I suspect this junior hiring crisis thing is linked to the ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days.

When I was starting, you were checked for potential as a trainee. In my case, options trading. They checked over that you could do some mental arithmetic, and that you had a superficial idea of what trading was about. Along with a degree from a fancy university, that was all that was needed. I didn't know much about coding, and I didn't know much about stochastic differential equations.

A couple of weeks ago, a young guy contacted me about his interview with an options trading firm. This guy had spent half a year learning every stat/prob trick question ever. All those game theory questions about monks with stickers on their foreheads, all the questions about which card do you need to turn over, the lot. The guy could code, and had learned a bunch of ML to go with it. He prepared for their trading game with some really great questions to me about bet sizing.

I was convinced he was simply overly nervous about his prospects, because I'd never met someone so well prepared.

Didn't get the job.

Now I can assure you, he could have done the job. But apparently, firms want to hire people who are nearly fully developed on their own dime.

When they get their analyst class, I guess there is going to be nobody who can't write async python. Everyone will know how to train an ML on a massive dataset, everyone will already know how to cut latency in the system.

All things that I managed to learn while being paid.

You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where people have to already know the job before they get their first job. Where everyone is like a doctor: already decided at age 16 that this was the path they wanted to follow, choosing classes towards that goal, and sticking with it until well into adulthood. And they have to essentially pay to get this job, because it comes at at cost of exploring other things (as well as actual money to live).