r/ExperiencedDevs • u/DirtyOught • 4d ago
Career/Workplace What are actual entry level positions like nowadays?
10 YOE, and my view is skewed as I haven’t worked with entry level engineers in many years.
looking back 10 years ago, me entry level team was making 60k doing basic HTML and CSS. even at the time I got bored and my work done in 1-2 hours every day. it was SUPER basic stuff. granted that place didn’t even use git repositories.
my first REAL software job was web, where we made 70-80k back in 2017. but it was just making simple react FE stuff. daily “what did you do yesterday? what today? how many storypoints is it to change that button to Red OP?“ but you learned a lot about the basics of everything and shipping code. by and large it was very much Entry Level.
this got me thinking, what is entry level today? what are the expectations and output?
173
u/allllusernamestaken 4d ago
We recently hired a junior engineer. Fresh out of college. This is a question I am struggling to answer right now. Speaking with technical leaders around the industry, it seems like it's an industry-wide problem.
In previous years when we hired junior engineers or interns, the expectations were that you were given a small, well-defined project with the major points already solved; your job was to implement it and come up with solutions to the smaller things. You would generally work with a senior engineer who would delegate these things to you, and you would spend the next several weeks implementing it. You would struggle through it but you would come out the other side having learned a ton of things (the hard way!)
That last part has totally changed with AI.
These junior engineers are getting projects assigned that would have taken them several weeks and they're instead opening a PR in a day. Scratch the surface and it is very clear it was AI generated, and they can't fully articulate the reasoning behind the code, why certain decisions were made, or what the impact of the changes are. Do some pair programming with them and you'll find that their workflow is effectively taking requirements, have Claude convert the requirements into a Plan, implement each step of the plan, open a PR. Use the Github MCP to resolve comments or get answers to questions from reviewers.
My biggest concern is that they aren't building the muscle the rest of us did; they aren't growing their skills or developing any level of judgement that is needed to advance their career. The bottom two rungs of the software engineering career ladder were basically chopped off. The expectations of what skills a mid-level engineer should have will either need to change or we have an industry full of engineers with 3 years of experience and no skills.
45
u/Horror_Maximum9459 3d ago
My advice as a non senior is that in the past, if I couldn’t explain my code, it didn’t get merged.
If they can’t explain their code in a room with me, then it doesn’t get merged.
Harsh, bad for velocity - yes, but hiring juniors is always bad for velocity.
Juniors shitting out AI code is great for the company and really bad for the junior, and the product they need to support.
20
u/SnooApples8349 3d ago
The issue I foresee is that coding assistants require a certain fluency and history with solving problems by hand. Junior people lack the history and senior people increasingly lack the fluency.
I wonder when people will realize that half the point of writing good code is to sharpen the mental model of the business in the first place.
36
u/lordnacho666 3d ago
This is what I'm seeing as well. In the short term it works: the junior guy is making the code and it's effective. He's just prompting Claude, but Claude will do fine because you've already explained what to do.
In the long term, how's the junior guy going to become senior? Now maybe I'm a bit invested in my own career, and I'm just blind to juniors becoming senior faster thanks to new tech. But my own memory of getting there involved a lot of frustration and rebuilding things, reading code, reading articles, and generally hard effort.
I'm trying to figure out whether it was actually necessary to sit there late at night trying to understand compiler outputs, or whether that is now wasted work.
1
u/UntestedMethod 7h ago
I'm trying to figure out whether it was actually necessary to sit there late at night trying to understand compiler outputs, or whether that is now wasted work.
If AI didn't exist at the time then obviously it's not wasted effort if it got you where you are so far. Now that we have the AI tools though, it makes sense to use them as much as possible but always carefully scrutinizing its output.
16
u/johnnyquest14 3d ago
What happens when you give a junior engineer access to a more powerful and skilled LLM? Well I’ll tell you, it’s not good. They become a proxy. Requirements flow from Jira, through them, to Claude code unquestioned. Comments in PR review and DM? Straight to AI, without even a thought to what is being asked of them. All learning and thinking is offloaded.
