. Choice between being full stack or focus in frontend. (.NET Core Web Development and/or React with Next.js).

Any opinions or advice would be appreciated. I also want to mention that most jobs won't t take into consideration that experience (1 and a half years). It's SAP development with SAPUI5 and ABAP mostly.

Personally (and this is from aGerman POV) I also think it is connected to the salary expectations that got absurdly high in the last years.

Software Developers always were very well paid jobs, but if I look at the salary expectations from beginning 2023 for a junior and compare it (including inflations) to the average salary fifteen years ago it made an enormous jump.

The second thing is, that IMHO there is a difference between someone doing a 3 year study in university or doing a 3 year training (in German "Ausbildung") vs someone doing a 3 month bootcamp. And in general that's okay, but the bootcamps suggested over the last years to those people, that they could make the same starting salary as juniors as someone having 3 years of training, and that broke it for me honestly.

Get into QA lol, it's the only entry level which is still easily reachable

No. This is bad advice. Most people including yourself are seriously underestimating the value of technical acumen. If you have the talent, you can just work hard, learn the required subjects and pass the technical interviews. Any company worth their salt including the biggest ones value these over years of experience, full stack capabilities or your github repos. Good developers are perennially in short supply.

I'm a CTO for a scale-up company in the Netherlands. I've also worked for Apple (senior software engineer) and anything in between. The thing is, many juniors nowadays suck. Bootcamp Heroes are a pain in the ass to work with, and freshly-graduated SE students haven't learned anything pragmatic and useful. A senior developer is only slightly more expensive (all-inclusive, insurances and other business costs included), and they get so much more done in very little time.

But I also coach junior developers to find their first jobs, and I have some success there. It has to do with finding a niche and specializing early. That's your foot in the digital door, and once you have 1 or 2 years of experience you can pivot. By a T-shaped junior, end-to-end, but with a deep specialization.

This is nothing new nobody wants juniors, they cost too much for no productivity.

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.

They they better have deep pockets. Cuz im not working for 10 bucks anymore.
There are always jobs for beginners tho. Many companies paying low wages that could never hire seniors anyway.

The big tech job market bubble is starting to burst.
For 10 years FANG companies were hiring aggressively because they were in an arms race against one another, and needed basically an army of devs. They even hired devs so that other companies couldnt get them.
With Ai becoming smarter there is going to be far less need for devs. Much like the auto industry automation is taking hold.
Pretty soon the power of programming with be in the palm of everyone. you just tell your smart phone what you want,and it sends that request to the cloud to process it.................and poof you have a website, application, and so on.

FYI by 2030 plumbers, welders, electricians will be $200k a year jobs.

If you think you're a junior just because of end a bootcamp, you're wrong!!! You need to spend so much time doing projects to earn the title of junior dev

learn 2 code .. oh wait

should have learned a trade, perhaps?

You picking Germany as your example isn't the smartest pick. In Germany only a select few companies look for junior or senior developers specifically. What you would consider "Junior" in the wider world is what we call "Auszubildender", which roughly translates into trainee. You would never look on Linkedin for trainees, As that page expects you to have some working experience to begin with.

I can't speak for the training positions anymore, but to get into the general working force after that, a great starting point for me personally was to apply at a temporary employment agency. In Germany people in development roles get replaced way way way less than in the US for example. A turnover rate average in that industry in the US is like what, 2-3 years? In Germany something big has to happen to switch. The last guy to leave the department I work in literally died.
The guys that have been in my department for 30+ years are still just called "Software Developer".

when i finish my programming education 2026 i get to see how hard it is get get a job as a junior system devoloper

I would also add, you need to start learning actual engineering fundamentals now, including systems engineering. With AI, frankly, it can code and write test much faster, the focus on most development now becomes systems design and integration, lifecycle management and implementation/deployments. That beings said, I think there are opportunities that exist now that didn't exist 10 years ago, you can deploy your own stuff without a huge enterprise behind you and make a on off of it. I suspect the ones that come out ahead in this decade will be the self-starter entrepreneur developers and the developer that moved into full stack engineering roles

Please checkout my channel where I post videos for Architects and Developers

this sounds scary

Is not worth it anymore, i would code if i have nothing left with my life to do

sorry, but the last part is just summary of what everyone have said all-over the internet about programming, nothing new. And, constant improvement is not possible, everything will hit its limit, then restructure

Short summary: You are fucked, leave the IT field as fast as you can

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 applied for a position that was mid but then got changed to senior a day later. These pieces of sh*t.
And then they send me a mail "Sorry but we changed it to senior".

it's hard to full focus in just learning when u have to work. I mean I'm about to get my degree, but I don't have the money to simply take 3 months or sum just to learn. I need money to live, also, in my country there's very low opportunities as a junior (well, as this video says it's a universal thing). When I started university I never knew that I would have to work 9-5 in other type of job. Anyways, I hope I can get a code job soon, good luck to you too, its gonna be hard but not impossible.

The point of hiring a junior developer is to "grow" your developer. They're cheaper than a senior developer, so your hope is that you get a cheaper developer and then you assimilate them into your ecosystem and get a senior dev out of it after a few years.

However, this is no longer possible, because junior devs know the game and to jump after a year or two and simply use this company as a stepping stone and for experience. You get a way bigger salary increase by doing this compared to just sticking to the same company.

Both sides have valid reasons for doing what they do, and unfortunately that just ends up with companies choosing not to hire junior developers because there's no point. They'd rather just suck it up and hire a senior developer at the start, because they are more likely to stick around.

Sorry, but this video is so shallow, I could not drown in it, if I tried.

to suumerize "get good plebs"

Just identify as senior dev and the offers will start rolling in

The problem with Juniors is that yes, they can code. However, they can't communicate, they can't maintain eye contact and they tend to be passive. Basically, they're kids. Where as companies need people who have their shit together and can get things done, aligned to the business goals.

clickbait title and intro to the video. If you guys actually think that companies aren't hiring junior devs anymore, you're out of your mind.

To all the junior devs out there looking for work, don't listen to these doomsday people. Be realistic about your expectations for your first job, continue to sharpen your skills, and understand that ALL job posts, regardless of position/level, have experience/skill requirements that look excessive. They shouldn't be treated as "minimum requirements" for you to apply.

What's most important isn't how many years of experience you have but the technical foundation you have and your ability to demonstrate competence in coding, which is much rarer than you think. The job market in general had a pullback in the last couple years due to broader economic conditions, and it will rebound. Even in the current market, there are still many companies hiring junior devs, offering internships, co-ops, etc. Keep looking, stay positive, and stay off social media nonsense telling you that it's hopeless and the market is fucked.

YOU WILL BE FINE.

i wasted so much money and time on coding bootcamps, interviews, projects, nothing to show after two years. I became a barber and make a lot of money now.