The notion that the junior software developer job market is oversaturated, but the senior developer market is not is absurd

I hear this notion mentioned all the time on Reddit. People will say that it’s really hard to get a job as a junior developer, but it’s very easy to get a job offer if you’re a senior developer. I don’t believe this is true at all.

First off, I have 10 years of professional software development experience, and I have just as much difficulty finding a job as the junior developers claim to have. If my anecdotal evidence is not adequate, then there is a more compelling argument, which I will describe in this article.

Let’s assume for the sake of the argument that it takes 20 years to cross the chasm from being a junior to become a senior developer. This means for the first 20 years of your career, you are a junior developer, and then for the remaining 10 years, you are a senior developer. (This assumes the total length of a developer career is 30 years). This means you spend 66% of your career as a junior, and then the remaining 33% of your career as a senior. If you assume that all developers in the industry are evenly distributed across all age groups, then this means that 66% of all developers ae juniors, and 33% of all are senior developers.

The problem here is that it doesn’t actually take 20 years to become a senior software developer. A more realistic figure is something like 4 or 5 years. This means that if the first 5 years of a 30 year career are junior, then 17% of all developers are junior, and the remaining 83% are senior developers.

Essentially, since you spend the majority of your career as a senior developer, then there should be more senior developers on the market. Additionally, since you spend relatively few years sas a junior developer, then junior developers should be more scarce. Yet the internet seems to keep saying that junior developers are more plentiful than senior developers.

So what’s going on here? My theory is that people on the internet who claim that their company is flooded with junior developers applications, but have a hard time finding senior developers are simply lying.