Junior developers are excellent, it’s as simple as that.

They are enthusiastic. They love building things, they love writing code that does things, and that joy is infectious and spreads across the rest of your team. They will be enthusiastic about the work that you are bored of doing - bug fixing, business-as-usual, tech support, internal tooling requests - they will enjoy that work because it’s new and they can learn from it in a way that more experienced developers on your team cannot.

They are eager to learn. Junior developers are information sponges, when faced with something they don’t know they will go out and find the answer. They’re used to learning - reading, watching videos, being taught, pairing. They’re not under the illusion that they know it all already.

They see things differently. Often they’ll find answers that your more experienced developers miss because they’ve seen something not work before or their brain has taken the shortcut to a more standard but less good answer. They will see your code and your product with fresh eyes.

They’re probably more cutting edge. If they’ve only just learned to program they’ve may have used new technologies that your team hasn’t touched yet. Their personal projects are probably on the latest versions of your frameworks. The tutorials they’ve learned from are a year old not ten years old.

They are more likely to be from an underrepresented background. As an industry we are still hugely lacking in diversity, but in my experience the diversity of junior developers is much greater than at the senior end. Sadly that’s been true for over a decade, so I can only assume that in the past the junior developers from underrepresented backgrounds have had a bad time and either left the industry or been under-promoted which is why we haven’t seen that junior diversity of 10 years ago translate into more diversity at senior levels today. We have to start changing that now!

For the future. We’ve all felt the pain of hiring experienced developers: there aren’t enough of them! Hiring and training junior developers, bringing people into our industry and keeping them there, is how we solve the supply problem. It’s on all of us to make sure the next generation of experienced developers is being trained and supported today.

In the words of Isaac Lyman: “If you don't hire juniors, you don't deserve seniors”.