The Junior Crisis in IT – A Short-Sightedness That Will Hit the Industry Hard
The days when a university diploma guaranteed a job in the IT industry are fading fast. Young programmers and computer science graduates increasingly hit a wall – companies are looking for experienced professionals, while junior-level job offers are scarce. This phenomenon isn't limited to IT. Similar trends are visible in other sectors, where newcomers lack entry-level opportunities, leading to serious long-term consequences. Let’s examine the roots of this employment crisis for young people and the risks it poses to the job market.
Companies Don’t Want to Train Young Talent
Many companies avoid hiring juniors, claiming they lack the time to train them and need immediate results. In practice, this results in a “seniors only” strategy. According to Harvard Business Review, in 2023, as many as 35% of entry-level job postings required at least three years of experience. Paradoxically, positions labeled as “entry-level” are no longer beginner-friendly. Research confirms the trend: over the past decade, entry-level job listings dropped by 14%, even as the overall job market grew.
The situation worsened after the pandemic boom. A report by SignalFire shows that the top 15 tech companies reduced hiring of new graduates by over 50% since 2019. Even though mid- and senior-level hiring picked up after the 2023 wave of layoffs, entry-level recruitment continued to decline. As a result, the percentage of recent graduates among hires in Big Tech fell from 15% pre-pandemic to just 7% today. Moreover, since 2021, the average age of newly hired engineers has increased by three years, as companies are increasingly unwilling to invest in young talent. In other words, they prefer to pay more for a fully trained expert than invest time in onboarding a junior.
Industry experts criticize this short-sighted strategy. They argue that without juniors today, there won’t be seniors tomorrow – companies risk cutting off their talent pipeline and deepening the skills gap. Unfortunately, many teams believe they can afford this. As Dr. Derek Austin put it, “With no jobs for juniors, we have a chronic skills shortage.” In other words, everyone complains about the lack of experienced programmers, yet hardly anyone is willing to hire people who could eventually gain that experience.
Mutual Disloyalty
The reluctance to invest in young talent stems partly from a crisis of loyalty between employers and employees. In the past, staying with the same company for many years was the norm – now it’s the exception. On one hand, young workers are told that loyalty doesn’t pay, especially when companies can cut jobs anytime in pursuit of profit. On the other hand, employers see juniors gaining some experience and quickly jumping ship for higher pay elsewhere. The rise of the gig economy and frequent job switching only worsen this mutual detachment.
Commentators note that loyalty is often discouraged by corporate practices. Decades of restructuring, mass layoffs, and cost-cutting have eroded employee trust. When people see long-time colleagues let go overnight, it’s hard to believe in any “mutual loyalty pact.” As a result, young employees adopt a pragmatic approach to careers – if the current employer doesn’t offer promotions or raises, they look elsewhere. Likewise, companies feel no obligation to nurture a junior’s growth, assuming they’ll soon leave. It’s a vicious cycle: lack of attachment leads to lack of investment, and underdeveloped employees are more likely to switch jobs.
This erosion of loyalty also reflects a broader trend. In an era where corporations prioritize short-term shareholder returns, cost-cutting has become the main goal – often at employees’ expense. Outsourcing and offshoring help boost quarterly numbers but send a clear message that profits matter more than people. Workers feel like spreadsheet entries, so it’s no wonder they don’t return loyalty that isn’t reciprocated.
Fear of Risk and Cost
Employers often see juniors as risky and burdensome. There’s a common belief that “juniors mean potential problems – they might make mistakes, require supervision, and their work won’t pay off immediately.” When hiring decisions are made by managers thinking in quarterly terms, it’s easier to go with a “safe” senior than risk an inexperienced hire.
Companies frequently claim they lack the time or resources to train juniors or that their projects are too high-stakes to allow for mistakes. In practice, they fear the potential chaos an inexperienced employee might create. It’s like the saying at Netflix: “If you don’t get a puppy, you don’t have to clean up after it.” The problem is that this thinking dominates many tech companies today – forgetting that every senior was once a “puppy” someone had to raise.