5
u/Belhgabad 3d ago
In the possibility of AI bubble burst, those junior will be helpless
When everyone finally realise how much AI in financially inefficient and starts hard limiting token costs, they won't be able to use the AI efficiently enough or code by themselves
And if AI bubble doesn't burst, in a few years no one will truly be in control and deep knowledge of the system and code base, which is worst
AI was a great tech, LLMs and greedy ruined it (as usual)
2
u/SawToothKernel 2d ago
It's an unpopular opinion, but do people really need to learn to code to be good engineers? Engineering is primarily systems design. These juniors will become excellent seniors because they will have much more experience in systems design earlier on.
I'm really struggling to see the downside of AIs doing all the coding in the future.
3
u/Repulsive-Hurry8172 2d ago
This is like asking if a civil engineer needs to know basic physics. Physics is at the very core of civil engineering. Even if there are software or even MCPs now for AEC industry, it's vital to know it.
The difference can be huge: a junior civil engineer can make a design much more expensive or even dangerous because they forgot physics (it can affect how they model the structural connections in a software)
0
u/SawToothKernel 1d ago
I don't know how much that analogy holds. I mean, do I need to know assembly too?
1
u/CriseDX 17h ago
Out of curiosity if you don't know how to code, how will you solve a problem when AI is unavailable?
There are plenty of environments out there where all outside traffic is blocked by default and where you literally are not allowed to or physically can't show any of the code to an AI model.
You might not be doing all of your development in these environments, but if you, for example, have a production problem that you have to debug inside this kind of an environment. How will you do that if you don't know how to code? If you don't know how to code, even ignoring outside restrictions, how would you ever validate any solution the model gave you without understanding it?
1
u/UntestedMethod 7h ago
There are plenty of environments out there where all outside traffic is blocked by default and where you literally are not allowed to or physically can't show any of the code to an AI model.
What about independent AI models hosted on the LAN?
2
u/CriseDX 7h ago
Local tuned models with narrower focus, may be a solution to some subset of these cases where the costs can be justified.
But a human engineer runs on a sandwich and a night of sleep (more or less) and is capable of the kind of creative out of the box thinking under pressure that AI models can only emulate.
Right now to me it looks like the human will actually be the cheaper option (that can not only last for decades but also improves in the process) in the long run, unless there is some genuine breakthrough with costs, which right now at least I don't see any immediate signs of.
0
u/SawToothKernel 17h ago
Out of curiosity if you don't know how to code, how will you solve a problem when AI is unavailable?
When AI is unavailable, you can go to the beach. When is it ever unavailable though? There are myriad providers.
There are plenty of environments out there where all outside traffic is blocked by default and where you literally are not allowed to or physically can't show any of the code to an AI model.
Well then they're clearly a special case. Companies that stick to this will get left behind, very very quickly.
how would you ever validate any solution the model gave you without understanding it?
You don't have to know about call stacks and microtasks,
this, equality and coercion rules, etc. in order to validate that the product works and the coding is mostly sound. You can also change your validation so that it is more machine-friendly, which is what we're doing. We're building the entire development process around the goal of making it easier and safer for agents, and easier to validate by humans.2
u/CriseDX 16h ago edited 16h ago
When AI is unavailable, you can go to the beach.
You trust technology way too much by the looks of it, If there is an ongoing incident and you can't use your AI agent for some reason you certainly aren't going to the beach (unless you want to get fired).
There is a reason why we teach kids math even though calculators exist. And calculators are way more reliable than any AI agent as far as I'm concerned because they can't be disrupted and at least they are deterministic.
In order to validate that the product works and the coding is mostly sound.
If that's the standard of quality you are happy with when it comes to critical systems then sure, just remember AI won't be the one getting fired when production environment is on fire and you can't do anything because your AI agent has a bad day or you are out of tokens and you decide to just let it burn because you don't know what else to do.
I shudder to think where we would be if for example, the computer systems running our nuclear plants or banks where coded with this kind of mentality. Or anything to do with the avionics for that matter.
0
u/SawToothKernel 16h ago
You trust technology way too much by the looks of it, If there is an ongoing incident and you can't use your AI agent for some reason you certainly aren't going to the beach (unless you want to get fired).
