Ask HN: Why Will No One Hire Jr. Devs?

The Portland startup where I work just hired 3 jr. devs. Our goal was 2 seniors and 2 juniors but we didn't get any viable senior candidates. Most candidates were eliminated at the code challenge stage. So that'd be my tip: if you have to complete a code challenge, make sure it's the best code you've ever written. Even if it's a trivial task, things like full test coverage and demonstrating that you know some OOP best practices will give you a better chance at an interview.

The two bootcamp grads we hired had much stronger skills than most of their peers. I had conversations with their instructors and, indeed, they said that these guys were top of the class.

Also note that while senior devs are hard to find, competition is fierce at the junior level. We relocated one from Boston and the other had done his bootcamp in Chicago.

You make it unclear what your skills are. Being a bootcamp, I assume you've got RoR or Node.js as your stack?

You also don't specify where you are applying. Startups or corporates?

I've also never heard of any major tech companies in OR, so perhaps you may need to consider relocating.

If I was in your position, I would go for some company like Oracle/RackSpace/RedHat. Do the ugly grunt work for a year or so and gain a shit load of experience. Don't be afraid to do as many certifications as the company can afford as well.

You can then leave after that year or so. Go do some startup stuff, see if you like it. If you don't, you can always go back to the $90k job with your certs.

PS. Here are some keywords for a startup job (polite humour): "I know web-scale" ; "node.js and async rule the world" ; "non-relational DBs shard efficiently and beat relational DB asses" ; "rapid prototyper" ; "Rails gems" ; "convention over configuration" .

Good luck!

I interviewed a few candidates from NYC-based developer bootcamps and the experience scared me away from even trying to interview any more.

The people I interviewed (admittedly only three, but the ones who I thought had the strongest resumes out of their cohorts), were unable to complete even basic real-world programming tasks during the interviews. I would literally sit them down, show them my code base, and ask them to make a minor improvement to a page (i.e something that would take me I think the basic problem is that programming is hard and learning to do it at a professional level takes a lot longer than 8-12 weeks. Much like learning to be a lawyer takes more than 12 weeks -- you wouldn't hire a criminal defense lawyer who had graduated from a "lawyer bootcamp."

If you actually do have the skills to do the job, the best way to demonstrate it is to build a complete, functional, polished website and put your code on Github. Some candidates I looked at had "bootcamp demo projects" on Github but the quality of them was way, way below where it needed to be to prove they were adequately skilled.

As they say: "show, don't tell".

I feel like including the company name and then proceeding to trash your employee was a poor choice.

Just out of curiosity, which bootcamps did these candidates come from?