alt Hacker News> The point of hiring a junior is that you get a (relative to the market) cheap investment with a long-term payoff.
This is only a consideration if you can pay enough to keep the junior for the long term pay off.
Companies that aren't offering Big Tech compensation find it very difficult to compete on this.
The best juniors will get a job paying more than your company can offer in 2 years. The worst juniors will remain the "still haven't progressed beyond what they could do after the first month."
In this situation, unless the company can continue to offer pay increases to match what Big Tech can offer, it is disadvantageous to hire a junior developer.
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Sorry, but this overwhelmingly has not been my experience in nearly a decade working in tech. Even if you get 2-3 years out of a junior before they jump ship to a "big tech" (not as easy or common as you make it sound, by the way, especially during the last few years of layoffs and hiring freezes), you likely have reaped far more benefits at a low cost relative to the market than the ramp-up time investment in the junior. Furthermore, the talent pipeline here benefits everyone - even if they jump ship elsewhere, because you could not promote or otherwise mentor them into staying, you can also hire these "jump ship" engineers on the other side of the pipeline.
When this dries up because the market stops investing in junior engineers, you're left with absolutely nothing after a mere handful of years. I worry about this future a lot. Luckily I am in a shop that does not mind hiring them (now is a super good time to find junior talent at a good price too).
This is absolutely FUD.
Most engineers don't work at FAANG. Most _good_ engineers DONT work at FAANG. FAANG is still composed of almost all good engineers. Most software engineers are NOT _good_.
All of these things are simultaneously true.
Most of your junior engineering hires will never develop to FAANG levels, and as such are never in positions to seriously only hypercompete for those FAANG salaries. There vast majority of devs, even in the US, that are perfectly adequate (note, not great, adequate) to act as developers for non-FAANG companies for non-FAANG wages. This is the kind of developer universities are churning out at insane rates.