In the last 3 months, I've interviewed 134 engineers - students, mid-level, seniors and even CTOs.
My main takeaway: there is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers that most companies won’t even consider.
While everyone else is fighting over seniors, smart companies can get a significant advantage by going the other direction. If you won’t, your competitors will.
I’m not alone here. In the beginning of 2025 Shopify recently hired 25 interns (and their head of engineering said he aims for 1000(!) more by the end of the year, saying that: “...interns bring energy, drive and intensity that pushes the whole team forward.”)
Why do companies avoid juniors?
Every company has a different excuse:
In small startups - “we are a very small team and we don’t have time to mentor juniors, we need engineers who will be very productive from day 1"
In medium-sized companies - “we are going to grow very fast, we need engineers who can handle scale and have faced such challenges before"
In big companies - “our infrastructure is super complex, it’ll take juniors too long to ramp up".
It's safer to hire someone with 4+ years of experience who can contribute from day one, even if their ceiling isn't as high as a motivated junior engineer.
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