I’ve found this to be much less of a challenge than finding more experienced developers! Our junior job ads have received 10s to 100s of applicants. That said, hopefully enough companies will follow the advice in these Notion pages and fewer junior developers will be looking for work!
I think of junior developers as coming from three different sources:
By chance I think they line up with the three categories in our progression framework:
Computer science graduates have more “knowledge” - especially computer science concepts which self-taught coders and bootcamp grads are often lacking.
Self-taught coders tend to be stronger on “delivery” - they often have personal projects and a lot of enthusiasm for writing lots of code.
Bootcamp graduates are often really strong on “communication & leadership” - they may have had a previous career where they developed those skills, and they’ve probably also experienced team work and pair programming during their course.
They each have different skills and benefits, and I’d say if you’re hiring multiple junior developers then you might want a mix.