Nobody Warned Me the Junior Dev Market Would Look Like This

I keep running into the same conversation. A younger dev, usually a bootcamp grad or a recent CS grad, message me asking why they've sent out two or three hundred applications and gotten almost nothing back. They assume it's them. It's usually not.

If you're trying to break into full-stack development in the US right now, you're not imagining the wall. Entry-level postings at a lot of the big tech companies have dropped hard compared to a couple years ago, and several well-known firms have straight up said they don't feel like they need as many junior engineers anymore. Meanwhile senior and AI-specialist roles are still getting funded. It's not that hiring stopped. It's that it stopped at the bottom of the ladder.

Why this happened, from what I can piece together

A few things landed on top of each other at once, and it's worth untangling them because they get lumped into one lazy headline ("AI took the jobs").

AI ate a lot of the grunt work that used to justify hiring a junior. Boilerplate CRUD endpoints, basic bug fixes, writing a batch of unit tests — that used to be the on-ramp. Now a senior with an AI agent can knock that out themselves in a fraction of the time, so the business case for "hire someone cheap to do the boring stuff" got a lot weaker.

The post-2022 correction never really reversed. A bunch of companies over-hired, then cut hard, and a lot of them just never reopened the junior pipeline afterward. It's easier to not restart a program than to restart one.

Managers are doing blunt math. An AI coding subscription costs a company something like $20 to $30 a month per seat. A junior developer costs a salary, benefits, and six to twelve months of ramp-up time before they're pulling their own weight. When budgets tightened, that comparison didn't go in the junior's favor.

The result, based on what I've seen reported across a bunch of different sources, isn't one uniform collapse — it's a split. Fast-moving product companies and startups have mostly stopped hiring juniors. Meanwhile, some enterprise software companies, banks, healthcare platforms, and infrastructure-heavy orgs are still bringing them on, because they know they'll need senior engineers in five years and those don't appear out of nowhere.

What I'd actually do if I were starting out right now

I'm not going to pretend I have some secret hack that gets around a genuinely hard market. But here's what seems to actually move the needle, based on people I know who've broken in this year:

Stop building toy projects. A todo app with a login page doesn't prove anything anymore — every bootcamp grad has one, and half of them were built with an AI agent doing most of the work anyway. What stands out is something end-to-end and a little messier: a real deployed app with a database, an API, some kind of auth, and ideally a CI/CD pipeline that actually runs on every push.

Get comfortable being visibly good at directing AI tools, not hiding that you use them. Hiring managers aren't testing whether you can write code with zero assistance anymore. They're testing whether you know when the AI's output is wrong. Pretending you don't use these tools in an interview is a worse look than showing you know how to use them well.

Look past the household-name tech companies. The Big Tech campus recruiting pipelines have shrunk a lot. Mid-size SaaS companies, agencies, and non-tech industries doing digital transformation (healthcare, fintech, logistics) are quieter about it, but some of them are still building out junior benches on purpose.

Contribute to real open-source projects, even small ones. A handful of genuinely useful, reviewed pull requests on a project other people depend on says more than another solo project ever will. It shows you can work inside someone else's codebase and conventions, which is most of the actual job.

The part that's genuinely worth worrying about

Here's what bugs me about all this, and I don't think it gets said enough: if companies keep skipping the junior stage, there's no obvious source of mid-level and senior engineers five to ten years out. You can't hire your way to a ten-year-experienced developer. Somebody has to have been a junior first. A few companies clearly get this and are investing anyway. A lot of others are optimizing for this quarter and hoping the problem is someone else's in 2031.

If you're on the other side of this — trying to get your first job — none of that makes your situation less frustrating. But it's worth knowing you're not failing at a normal process. The process changed, and it changed for reasons that have nothing to do with your ability to write code.