Juniors write a lot of code. Often significant amounts for a company's products and services. They're the ones who are implementing all the decisions that seniors spend their time making in all their meetings.
Most senior engineers I've seen have most of their days filled with meetings with very little actual coding time.
The seniors are valuable, making decisions, coming up with solutions, building frameworks etc, but it's the juniors who then take that and run with it and build everything on top of it.
So while some will still code, it's far less than what the junior engineers are creating.
Yes they require some more training, and clear direction, but they are the ones actually creating and executing the vision of the company informed by the seniors.
What companies really want, like others have said, are senior engineers who are willing to accept a junior salary.
While of course companies would love senior engineers willing to accept a junior salary I'd say
> Most senior engineers I've seen have most of their days filled with meetings with very little actual coding time.
Is actually a symptom of the shortage of senior engineers. Big companies that can afford to hire as much talent as they want actually will let seniors write code all day (my company does) because they have the economies of scale that lets them afford doing so; no one else can.
Juniors write a lot of code. Often significant amounts for a company's products and services. They're the ones who are implementing all the decisions that seniors spend their time making in all their meetings.
Most senior engineers I've seen have most of their days filled with meetings with very little actual coding time.
The seniors are valuable, making decisions, coming up with solutions, building frameworks etc, but it's the juniors who then take that and run with it and build everything on top of it.
So while some will still code, it's far less than what the junior engineers are creating.
Yes they require some more training, and clear direction, but they are the ones actually creating and executing the vision of the company informed by the seniors.
What companies really want, like others have said, are senior engineers who are willing to accept a junior salary.