I’m Worried About Junior Developers

Article by Nick Walsh — Apr 30, 2025

Drumming up excitement for “learning to code” is tough right now. There are too many stories out there highlighting a bleak job market with few entry-level roles. Too many anecdotes of multi-month (or even multi-year) job searches with little in the way of feedback or hope. It’s a hard sell for folks considering a career switch, coursework, and/or a degree.

The dreary outlook on developer opportunities is hitched to too many causes, too. A saturated talent pool, wayward after several rounds of layoffs. Uncertainty from AI. Uncertainty from the economy. No real fix on the horizon.

It’s a rough set of circumstances, now and later. Looking ahead, what’s happening to junior developers today will set up a new series of problems tomorrow — and that’s what we’re hoping to get out in front of.

Let’s talk through the warning signs, why we’re worried, who’s on the hook, and some next steps to ponder. And maybe toss some hope in there, too; this was a gloomy way to start an article.

Entry-Level Warning Signs

Even during the good times (that magical 2021–2022-ish period with ZIRP and developer “over-recruiting”), plenty of entry-level folks struggled to land their first role.

Fresh grads and bootcamp students hopped into a months-long cycle, sending hundreds of job applications out to get their foot in the door somewhere. That only worsened when layoffs picked up (the “over” part of “over-recruiting” after the good times), and doesn’t seem to be changing in the face of all those causes we mentioned earlier.

Broadly, we’re hearing:

Junior-level developer openings flood with applicants. Doubly so for remote positions.
After spending time, money, and effort to pick up tech skills, would-be developers are still stuck in the role they were hoping to escape.
What they were sold — a market willing to pay dearly for anyone who knows React — doesn’t line up with what’s available.

Closer to home, our involvement in Orlando Devs highlights a few more concerns:

#career-advice is routinely the most active Slack channel.
While normal monthly meetups still lack their pre-pandemic fervor, career-focused events easily hit capacity.
Each meetup gives local companies a chance to share hiring news. Lately, crickets.

And, even more directly, several CEOs have just come out and waved the white flag: Facebook aims to replace midlevel developers with AI, and Anthropic says “AI will replace 90% of developers in 6 months.” Are we looking at an actual shift? Hype by folks with a vested interest? Or a lot of breath-holding while uncertainty reigns?

The Impact on Junior Developers

Regardless of how this all plays out, the perception has been dinged. Just like the blanket “go to college” direction of generations past, “learn to code” isn’t as easy to sling as a recommendation — and is a slog to actually follow. That lands us at our first concern: Will talented folks look elsewhere for a career?

If they stick with it, and if they find that first role, they’ll find the second concern: Our onboarding process keeps one-upping itself in complexity. As an industry, we’ve:

Consolidated more and more openings under the nebulous “full-stack” title.
Added more and more dependencies and developer tooling, deepening “the stack.”

Through all of that, we’re left with a list of job requirements that takes years of experience to meet. It’s a challenge for newly-minted developers and for organizations watching the investment needed to train fresh technical talent tick further and further upward. (More on both later.)

That ties into the third concern: AI. The AI-of-it-all is a specter I don’t want to invoke too much in this piece, but it’s at its most relevant here. The current refrain positions LLMs as a tool roughly equivalent to an intern or junior-level programmer — something that raises the floor for non-technical dabblers and newcomers to the field alike, papering over any experience gaps (up to a point).

AI can (in certain situations) make those fresh-off-the-line developers productive faster, but a series of questions follow in the wake. If LLMs are more tool than replacement, will juniors ever be incentivized to pick up higher-order skills? Will the tools advance to a point where that doesn’t matter? Can traditional (and/or non-traditional) learning options keep pace with whatever the “developer of the future” looks like?

Peek under any rock today and you’ll find ten articles contradicting each other on what to expect. Uncertainty isn’t bad in and of itself, but long-term decision making is hard with the amount we’ve been navigating through for the past few years.

The Impact on Senior Developers

The ripples extend up the ladder, too. Senior developers — already facing an unrecognizable job market — are also tied to junior developers’ fate. Three things to contend with, so far:

Stuck? At some point, these specialists will either retire or look to move into a different role. Will we have a steady stable of replacements? Will those engineers ever be promoted if there’s no backfill in sight? Individual contributors may find themselves locked out of management if the next generation can’t cover their “extra” knowledge.
Jaded? Senior-level folks can also be a bit of a… wet blanket. They’ve seen it all, and dealt with the fallout. Newcomers inject joy, excitement, and come with fresh questions to ponder — all of which spill over into community (meetups, conferences, and the like). Teaching has always been a cornerstone of the developer experience and a path to mastery. Will those opportunities still exist?
Sapped? If the state of the art becomes orchestration over craftsmanship, will senior developers still find joy in their jobs? Freely built and maintained open-source software, blog articles, conference talks, mentorship: Much of modern software’s backbone (and much of the corpus LLMs train on) was built by engineers who simply enjoy the trade. If that’s lost, we can’t begin to predict the impact.

At any rate, the current crop of senior talent can’t stick around forever, and the pipeline for replacements is a new uncertainty to question.

Who’s Gonna Fix It?

