[colangelod]

A junior engineer with some (but not too much) experience. Im not sure what exactly has been causing this lately but we have had serious issues at my current org as well as others that I help, finding junior engineers with 2-4 years of relevant experience. We run a fairly straight forward stack (postgres, python/node depending on the service, react front end), our packages are pretty competitive and we have not had a lot of (read basically none) good stuff come across the wire. Recently we have been inundated with resumes from boot camps, college kids, "self taught" people, and just people looking to change careers and expecting us to foot the bill to train them, none of them can hack it on even simple coding challenges or basic architecture questions. At this point ill take someone who can look at a common stack dump and have a fair idea of whats going wrong...

The best analogy I can think of is that we dont need Frank Gehry, but we need someone know knows the studs should be 16 inches apart, and all we are getting is people who know that 3 inch screws might be involved in the job but that is the only screw they have ever seen and the only screw they are comfortable using.

[trowawee]

Is the issue, possibly, that virtually every company has decided that hiring people and training them up in the requisite skillsets is an unreasonable ask? Despite that being the pattern for employment for most of the history of employment as a concept? Where do you think the population of junior engineers is going to come from if everyone thinks it's unreasonable to "foot the bill to train them"?

Drives me crazy that people don't want to hire entry level engineers, don't want to train people, and then complain they can't hire anyone. I was a bootcamp grad, and I was pretty useless for at least the first 6 months after I got my first job, as are most entry level engineers. Since then, I've been a pretty substantial bargain for every company I've worked for, based on the fact that I've managed 25+% raises at each subsequent job hop. I'd still be working at the first place I ever worked if they'd just kept my comp roughly in the same ballpark as what I was being offered.