Small, not tech heavy companies like simple webshops, small crowdfunding platforms, etc will need someone, ANYONE, to keep working on their giant stack of legacy PHP/Rails/whatever code. The business does not support hiring very senior people and the founders are not technical at all so they don't recognize the troubles inherent in hiring a full team of juniors.After a few years the business may fold, but at that point the junior devs have gained some experience and move onwards and upwards. The attitude of "We refuse to train the future employees of our competitors.", while not un-true, fails when you can't even hire seniors.
I have done so with several big codebases, so I know that you speak the truth here. Putting junior devs in charge of a tire fire is only going to make such a codebase worse. But most of the owners of such businesses do not recognize it and only call in professional help when the business is already at the verge of collapse.
It's a hard fit for seniors even. Legacy is hard, big codebases are hard. You'd have to be crazy to let juniors take over such a thing. I think a junior might actually do better on a greenfield project if deadlines aren't too strict.
Small, not tech heavy companies like simple webshops, small crowdfunding platforms, etc will need someone, ANYONE, to keep working on their giant stack of legacy PHP/Rails/whatever code. The business does not support hiring very senior people and the founders are not technical at all so they don't recognize the troubles inherent in hiring a full team of juniors.After a few years the business may fold, but at that point the junior devs have gained some experience and move onwards and upwards. The attitude of "We refuse to train the future employees of our competitors.", while not un-true, fails when you can't even hire seniors.