The Junior Developer Hiring Crisis
Why landing your first tech job has never been harder.
Maya is a 24-year-old CS grad with a 3.8 GPA and two internships. She applied to 387 software jobs in six months. Her callback rate was 2%. She couldn’t even get past automated screening. It felt like shouting into a void.
This post is for anyone living that reality, and anyone hiring who wants to understand what changed.
Introduction: Dreams vs. Reality for New Developers
Not that long ago, a degree (or a bootcamp), a couple personal projects, and real effort could get you in the door. Now that door feels locked… and it’s not because juniors suddenly got worse.
Entry-level tech job postings have dropped 25–60% in recent years. In mid-2025, unemployment for young developers (ages 22–27) was around 7.4%, nearly double the national average.
One recent CS grad reportedly applied to 5,762 jobs without a single offer.
That’s not “a few people having a hard time.” That’s a system breaking at the entry point.
The Collapsing Entry-Level Job Market
Here’s what “bad” looks like in practice:
- Entry-level openings are vanishing: true entry-level roles were estimated at only ~2.5% of all tech job postings by early 2024.
- Junior listings are down hard: postings explicitly for “junior” devs are down 60% since 2022, including a 29% drop in 2024 alone.
- The drop is brutal year over year: a Stanford analysis found a 67% decrease in U.S. entry-level tech job postings between 2023 and 2024.
- Competition got ugly: unemployment for recent CS grads hovers around 6–7.5% (about double the overall rate).
- Internships shrank too: tech internships dropped about 30% since 2023.
- Confidence is collapsing: 56% of seniors in 2025 felt pessimistic about their job prospects.
- Big Tech pulled back: hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies fell over 50% from 2019 to 2025, and new grads went from 15% of Big Tech hires to 7%.
This is why juniors can be doing “everything right” and still get nothing back.
01
Experience Inflation: “Entry-Level” That Isn’t Entry-Level
Over 55% of “entry-level” tech job postings now demand 3+ years of experience. In places like the SF Bay Area, 80% of entry-level listings require 2+ years.A lot of these roles are basically mid-level jobs wearing a junior title (and often paying a junior salary).
02
The Mentorship Drought
Teams are lean. Seniors are overloaded. Training gets treated like a luxury. One especially bleak example: Indeed reportedly told engineering staff to stop mentoring anyone below senior level, around the same time juniors were laid off. The message juniors hear is simple: “If you’re not already experienced, you’re on your own.”
03
Economic Whiplash: Layoffs, Freezes, Risk-Averse Hiring
After the hiring boom, the downturn hit hard. Over 200,000 tech workers were laid off in 2023. That dumped a lot of experienced talent into the market and made companies even less willing to take a chance on juniors. Salesforce even announced a freeze on software engineering hires for 2025, pointing to productivity gains from AI-assisted work.
04
AI: Replacing Junior Work, Then Filtering Juniors Out
A senior engineer using AI can sometimes do the work of 2–4 junior developers. Copilot costs roughly $10–$39/month, while a junior engineer costs $70k–$90k/year plus benefits. No surprise that 37% of employers say they’d rather “hire” an AI tool than a new graduate.
And AI isn’t only doing the work. It’s screening applicants too. 73% of entry-level job seekers suspect an AI algorithm filtered out their application before a human ever saw it, and only about 1 in 5 applicants make it past the AI filter to a real interview.
The long-term risk is scary: if we stop hiring juniors now, who becomes the seniors later?
“A lot of people picked a bad year to be a junior developer… I wouldn’t want to be just getting started in the industry today.”
Read the full post
Rebuilding the ladder
Solving this isn’t charity. It’s future-proofing. If companies stop hiring and training juniors now, the whole talent pipeline gets hollowed out later.
We can keep the bar high and still build a real entry point again.
What companies can do
Concrete changes that make junior hiring real again.
01
Recalibrate job requirements
Stop calling a mid-level role “entry-level.” Remove rigid years-of-experience filters and hire for fundamentals, potential, and evidence of learning (projects, portfolios, assessments).
02
Bring back apprenticeships and mentorship
Create real ramps: internships, rotational programs, and 6-month apprenticeships with dedicated mentor time. Incentivize mentorship so it doesn’t get punished by “busy culture.”
03
Plan talent like it matters
Quantify the long-term cost of “no juniors.” A team with zero early-career talent is one resignation away from a skills gap. Don’t trade the future for this quarter’s spreadsheet.
04
Use AI to teach, not to erase the entry level
AI can automate the boring stuff and speed up learning… if juniors are included. Treat AI as a multiplier for the whole team, not a reason to stop developing people.
What junior developers can do right now
None of this is “easy,” but these moves tend to shift odds in the real world.
Build real projects (and ship proof)
Portfolios beat certificates. Contribute to open source, build small apps, write clear READMEs, and make it easy to evaluate your work fast.
Learn to work with AI tools
If AI is in the workflow, being AI-fluent helps. Learn how to use Copilot and ChatGPT to speed up debugging, testing, documentation, and learning… while still understanding what’s happening.
Network like a human
Referrals still cut through the automated black hole. Alumni chats, meetups, communities, informational calls… boring sometimes, effective often.
Get experience wherever it exists
Freelance, volunteer, contract, nonprofit work… anything that creates real artifacts, real constraints, and real stories for interviews.
Then practice communicating your decisions clearly.
Conclusion: Turning Frustration into Hope
If you’re a junior dev getting crushed by silence and rejections, this isn’t you “not wanting it enough.”
A bunch of forces hit at once: fewer entry roles, higher requirements, less mentorship, layoffs, and AI shifting both the work and the hiring funnel.
The part that matters most is what we do next.
If we want a future with great senior engineers, tech leads, and mentors, we have to create space for people to become them. The industry can rebuild the entry point without lowering standards… it just has to actually value training again.
Sources & further reading
If you want to dig deeper, these were referenced in the write-up.
Byteiota: Where will seniors come from?
A clear breakdown of why the pipeline problem is real and why it catches up fast.
SF Standard: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out
A look at entry-level collapse, hiring trends, and why the ladder is disappearing.
IntuitionLabs: AI’s impact on graduate jobs
Data-driven look at AI adoption and what it means for early-career roles.
Sourcegraph: The death of the junior developer
A blunt industry perspective on why junior hiring is getting squeezed.
Wawiwa Tech: Junior tech talent crisis
More context on entry-level contraction and what young pros can do next.
FinalRound AI: Why juniors struggle more now
A readable explainer of how AI shifts work, hiring, and expectations for juniors.
Have thoughts on junior hiring?
If you’re hiring and trying to rebuild an entry-level pipeline (or you’re a junior dev navigating this mess),
I’m happy to chat. Email is easiest.