Fears of junior mistakes are understandable but manageable. Experienced teams can implement code reviews, automated testing, and mentoring – in short, create an environment where a junior can quickly grow. Unfortunately, it’s easier to exclude fresh blood entirely than to invest in a culture of learning from mistakes. The prevailing approach is “zero errors at any cost,” which paradoxically can stifle the entire company’s growth. Intolerance for mistakes breeds a culture of fear, which hinders innovation and openness – not just for juniors, but for seniors as well.
Hiring cost is another barrier. Companies calculate that two juniors cost the same as one senior, while initial productivity will be lower anyway. Especially in times of talent shortages, seniors are in high demand despite higher salaries, because they deliver results immediately. However, this logic overlooks long-term benefits – a junior can become a solid mid-level engineer in one or two years, loyal to the company that gave them a chance. Sadly, corporate planning rarely looks beyond the next few months. Avoiding risk has become the norm – but those who avoid juniors today risk staffing shortages tomorrow.
Flawed Recruitment of Young Talent
The “experience required” paradox: many young people face absurd expectations – they need experience to get a job, but they can’t gain experience without a job.
Another issue is incompetence or short-sightedness in recruitment processes. Many recruiters and HR managers are unable to assess a candidate’s potential without a rich résumé, so they reject all “inexperienced” applicants. In extreme cases, this leads to absurdity – internship offers requiring knowledge of three programming languages and several years of commercial experience. As one young developer put it, “Nowadays, finding a job without experience is almost impossible due to the massive competition and often insane requirements for internships or junior roles.” Unfortunately, “experience” has become a fetish – even if a candidate has school projects or personal apps, lack of formal employment can be disqualifying.
In Poland, this trend was clearly visible during the pandemic. When companies struggled to survive in 2020, junior offers nearly vanished – making up only 5% of IT job postings (compared to 12% the year before). Employers openly admitted they needed people “ready from day one” and had no time to train newbies. Although the situation improved somewhat after the crisis, the “only self-sufficient candidates” approach took root. Junior job postings now include more and more requirements – today even entry-level roles can demand 2–3 years of professional experience.
There’s also the other side – recruiter incompetence in evaluating candidates. HR as a field suffers from a poor reputation, and trust in recruiters is low. A common example is the lack of understanding of technical roles – sometimes a recruiter rejects a highly promising candidate simply because they don’t understand the portfolio or ask inappropriate questions. The internet is full of stories about absurd interview questions or recruiters mixing up technologies. No wonder many young people are frustrated. As one Big Tech employee put it: “HR there is so damn incompetent, they actively destroy everything good we try to do to reduce turnover.” A harsh opinion, but it reflects the mood – recruitment departments, instead of enabling the inflow of talent, often stifle it with flawed practices.
Add to this the lack of feedback during recruitment. Candidates often receive generic rejection emails with no explanation. This makes it hard to learn and improve. Sometimes a young person is rejected for completely fixable reasons – but no one tells them, because recruiters “don’t have time” to give personalized feedback to 200 applicants. As HR expert Jakub Iciaszek notes, giving basic feedback to a few finalists is a matter of professionalism – and its absence often stems from laziness or incompetence. As a result, young candidates go in circles without knowing what they’re doing wrong, while employers complain about a “lack of talent.”
Automation and AI Are Taking Over Entry-Level Jobs
Alongside the human-side challenges, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly influencing the job market for entry-level professionals. The technological irony is that the IT industry is building tools that partly eliminate the need for junior developers. Traditionally, junior programmers started with simple, repetitive tasks: minor bug fixes, small features, testing, and project support. These tedious "bottom-of-the-pyramid" tasks were essential for gaining experience and honing practical skills. Today, many of them can be handled by AI tools—from GitHub Copilot suggesting code, to ChatGPT generating entire blocks of software.
Market analysts speak of the “death of the junior developer as we know them.” In a widely shared blog post, Steve Yegge (a longtime engineer at Amazon and Google) stated, “a lot of people picked the wrong year to become a junior developer,” suggesting that ChatGPT and its counterparts are disrupting the traditional career path. Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph, adds: “the role of the junior developer will look completely different in a few years”—young developers will need to learn how to collaborate with AI as an assistant, while much of the routine coding will be handled by machines. Instead of simple bug fixes, they may face more complex design problems from the start (since AI will filter out the “easy stuff”).
