Where Did All the Junior Jobs Go? (And Why Should We Care?)
Eight years ago, I was juggling a healthcare career and a six-month part-time coding bootcamp, learning JavaScript and React while trying not to fall asleep in my chair after long shifts. It was exhausting, but it worked. The job search afterward wasn’t easy, but doors were open. Companies were willing to take a chance on someone who brought a weird mix of clinical problem-solving skills and freshly-minted web dev knowledge.
Fast forward to today, and I’ve led teams, mentored engineers, shipped products that millions of people use. The career switch was worth every sleep-deprived evening spent debugging CSS.
But if I were trying to make that same transition in 2025? I’d be kind of screwed.
The Numbers Don’t Lie (And They’re Not Good)
Look, I’m not one for doom and gloom, but the data here is pretty damning. Only 18% of tech job postings right now are open to people with a year or less of experience. Eighteen percent. Meanwhile, jobs asking for 5+ years of experience jumped from 37% to 42% in just the last three years.
New grad hiring is down 50% compared to 2019. Employment of software developers aged 22-25 dropped 13% between 2020 and 2023. A Stanford researcher called this “the fastest, broadest change” he’s seen in the labor market outside of the sudden pivot to remote work during COVID.
And bootcamps? They’re getting demolished. Codesmith—a well-respected program—saw their placement rate drop from 83% to 37% in less than two years. The big bootcamp operator 2U just shut down all their coding programs. Their CEO literally said the bootcamp model “no longer aligns with what the market wants and needs.”
Ouch.
Why This Matters (Hint: It’s Not Just About Bootcamps)
Okay, so bootcamps are struggling and junior jobs are scarce. You might be thinking, “Well, maybe we just trained too many people for a while, and the market’s correcting itself. Supply and demand, right?”
Except that’s not what’s happening here. This isn’t a healthy market correction—it’s companies systematically deciding that training junior engineers isn’t worth the investment anymore. And that decision is going to come back to haunt us.
Here’s the thing nobody seems to be talking about: where exactly do people think senior engineers come from?
They don’t materialize fully formed from the coding ether. That senior engineer who can architect complex systems, mentor a team, and navigate messy organizational politics? They were a junior engineer once. Probably a pretty mediocre one at first, if we’re being honest. They got good because someone invested in them, gave them opportunities to fail safely, paired them with patient mentors, and let them gradually level up over years.
If we’re not hiring juniors in 2025, where are we getting our seniors in 2030? Our principal engineers in 2035? You can’t just skip the first few levels of the skill tree and expect everything to work out.
The Diversity Thing (But Not the Way You Think)
Let me be real about something: when tech companies talk about diversity, it’s usually about demographics. Gender, race, ethnicity. And yes, those things matter enormously. Representation matters. But there’s another dimension we’re completely overlooking: cognitive diversity that comes from career diversity.
When I transitioned from healthcare to engineering, I didn’t leave my healthcare brain behind. The way I approach problems, think about systems, communicate with stakeholders—all of that was shaped by years of clinical work. And it makes me a better engineer, not despite my non-traditional background but because of it.
Think about what different career-changers bring to the table:
- The former teacher who intuitively understands how users learn new interfaces
- The musician who sees patterns and thinks about iterative refinement in ways that inform debugging
- The business analyst who connects technical decisions to actual user outcomes
- The retail worker who learned customer service and stress management in the trenches
These aren’t “soft skills” that live in the margins. They fundamentally shape how you build things, how you lead, how you make decisions when there’s no obviously correct answer.
I’ve seen this play out so many times. The team that’s all Stanford CS grads with identical backgrounds will build technically elegant solutions… to the wrong problems. They’ll have blind spots they don’t even know they have. The team with a mix of backgrounds—traditional and otherwise—is messier, sure, but they’re more likely to catch the edge cases, think about the human factors, and build something that actually works in the real world.
The AI Red Herring
So everyone’s blaming AI for this, right? “AI can write code now, so we don’t need junior developers anymore!”
And look, I get it. AI coding assistants are legitimately impressive. They can generate boilerplate, help with syntax, even solve straightforward algorithmic problems. But this narrative that AI replaces junior engineers is missing the forest for the trees.
Junior engineers don’t just write code. They learn your codebase, your domain, your organizational context. They ask the “dumb” questions that sometimes reveal assumptions everyone else took for granted. They bring fresh eyes to problems. They make the mistakes that, when caught in code review, teach everyone something.
More importantly: they become senior engineers. That’s literally the whole point.
