Programming gives me great joy. I wrote my first batch scripts when I was 6 years old. I got my first job in the industry when I was 20. I'm 41 now. The problem isn't the act of programming.
As to juniors, first time I heard someone brag about AI removing the need to hire juniors was in 2022. every junior I know is struggling to find work. It's not hard to find reddit threads with people sharing their experience to that effect. The fact that some do get hired is not evidence to the contrary.
I remember being fresh out of school in peek free money era and couldn’t find anything. It was brutal. The only way i got out of it was by accepting help from an uncle who got me an internship at his company. After that one tiny bit of experience, i found a job at a php shop.
I dont think much has changed. It has always been who you know. I was fortunate enough to have an uncle.
Every single new hire i see is either the child of two fango mango parents or a visa. I rarely ever talk to someone with a different background.
In startup world, everyone had theater degrees or dropped out. It was amazing. I miss it.
Me, personally, a text adventure game filled with bugs that I did not know how to fix. (I realise only decades later that the index into array I was using to store the location references was probably incorrectly calculated when I moved sometimes.)
I learned a lot of programming from books like these (official links, not pirated):
There were more (one had a game called "Rats" and from the description I thought it would be a 3D game, but alas I never got it entered properly and even if I did, I realise now that it probably wasn't 3d rendered).
Not much for a while, then when I was a teenager I got into Flash / ActionScript, this was around the 2advanced era, if that means anything to you. I did a little bit of that & HTML, CSS and PHP throughout high school, then landed a job in e-mail marketing a few years after I dropped out of school, slicing templates for customers. Been climbing my way up since.
haha close! i saw my mom get frustrated not remembering where her programs were located, so I wrote a little numerical menu for her with her programs listed in order of use. each number was secretly another .bat script that would then go to the right directory and run, for example, WordPerfect for her.
As to juniors, first time I heard someone brag about AI removing the need to hire juniors was in 2022. every junior I know is struggling to find work. It's not hard to find reddit threads with people sharing their experience to that effect. The fact that some do get hired is not evidence to the contrary.