Looking ahead, companies ask themselves a simple question: “Why should I pay a junior to write trivial code when AI can do it faster and cheaper?” As Professor James O’Brien from UC Berkeley reports, the startups he works with are increasingly skipping the idea of hiring 2–3 juniors to support a senior—believing that AI provides the same value as less experienced employees. He cites a common question asked during board meetings: “Why hire a fresh graduate when AI is cheaper and faster?” This is not just theory—Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will replace some junior developers with AI in 2024, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declared his company would freeze new developer hiring, as productivity gains from AI have reduced the need for human staff.
Of course, AI also creates new jobs, and top-performing juniors treat it as a learning accelerator rather than a threat. But for the average graduate, competition now goes beyond their peers—they’re also up against algorithms. The same applies in other industries: banks are automating customer service, law firms use tools to analyze legal documents, and media outlets experiment with AI-written content. The early career stages—once filled with simple “starter” tasks—are being automated. This creates the risk that young professionals won’t have opportunities to build foundational skills. If an algorithm handles their simplest duties, employers may expect higher skills from the outset—narrowing the pool of eligible candidates.
Automation is also a catalyst for other trends. It amplifies the effects of a weakened job market (e.g., after the tech layoffs of 2023), forming a “perfect storm” for junior workers. When companies cut costs and freeze projects, they tend to start by letting go of the least experienced—and at the same time invest in automation to replace part of their work. Jeff Watkins, CTO of CreateFuture, observes that in recent years of economic slowdown, it’s entry-level workers who take the biggest hit—they're often the first to be laid off. Companies prefer to retain a “core engine” of mids and seniors, while testing how much AI can do instead. Junior developers now find themselves in a bind: they must prove their added value beyond what technology offers—on an extremely competitive job market.
Overproduction of Aspiring Elites
Another dangerous consequence of current trends is the phenomenon of overproduction of aspiring professionals, also known as "elite overproduction." Classical theory (e.g. by Prof. Peter Turchin) states that when the education system produces significantly more highly qualified individuals than the economy can absorb in roles matching their skills, it leads to frustration and social tensions. “An oversized elite clashes with a shortage of jobs suitable for the growing intellectual potential of new generations... Professional failures generate frustration, and then – aggression,” writes Jan Cipiur, explaining Turchin’s concept. In other words, we are witnessing masses of talented, ambitious young people with strong qualifications who are unable to find professional fulfillment matching their aspirations.
The examples are plain to see. Thousands of computer science graduates working below their qualifications – turning to manual testing because they weren’t hired as developers. MSc engineers working security or waiting tables just to make ends meet. Young researchers, lawyers, or doctors unable to secure a place in specializations or top firms, remaining stuck in unstable freelance jobs for years. In the U.S., around 25,000 more lawyers graduate each year than the market needs; in the U.K., about 30% of graduates work in jobs below their level of education. In Poland, we also continue to educate many more degree holders than during times when the market could absorb them all. That doesn’t mean education is futile – the problem lies in systemic mismatch: education fuels ambition, while the market suppresses it.
As a result, frustration builds among the young middle class. These people want to be part of a professional elite, to thrive, and to earn wages corresponding to their knowledge – but feel blocked. This leads to broader social phenomena: emigration in search of work (the so-called brain drain), career shifts (e.g. a CS graduate switching to a completely different industry after failing to break into tech), or increased social tensions. Turchin links unmet aspirations with historical episodes of unrest and conflict – for instance, in his view, the French Revolution was largely a result of conflict between a growing, educated “counter-elite” and the entrenched traditional elite. Today’s circumstances can’t be directly equated with those times, but the warning signs are there. If an entire generation of well-educated youth feels there’s no place for them at the "table of prosperity," it creates serious challenges – ranging from economic (wasted human capital) to political and social.
A Systemic Skills Crisis
Perhaps the most dangerous element of all is the potential systemic crisis in access to qualified talent. It’s a paradox: today many employers turn their noses up at “underqualified” candidates – but tomorrow those same employers may be desperate for any specialist, because years of neglect will create a generational gap. In some fields, this is already visible. For example, in certain niche IT technologies, the average age of experts is approaching retirement, with no juniors to take their place – because companies never trained anyone in that field, counting on the fact that “things will work out.” The same is true in the energy or engineering sectors – years of cuts to training and young recruitment have now left no successors for retiring specialists.
