This article appears at least somewhat BS to me at a first reading but I think I have found the root of my disagreement: the definition of junior.

Regarding the article:

1. One point made in the OP is that big companies don’t hire junior devs. For my definition of junior, this is false. Look at e.g. [1] where you can filter by YoE=0. I count 98 entries over a year and you can multiply that up to account for the other big companies and the fact that only a fraction of people add datapoints on that site. Not only do I think that this corresponds to a large number of people but I think it is sufficiently large to dispel the idea that only graduates from top universities can be hired at such companies (there aren’t enough graduates and many go into research or smaller higher-paying/hotter companies too). Google for one has tens of thousands of engineers. They won’t all be senior. And just look at how many internships people do.

2. The company I work for hires lots of junior devs (though we don’t call them that) and puts a lot of work into finding and mentoring interns for its size, though it is small. We seem to do an ok job of reasonably quickly getting them to the point that they are contributing more than they cost.

3. The impression I get from HN is that the job market is extremely hot at the moment and that lots of senior people really hate the “algorithms” questions or feel there is a lot of ageism. But my intuition is that someone fresh out of university who knows a programming language would be in a good position for that sort of question that is like homework and abstracted away from the real world. But maybe this impression is biased by certain people being more likely to post or me reading 20 posts from 'ChrisMarshallNYC and thinking I’ve read 20 different people.

4. When I look at how I found a job after leaving university (not so long ago) I don’t think I had too hard a time. I sent a mediocre CV to a recruitment agency and one company, did interviews with three companies (no idea how many the recruiter sent my CV to, probably more) got two offers and accepted one. This was a mix of smaller and medium-sized (think 200 employees in my country and 700 globally) businesses. Caveats would be: 1. I didn’t do CS at Uni. I didn’t do internships. But I did go to a ‘top’ university. I’m not in the US. This was before the rona.

5. I concede that the shift to remote work in early 2020 probably put a hold on recruiting at many companies as they were busy with other things or trying to work out how to do interviews. I wouldn’t want to have been graduating into that environment.

6. There definitely are companies that don’t hire junior devs but those are small companies who can’t afford to train them rather than large companies who are relatively flush with cash.

Regarding the definition of junior:

I generally think of someone trying to be hired into a junior dev position as a recent university graduate (in CS or maybe something related) who already knows how to program to a reasonable level. Perhaps the curse of so many programmers being self-taught is that people are typically expected to be able to do the job to some extent right when they start. Where I work almost all junior developers we hire are recent university graduates (we don’t have some strict filter on the university but our on-campus recruiting is reasonably targeted to places that are considered top institutions or where we got many good hires from)

It seems that the article is talking more about someone who might be changing career or who came out of a bootcamp or who didn’t go to university. Such people would require more training and there might be a higher variance in outcomes. I would imagine they would mostly be hired by small companies and not big tech companies like Google. And they might well be having a much harder time getting hired now than a few years ago.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...