There’s really no singular person or institution to lay the blame on, and it’ll take more than one to fix it, too. From what we’ve seen, there are four facets to track:

The Coursework

Tech has always had a learn-as-you-go flavor to it. Everything changes quickly: Knowing JavaScript is a step towards success with JavaScript-flavored options like React, TypeScript, and Node in the same way that understanding a hand saw helps you operate a chainsaw, a jigsaw, and a table saw (some, but not much).

It’s tough, regardless of whether someone’s preferred path is a degree, a bootcamp, or self-paced. Not much of my CSS knowledge from 20 years back stands up today; it’s a good sign for platform progress, but a pain when it comes to creating a curriculum. How do you approach training when “best practices” change every semester?

Bootcamps aim to cover the speed-to-market problem, but they’ve fallen on hard times. While there’s still demand for that programming-and-trade-school combination, the specializations they focus on have to move with the speed of the industry.

Summed up, coursework has a few challenges:

Incoming students come from all walks of life and experience levels. Introductory courses can be both too advanced and too basic for the range of students involved.
Creating new products is useful, but students lack reps contributing to existing codebases — which is the most likely need they’ll fill post-training.
College as a transaction and development as endless reinvention are at odds.

The Community

It’s all about who you know, and community exists to connect the dots. Whether it’s jobs, sales, mentorship, speaking, or education, networking reigns. In the context of this article, though, it’s harsh to point a finger at “the community” — they’re generally doing all of this in a voluntary capacity, after all.

Local to us and lucky for us, Orlando has a lively tech scene. We’ve founded, supported, and participated in a number of efforts, both for value (networking with future hires, clients, and connections) and values (our core values, including education, excellence, and fun). Contributing time and sponsorship funds has been the least we could do, and we’ve heard the same of other technology-focused organizations around the world. Communities, both physical and remote, are the basis of the industry we know today.

In our region alone, there are accelerators, incubators, non-profits, economic partnerships, and industry clusters. They exist, and exist to help, but that help doesn’t always reach the intended target.

With no zero-sum games in sight, communities have a few obstacles of their own:

How do you connect with the right people, who are otherwise unaware or unable to take part? Many of the developers with the greatest need don’t have time for an evening networking event, or the means to travel to a different city center.
Volunteerism is difficult work, and those that raise their hand are often ground into dust. Groups struggle when they lean into a few engaged contributors well beyond the point of burnout.
There’s an ebb and flow to folks’ involvement, but positions of power don’t always cycle at the same rate. It’s common to see communities stall when their leaders take a step back without some kind of replacement.

Here’s the first glimmer of hope I promised, though: All of those accelerators, incubators, and such that I mentioned desperately want to help. They have the funds, people, and partnerships to make it happen — they just need help heading to the right place.

The Employers

Coming from the hiring side of the equation, there’s an evergreen challenge: It’s hard to bring fresh developers up to speed. That sounds trite when you hold the decision-making power, but inexperienced hires really are an investment in a future business state.

It’s a multi-year effort to help someone drop the junior part of junior developer. “Investment” comes in when you pair that with:

Turnover before the “investment” (such an awful word for referring to a person) is returned
Market uncertainty and industry changes
High salary expectations
The need to peel experienced developers away for training help

Teams are already shrinking, and it’s tough to slow velocity on active priorities for the promise of help later. At the same time, we’ve all seen the sink-or-swim style of onboarding fail spectacularly — it isn’t equitable or reasonable to assume the right developers can thrive without mentorship.

All that in mind, employers are facing down a handful of hurdles:

As mentioned earlier, open roles are receiving an unreal amount of “noise” right now. It’s difficult to remember that (many) of those applications are real people trying to get by, and we have to do better at communicating with them.
New hires need time from senior staff to onboard, and it’s worth pre-planning into schedules.
Not every hire will work out, but bringing entry-level staff through the process is necessary for the health of the organization and the existing technical team. Someone’s gotta bring fresh ideas and excitement to the fold.

The Developer

Simply put: They’ve been fed some lofty promises about “learning to code.” It’s not their fault, but it’s something to overcome. We’ve talked a lot about the current state of the world for developers, so let’s dive right into the list of challenges.

Having spoken to many a bootcamp-in-progress and recent grad, patterns emerge:

It’s easy to underestimate networking or skip it as something for “later.” Forming the right kinds of connections and meeting the right people takes time — as does learning to network in the first place. Developers should kick this off as soon as they can, and peer groups are a great place to start.
Everyone else in their cohort will have a similar portfolio, and they’ll likely need something else to stand out amongst the noise. That usually surfaces as a personal project or a way to apply their new skills to an existing role.
Programming doesn’t start and end with the tools you know now. Learning never stops, and employers will be interested in how they plan to keep up. Ties go to the better communicators.
The first role doesn’t have to be a household name. It may be small, local, and tech-adjacent.

Times of heavy competition (like now) force candidates to treat job hunting as another skill.

What’s Next?

And now we’ve reached the cliff: an article full of dreary concerns and not much in the way of solutions. The industry has taken a hard problem (developer training) and watched it worsen. Or skipped it altogether with senior-only hiring policies. How it’ll impact the next generation of software engineers is equal parts troublesome and tough to quantify.

Want to help? Have ideas? I’d love to connect.

Locally, we’re fortunate enough to have connections with all four facets of “Who’s Gonna Fix It?,” and getting communications started across those barriers is our first step this year.

As we close, here’s a little more hope for those setting off on their learn-to-code journey today.