If these micro-trends scale across the economy, we may face a serious skills shortage. Imagine that in 10–15 years, a large share of today’s seniors (developers, engineers, analysts, specialist doctors, etc.) retire or change careers, and there’s no one to replace them in sufficient numbers. Suddenly, companies will remember juniors – but training them from scratch will take years, and the market doesn’t tolerate a vacuum. The gap may be filled by specialists from other countries (especially if brain drain intensified locally), which on one hand could be beneficial (labor immigration), but on the other – it will expose how much we’ve neglected our own talent development.
Such a crisis can trigger a spiral of problems. A lack of specialists means lower economic productivity, higher labor costs (as wages skyrocket in the battle for talent), and potentially stalled investment. We already hear that a shortage of developers or engineers is a barrier to company growth. If the “we don’t hire juniors” policy becomes widespread, these shortages will only become more severe. It could even lead to systemic stagnation in innovation and growth – because you can’t launch new projects without a workforce. Worse yet, the skills gap won’t remain empty for long – it will be filled by those who did invest in talent: either competing economies or increasingly automated technologies.
In an extreme scenario, a dangerous feedback loop could form: companies, instead of training, try to plug holes with more automation or imported talent. This, in turn, further limits opportunities for local juniors – and the cycle continues. Ultimately, the local population loses skills, technology and expertise are imported, and the domestic aspiring elites are left marginalized. This is a bleak scenario, but not an impossible one if short-term thinking completely dominates labor market strategy.
Conclusions – Time to Wake Up
The picture of the job market for young talent is alarming. Companies avoid investing in juniors, workers see no point in loyalty, recruiters and hiring processes filter out potential, automation and offshoring reduce entry points into careers, and on the horizon looms a generation of frustrated, underutilized specialists and a shortage of experienced professionals. It’s largely a crisis of our own making – the result of business decisions focused on the present, with no regard for the future.
Can these trends be reversed? Many experts believe yes – provided that companies, educational institutions, and governments all change their approach. Companies must understand that hiring juniors is an investment, not an expense. It doesn’t pay off immediately, but it builds loyalty, organizational culture, and a talent pipeline for years to come. Moreover, organizations known for nurturing young talent attract the best – and in the long run, they see lower turnover and more innovation. Deloitte research confirms that companies with strong early-career programs report up to 45% higher innovation rates. It simply makes sense.
Systemic changes are needed as well. Higher education and the IT sector should cooperate more closely to align graduate skills with market needs – so companies can no longer claim that “juniors don’t know anything.” Internship programs, in-house coding academies, and mentoring – all of these require effort, but pay off. Some corporations are already getting it: Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce have launched internship-mentorship programs to integrate fresh blood. Investing in potential instead of just buying ready-made skills from the market could restore balance.
Finally, society and policymakers should not ignore the fate of this generation of aspiring specialists. This is not a “spoiled millennials” or “entitled Gen Z” issue, as it is sometimes stereotyped. It’s a structural problem that, in the long run, will affect all of us – because the economy is a system of interconnected vessels. Long-term thinking about the labor market also means ensuring a steady flow of talent into strategic sectors, rather than relying on imports or technological miracles. Artificial intelligence will not completely replace creativity and expertise – and even its development depends on new generations of engineers, whom someone has to train.
The junior crisis in IT and beyond is a warning sign. If we ignore it, in a few years we may wake up to an economy full of unfilled vacancies and a surplus of talented people working well below their potential or seeking success elsewhere. We should already be asking ourselves: can we afford to let an entire generation of specialists waste their potential? If not – then it’s time for action before the short-sightedness of current trends leads to a full-blown systemic crisis. Because without juniors, there will be no seniors – and without them, the future looks bleak.
Sources: Research and reports cited in the text, including Harvard Business Review, SignalFire, LinkedIn Economic Graph, Deloitte Insights, works by Peter Turchin, industry publications (LeadDev, CTech, The San Francisco Standard, Medium), data from NoFluffJobs and JustJoinIT, and expert statements and labor market participants.