Comment by supportengineer 15 hours ago
Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first?
Single-Payer health care would help our industry immensely if it came to pass.
Imagine having no fear any more.
> Perhaps juniors (and in fact all of us) are going to seem more palatable as contractors at first
It actually might help.
This is the model used in Eastern Europe and India - the vast majority of new grads are hired by mass recruiters like EPAM, WITCH, Deloitte, and Accenture at low base salaries but also the expectation that they self train and learn how to become productive SWEs, or they just stagnate at the low rungs. Japan, Korea, and China use a similar model as well.
But honestly, even FTE isn't much of a headache if I can hire a junior SWE for $60k-80k, invest in training them, and then bumping salaries to market rate after they have matured. This is what a number of traditional F500s like Danaher [0], AbbVie [1], and Capital One [2] do via Leadership and Trainee Development Programs, and honestly, it's much easier to make a case to hire someone if they have a couple of years of real world work experience.
[0] - https://jobsblog.danaher.com/blog/leadership-development-pro...
[1] - https://www.abbvie.com/join-us/student-programs.html
[2] - https://www.capitalonecareers.com/get-ahead-with-early-caree...
>if I can hire a junior SWE for $60k-80k, invest in training them, and then bumping salaries to market rate after they have matured.
1. if you're in a high CoL area, how are they living off of 60k?
2. the big gamble is trusting companies to give a salary bump after that point and not instead cut them off. trust in corporate isn't exactly high right now.
I don't really like the idea of "what if we get more desperate and lower our standards while billionaires continue to make record profits?" as a solution to our problem. We'll just go the way of Electrical Enineering and lose most of our talent to China.