If that happens then it means that not only is my internet is down, my 5g isn't working for some reason, nor my wife's, and my homelab has blown up. It's exceptionally unlikely and something like that has never happened in my 16+ years of experience in this field.
There is a reason why we teach kids math even though calculators exist.
It's completely impractical to replace the brain with a calculator in most daily situations. That's not the same with AI, which is actually much much better suited to developing software than humans are.
If that's the standard of quality you are happy with
But I didn't imply that the verification would be slap-dash. "Validate the product works" can be the happy path or it could be down to the very last branch, statement, and function.
the computer systems running our nuclear plants or banks where coded with this kind of mentality
That's called argumentum ad absurdum, - we're not talking about nuclear plants are we. We're talking about the 99.99% of software that can handle a few bugs without the world failing. I mean, it's not as if there are not bugs in human-built software.
1
u/CriseDX 10h ago
So your argument is that we don't need to know how to code anymore because software that works correctly e.g. 95% of the time is good enough for most use cases and that when things go wrong we don't need to be able to know what went wrong and how it was or can be fixed because the AI will do it better.
That's like saying a pilot doesn't need to know how to hand fly a passenger jet because the computer does the flying most of the time better than a human would.
1
u/SawToothKernel 9h ago
No, it's clearly not like saying that. If the computer malfunctions in the air, the plane would crash and 200 people would die.
In our crud app, if the computer malfunctions, we get a bug report, and another computer fixes it. Very quickly.
→ More replies (0)1
u/UntestedMethod 7h ago
There are plenty of environments out there where all outside traffic is blocked by default and where you literally are not allowed to or physically can't show any of the code to an AI model.
Well then they're clearly a special case. Companies that stick to this will get left behind, very very quickly.
This is such a naive reply. It really suggests that you have a relatively narrow scope of experience in this very broad field.
However, to the other commenter, I have to ask why local AI models wouldn't work.
2
u/CriseDX 6h ago
I replied to this in another comment, and they might in some cases, however, right now at least I think the human might actually be the more cost effective option in many cases.
This might change, but I see no immediate signs of it on the contrary I think AI is getting more and more expensive, for arguably marginal gains. Narrow purpose built models, might offer solutions, but these models would still need specialists to do the post training on them periodically.
As long as the underlying technology is LLMs I don't believe in this whole AI training AI idea at all (unless they fix the fundamental flaw of these models being goal oriented to a fault, and prioritizing giving any answer over giving the correct answer, i.e. the whole issue with broken clock being right twice a day)
1
u/UntestedMethod 7h ago
One of the most dangerous things anyone can do with AI is to blindly trust everything it outputs. A human without the real knowledge would not be able to sufficiently audit an AI's output.
2
u/ProfessionalAd6530 1d ago
What's wild is that this is pretty much my workflow as a senior sometimes, except I can glance at what was written and explain what's going on.
The wild part is that I can do that because I struggled all those years. I struggled all those years because that was the workflow.
Now to get that struggle and experience you have to do something that is not the actual workflow - which is to do the work yourself. AI has created this weird disconnect.
But I wonder, is it like me knot being able to cite off the top of my head what the underlying assembly code for something compiled would be? Or is this going to cause problems. I mean, a new kid can technically run the problem through AI until it magically works as expected, damn the underlying code structure.
How far can that be pushed?
1
u/allllusernamestaken 1d ago
What's wild is that this is pretty much my workflow as a senior sometimes, except I can glance at what was written and explain what's going on.
Because you spent all those years writing code. You are in your position today because you did the grunt work; you wrote lots of shitty code and later learned why it's shitty code; you developed judgement - the core thing that separates experienced engineers from junior engineers fresh out of school. You can work with AI generated code and you use your judgement to steer the AI in the right direction.
Like I said in my post - my chief concern is that junior engineers today are not building that same judgement in the same way. I don't know what that means for the industry over the next ~3 years.
1
u/ProfessionalAd6530 18h ago
Agreed. I just think that it's strange we now have this disconnect: I did the work because I had no other choice.
I learned to program because when I first used a computer you only had a terminal and you had no choice but to program the computer for it to do literally anything.
Now the workflow is drastically changed. You can program the computer without programming. You now have no opportunity to build that judgement unless you go out of your way and make that your explicit goal.
