Not Hiring Junior Developers Isn’t a Mistake, It’s the Tragedy of the Commons.

Most teams won’t actually benefit within the first year of hiring junior devs. Here’s why junior devs can’t find jobs.

Ever wondered where all the junior software engineers are in the industry? (Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash)

In the first 6 months, 2 junior devs won’t replace 1 senior developer but will typically cost the same or more.

(I actually do hire and mentor junior devs on my team, but they’re definitely not staff-level engineers within a year.)

Plus, the junior devs know they can leave after a year for a job paying twice as much, and companies don’t give raises, so retention isn’t incentivized.

Think about the business case for hiring junior developers. It makes perfect financial sense to never hire junior developers if your team:

• has problems with retention,
• lacks mentoring,
• needs immediate results, or
• is understaffed.

Since that sounds like most software engineering teams, then most teams just aren’t going to be the right fit for early-career software engineers.

The tragedy of the commons piece of things is that, with no junior dev jobs available, there is indeed a chronic skills shortage when hiring…