AI can generate code, but it can’t figure out what to build. It can’t navigate stakeholder disagreements. It can’t look at a system and understand the historical context of why it’s janky in that particular way. It can’t mentor the next generation of engineers because—and I cannot stress this enough—there won’t be a next generation if we stop hiring them.
The Pipeline Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here’s what really keeps me up at night: we’re creating a time bomb.
Companies are making a totally rational short-term decision: “Hiring is expensive, training takes time, let’s just hire experienced people who can contribute immediately.” Cool. Great. Except when every company makes that same decision simultaneously, you get a catastrophic failure of the talent pipeline.
It’s like if every hospital decided to stop accepting medical residents because it’s cheaper to only hire experienced doctors. Great plan until you realize that in ten years, you won’t have any experienced doctors because nobody trained any residents.
The bootcamp grad you don’t hire today? They’re not going to be sitting around in five years waiting for you to change your mind. They’re going to build a career somewhere else. The career-changer who could have brought that valuable outside perspective? They’re moving on. The diversity of thought and experience we’re losing now isn’t coming back when some VP finally realizes the talent pool has dried up.
What I See When I Interview Now
I’m still interviewing candidates—fewer junior roles than before, but they exist. And the conversations with bootcamp grads have changed completely.
Two years ago: nervous but optimistic. “I’ve been searching for three months, had some good conversations, feeling pretty good about my projects.”
Now: exhausted and defeated. “I’ve applied to 400 jobs. I’ve been searching for a year. I don’t know what else I can do.”
These are talented people. They’ve built real projects. They’ve learned the technologies. They’re hungry and motivated. But they’re competing for scraps while companies hold out for someone with five years of React experience and a top-tier CS degree.
And here’s the kicker: when I do get approval to hire a junior, or heck, even a mid-level, I get hundreds of applications. Many from people with years and years of actual experience who got laid off and are desperate enough to take a junior role. How is a bootcamp grad supposed to compete with that?
This Didn’t Have to Happen
Look, I’m not naive. The market dynamics are real. The economic pressures are real. AI is real. But the choices companies are making in response? Those aren’t inevitable.
Some companies are doing it right. Microsoft’s LEAP program. Google’s apprenticeships. Companies that have decided training junior talent is strategic investment, not charity. They’re going to have a massive competitive advantage in five years when everyone else is desperately trying to poach their mid-level engineers.
But these are drops in the bucket. The industry as a whole is making a collective choice that’s incredibly short-sighted. We’re optimizing for this quarter’s efficiency while mortgaging our future.
What Actually Needs to Happen
First, we need to stop pretending AI eliminates the need for junior engineers. It shifts what they do, sure. But someone needs to learn how to use these tools effectively, how to review AI-generated code, how to make the architectural decisions that AI can’t make. And that someone needs to start somewhere.
Second, companies need to accept that some roles should be filled by juniors, even if it means slightly less productivity today. Mentorship is an investment. Building a talent bench is strategy, not a nice-to-have.
Third, we need to keep alternative pathways open. Bootcamps need to evolve—maybe shorter, more specialized, better integrated with apprenticeships. But the core idea that motivated career-changers can become great engineers? That’s still true. We shouldn’t abandon it just because the market got tough.
And honestly? We need to reembrace the concept of potential over pedigree. The person who taught themselves to code while working two jobs might have more drive than the Stanford grad who never had to struggle. Skills-based hiring isn’t just a diversity initiative—it’s smart business.
The View from Here
Eight years ago, someone took a chance on me. I was a bootcamp grad with a healthcare background and a GitHub full of half-baked projects. I had no idea what I was doing. I made so many embarrassing mistakes in my first six months.
But I learned. I got better. I eventually became the person mentoring the next wave of juniors, teaching them the things I wish I’d known, helping them avoid the mistakes I made.
That’s how this is supposed to work. That’s how you build a healthy industry with a sustainable talent pipeline. You hire people with potential, invest in them, watch them grow, and then they do the same for the next generation.
What we’re doing now? It’s not sustainable. It’s not strategic. And it’s definitely not smart.
The bootcamp grad we turn away today is the senior engineer we’ll desperately need in 2030. The non-traditional candidate we don’t hire is the diverse perspective we’ll wish we had when we’re trying to solve hard problems with a room full of people who all think the same way.
We built this industry on the idea that anyone could learn to code, that merit mattered more than credentials, that the best ideas could come from anywhere. Would be a real shame if we abandoned all that just because the market got a little tough.
Someone took a chance on me eight years ago. I’m still taking chances on people today, when I can. The question is: who else is?
And maybe more importantly: what kind of industry do we want to be five years from now?
Thoughts? Pushback? War stories from your own hiring/job search experiences? I’m curious what people are seeing out there.