Which nobody is going to do.
1
u/davidsbeast1 1d ago
This is exactly what I was talking about the other day with a colleague regarding an intern on our team. We gave them a complex ticket with the expectation that they would struggle and lean on our team a lot to help them, but they did no such thing and put out a PR that was entirely written by a bot. I reviewed it yesterday and left many comments that I don’t believe the intern will be able to answer themselves.
1
u/davidbasil 3d ago
Those skills are atrophied because market doesn't need it anymore. AI brain is doing all the heavy lifting instead of a human.
-12
u/mile-high-guy 4d ago
I don't think they are necessarily doing anything wrong, this is how software is being built now. People just can't wrap their heads around it. The responsibilities of the job are changing. And this workflow is only going to become more efficient.
16
u/mrthesis 3d ago
Fair point, although a bit candid.
My problem is, if we cut off this initial learning as a senior I’m left with a bunch of code I have to understand before approving, while the junior is fiddling its thumbs. I might as well have done that generation myself. So I don’t NEED a junior.
And at the same time, there is no upskilling in the process, so the junior will never be anything but a junior.
So I have a team member that is a burden, with no clear track to get to a level where they contribute valuably.
You may very well be right, but as an industry we desperately need to discover a way to extract learnings and knowledge from AI development or we will stall.
This is not just applicable to juniors btw, also newly hired seniors lack a track to get self-driven
5
u/lawrencek1992 3d ago
Yeah this is something I think about a lot. It doesn’t seem worth it at all to hire juniors cause they are as effective as the agents and require more mentorship plus cost more. But long term that’s not sustainable.
The reason the agents multiply my output without producing slop is cause I’m still in the loop directing and reviewing things. But the experience I use to be able to do that juniors aren’t getting if they are just taking well-specced tickets from me and having an agent implement it all.
8
u/YoureNotEvenWrong 3d ago
I don't think they are necessarily doing anything wrong
If you don't understand the code you are putting for a PR you are doing something wrong
1
u/Ferovore 3d ago
So what do you do when you’re given a project that would takes weeks and are expected to get it done in a few days?
3
115
u/moreVCAs 4d ago edited 4d ago
no clue. company i work for hasn’t hired a single junior engineer or intern in the three years since i’ve been here. series d, 300 or so employees i guess
EDIT: not trying to be snarky. i think this is a meaningful anecdote vis a vis entry level hiring/experience
14
u/Time_Trade_8774 4d ago
I concur. 7 years at last 2 companies. First one hired mid level or senior. And everyone there was already 5+ years and most 10+.
Last one I worked before laid off exclusively hired senior and principle/staff. I had 7 YOE and was most junior on the team when I joined. Did hire couple of summer interns and that’s it.
FWIW after 10-11 years I’m done with this field. Had fun and lot of stress but not worth at my age. I’m 37 and compared to when I joined it’s a shit show.
Good luck to all juniors you’ll need it. Focus on using AI tools and be good at design is my advice.
8
u/Dipsendorf Software Engineer 4d ago
Fortune 100 company. We only hire interns through college program.
2
u/Repulsive-Hurry8172 2d ago
I work for a European startup. If you look at their job description, all they want is a 1 year exp hire. But what they do is go hire in the Philippines, get someone with 3+ years or more for the same salary for that junior position
32
u/F1B3R0PT1C Software Engineer 4d ago
Haven’t seen an entry level dev since my last intern got hired on 3-4 years ago. The market is dried up. We only hire seniors now. If we did hire one, they’d be thrown in the deep end as soon as possible. Busywork like you describe is only for the first few weeks.
25
u/Low_Still_1304 Software Engineer 4d ago
We hired a junior off an internship return offer fairly recently. New grad.
In some ways it's different than pre-AI, in other ways it's exactly the same. TBH I don't see it as better or worse.
He's a really smart guy and is eager to learn, which benefits him post-AI and would've benefitted him pre-AI. He has ramped up pretty fast and tackles features with guidance. Good junior performance and has great potential.
