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When where I work was small, we still hired a fair number of junior people, although I think all (or most) were conversions from interns. One thing we were able to do, that is much harder at large companies is hire smart, technically minded people for customer support, who were able to help with automation, and eventually become full time developers. At a larger company, they would have automated their job, and nobody would have noticed, now they've been able to build skills and experience and should be able to get a developer job when they're done with us (may need to learn interview problems though).