I'm advertising for 2 roles at the moment: a Senior Backend engineer and a Junior Frontend (in London, UK). Almost impossible to find someone for the backend role, but I've had to turn off the advertising as I've had 71 people apply for the junior frontend role. The mix is fascinating, a lot of ex-bootcampers, some CS grads, some self-taught people, but all of them are desperate for a shot to get into our industry. I've found this quite worrying as a signal for what's happening in the wider economy.
Could be a lot of things, but my guess - maybe seniors don't find your offering compelling enough? Try avoiding "young teams" and "beers" and put more "healthy snacks", "work life balance" in the job offer and see what happens. Seniors generally have better options than juniors, you're gonna have to work hard to get and retain them.
I read an article regrading this recently... With junior engineers, they are selling themselves. With senior engineers, the company has to sell itself to them instead.
My comment was about comparing and contrasting the amount of cold interest(/desperation). I wasn't passing comment on how hard it was to recuit - of course it's harder to recruit experienced people.
Yes, the web front-end is perceived as low-effort entrance to the software development fields. Purely commercial bootcamps, people from unrelated fields, people without a clue about networks and browsers, people hanging on anything which will allow them to land a job - it makes it trivial for Google and Facebook to basically take an absolute control over the web with their technologies, solutions, and stacks.