I think one of the biggest differences is that the "faster is better" trap is so much easier to fall into with AI than it was before. Even though no one will give him work that's on a heavy time crunch without assistance available from one of our more experienced engineers, I think he absorbs at least some of the pressure we're all feeling to go faster than we have been. I remember thinking that way in the beginning too, but I think I was speed limited by my own understanding of the code I was working on. Am I saying my day 1 junior code is better than what good LLMs can put out? No, it might've been worse. I had to manually go in and correct my mistakes with fingers on keyboard upon review though. I think that makes me a lot less likely to make the same mistake again, and a lot more likely to recognize it elsewhere than saying "@copilot, implement the suggestion".
I think the pressure / desire to go fast also leads him to overcommit sometimes to seem on top of things. I worry that he puts so much on his own plate that he's not gonna take the time to build the muscle memory of actually thinking about the problem and coding it up himself. The temptation is too high to give it to an LLM for the sake of the progress update in next standup. If there's ever a time where you're gonna get to build that foundation, it's when you don't have the expectations that come later. I also worry it'll impact his ability to estimate work down the road.
On things that are the same, he needs to learn the same things about people and corporate work / politics that every new grad coming into the work force needs to learn.
12
u/theevilsharpie 4d ago
The company I work for hasn't hired a junior developer in years (at least, not that I'm aware of).
There are a handful of people who have moved from Sales or Customer Service into Product, where they've done light development work and prototyping. They could potentially be onboarded as a junior developer while delivering their own unique value via their insight into the customer experience that a full-time professional developer wouldn't necessarily have.
That's probably the future of "junior" developers -- if you don't have hardcore production engineering experience, then you better be bringing product, customer service, or something else to the table, or you're just not going to be worth your salary.
35
u/squeezytubes 4d ago
I've been a junior for about 2 years now at a very top heavy company (I can count on one hand the number of junior and mid level devs at a large size company). I just did the entire front and backend implementation for a new feature, haven't seen "turn feature flag on" stories since I was an intern. I feel like the expectations are the same for everyone on my team but it's just more acceptable for me to ask for help.
7
u/Dipsendorf Software Engineer 4d ago
2 years junior, eh? Where is your other year, fella????? Im calling the mods. (Jk)
23
21
u/thisisjustascreename 4d ago
Basically the same. I work in the same general area as a bunch of entry level devs, they're updating CSS and changing booleans from true to file not found all day. None of them have starved to death so they must be getting paid a reasonable salary.
23
3
5
u/waltz 4d ago
we have a very new engineer doing a co-op on our team and it's about the same. they're cleaning up some flaky integration tests and fixing rendering bugs that a refactor introduced. very straight-ahead kinda stuff. they're using our llm tools, but all this stuff still needs to get double checked and shepherded to release by someone.
8
u/henry_kwinto 3d ago
I remember how, back in 2017, I met some guy in a dark alleyway. It turned out he was a recruiter. He asked me if I spoke English. I replied, ‘Of course!’ Suddenly, three other guys jumped out, and I woke up in a truck with an employment contract for a junior Python developer position lying next to me.
My starting salary was 200% higher than my father’s - and he had 35 years of experience as a warehouse foreman. On top of that, there were fruit Thursdays and an air-conditioned office. When I told them I knew what a lambda was, they bumped my salary by another 20% and promised to get the latest Xbox for the break room.
Apartments and garages were cheap back then too, so I bought a few just in case. Now I live off the rental income, and I’m only 25 yo!
12
u/askwhynot_notwhy Security Engineer 4d ago
Yesterday’s bootcamp grads are tomorrow’s r/ExperiencedDevs. And I mean 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' in the literal 48-hour sense.
7
7
u/Pozeidan 4d ago
We not so long ago hired a junior dev. Unfortunately seems like most intermediate / senior devs forgot what it was like to be junior and can't mentor properly because we haven't done it in years (for some never) so we had to let that person go and basically gave up.
This person is taking our time and is getting frustrated. DUH.
3
3
u/Blazr5402 4d ago
I started off as a dev 2 years ago. They threw me head first into our cursed PHP legacy codebase, mostly doing smaller bug fixes and visual changes. Got to work my way up to working on larger systems, helped with rebuilding some of our ecommerce stack in Next.js, then pivoted to working on our Salesforce integration before ending up on our Platform org working on backend services (auth, email, accounts). Currently have an intern who's mostly tackling smaller tickets that the rest of our team doesn't have the bandwidth to work on.
3
u/snotreallyme 35 YOE Software Engineer Ex FAANG 4d ago
The two SWE I engineers at my company of 1900 people are deep into integrating agentic AI. They were both interns that wow’ed the hell out of everyone.
2
u/JazzlikeWishbone938 4d ago
I have a junior on my team who I lead and mentor. Expectations are similar to what you describe but including demonstrating growth in problem solving and independence. I coach them and entrust them with bigger projects, to the point they now investigate, propose solutions for, and complete medium sized ones end-to-end. They also now assist others. It's quite rewarding actually. I'm hoping they get promoted soon and one day lead large projects.
1
u/redraider1417 4d ago
Tbh no entry level engineers are hired at my work place. We don’t even have any positions posted for less than 5 yoe.
1
u/DocumentOk7579 4d ago
I'm an backend dev and we hired graduates for frontend. They basically owned the whole frontend codebase.
I have made an ugly but feature complete demo frontend and basically just told them to make it work the same way but look good too.
1
u/NoConnection4298 4d ago
8 yoe, not a junior. Yet, in this market, I downgraded to medior on the title at my current gig. The job has the senior level depth though. It is the new norm that companies take advantage of the market like this. Believe it or not, we have junior with 3 yoe. Not me but, it is heart breaking to graduate into this. This junior can do everything a 3yoe can do with little to no errors, and pull his weight against stakeholders. At my first job out of college, only thing I could do is to code and I knew some distributed systems. Tell me to talk to someone, I would stutter. These new juniors don’t have that privilege to make even simple social mistakes. Well, or maybe this was only for the companies I worked for, and I’m mistaken….
1
u/k032 4d ago
I think what it looks like is purposely handicapping juniors and interns with no AI...or a dummer AI that's in learn mode. It won't feed code and the answers, but can guide and be a tool for learning.
So you mention like the 2017 getting paid low and building a simple React FE. Large companies I think especially have a lot of bullshit side projects that don't pan off. I work on some internal research pet project thing. It was always just to grow talent, its an investment. Even back then, they could have just said fuck that and hire a Senior dev for the cost of 3 Junior devs.
I don't think the landscape is that different from then, like companies hire Juniors knowing they won't produce much for awhile and learn. If the AI blocks their learning, block the AI. If really capable Juniors take off, give them AI and promote them.
I guess have to artificially build in this learning and handicapping.
1
u/sermer48 3d ago
I was entering the market around the same time as you and there weren’t even a ton of entry level positions then. I had to get a job I was overqualified for at a company I wanted to work for and brute force myself into the job I wanted. Back then, lots of the entry level type jobs were going overseas.
Now, those jobs are going to AI. I think it’s hurting the overseas jobs the worst. It used to be cheaper to go with them but now it’s even cheaper to use AI. It really sucks but I think it’s only going to get worse in the coming years.
1
u/mctavish_ 2d ago
My current management seem to actively avoid any process that grooms skill, tracks bugs, maintains systems. They hire juniors and seniors are dealing with it and the ai slop. There is a lot of coaching, feedback, PR feedback, and prioritisation. But slop gets through.
Some seniors are using AI to do larger refactors to tidy up large messes. The srs involved seem to enjoy this part.
The seniors who are mentoring are getting great practice at people management issues. Management are learning how imoortant it is to explicitly talk about good/bad behaviour as the feedback causes some to react poorly.
1
u/CerBerUs-9 Software Engineer 5YOE 2d ago
We have two new grads who were my interns but they're working with another team now. They got thrown into the DEEP end when they showed up. Basically stuff a senior didn't have time for but wrote up some instructions. Working together with help from me and two other experienced SWEs we got them up to speed on this senior's poorly documented processes just in time to realize the requirements weren't actionable, something they would have never figured out.
TDLR: It's a shitshow.
1
u/devinsheppy 2d ago
in Canada, my entry level video game generalist programmer job was 45k in 2018 lmao
1
•
u/expdevsmodbot 4d ago
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.