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Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#32I've hired quite a lot of programmers over the years, but I'm Danish, and around 95% of our junior applicants and 100% of the people we interview come with a relevant degree (2.5-5 years) because of our free education system. So it may be a tad different in the US where a lot of people are autodidact.
Basically I look for the following things.
* Do I think the candidate has the capacity to learn. Every hire we've taken straight out of college has been fairly useless for the first 3 months. They typically know how to write software, but they have no idea how to do it in an actual production setting. We've had hires who couldn't publish and deploy a simple asp mvc site to an IIS for instance. I typically judge this by what projects they've done during their education (and their free time) and what sort of roles they've filled in those projects.
* Does the person have the minimum technical skills required to learn. I don't care if you can write a double linked list on a whiteboard, but I do want you to be able to do simple things, know about best practices and preferably things like SOLID. We'll typically ask what people think about test-first-development as an example, and we'll try to provoke an answer that doesn't come from a text book to see whether or not they actually have an opinion and knowledge on the matter or they're just telling us what they think we want to hear.
* Do I think the candidate is capable of failing, accepting responsibility for the mistake and learning from it. It's perfectly fine to screw up, we all do it, but people who don't admit when they do it are dangerous.
* Communication skills. I need candidates to be able to explain what they are doing to their grandmothers without getting angry. Both because the business end won't understand otherwise but mainly because politeness and a well mannered temper is more valuable than gold.
* Do I think the person will be a strategically good fit in the team.
* Does the team think the person will be a good fit.
* Does it seem like the candidate wants to work for us. The best employees are the ones who value and take pride in their work. I don't want people to be blind zealots, but I want them to be able to tell their friends they're making a difference.
Often we end up with a few who are strong technically and a few who are strong in personality and willingness. We always go with the latter. Obviously I can't tell you about what we've missed out on, but I can tell you that we've always had successful hires which is pretty important, because the most expensive you can make as a manager is hiring someone who doesn't work out.
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#33Maybe you should make the first step a small automated coding challenge? No longer than 1-2h and it's a simple filter. Finishing the challenge on itself will be the first filter; then you can review the ones who finished it and interview the ones you like most. BTW if you are looking for a remote web dev (front-end or back-end) drop me a line "public at francisco.io" <= my CV.
I personally won't do any coding challenges without at least an initial technical phone screen. It's not really fair to ask for that kind of time investment from candidates without being willing to reciprocate.
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#34Ability to learn. Which means most of: eagerness, humility/humbleness/not believing they are knuths gift to the programming world, communication which at junior level means ability to listen and ask questions, confidence, that they derive Joy from programming/problem solving.
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#35I would caution you against hiring junior developers.
Typically you hire junior developers for what they will become, and not where they currently are. That means the traits you're looking for is a desire to learn and genuine interest in technology.
If you only have junior developers, they will have a much tougher time learning. They'll never see how software should be built.
There are exceptions. Really simple prototypes is one of them. Some maintenance of existing projects might be another exception, depending on the quality of that project, and the type of work involved. Anything reasonably complicated, I wouldn't expect them to finish, and if they did finish, I'd expect it to need to be rewritten very early on.
If you want to do it right, hire a mid level or senior developer. It's better to have a single senior developer than 5 junior developers. If you're looking to hire multiple developers another choice would be to hire one senior developer and one junior developer. Just don't hire only junior developers.
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#36I'm a little worried you're never going to find a junior developer that's satisfactory enough to qualify for what you want, explicitly because you're looking for a senior developer at junior developer pay. Junior developers need to be given time to make mistakes and learn. I know a senior developer might seem too expensive for your budget, but hiring a junior developer might ultimately cost more for your project over…
Ability to communicate and ability to think.
That's the core of what I look for in any (junior) developer.
Its the skeleton on which everything else hangs.
Its not the only qualities but the most important ones.
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#37I actually wrote about this fairly recently, although it's aimed squarely at Android developers: https://proandroiddev.com/what-i-look-for-in-a-junior-androi...
tl;dr: I want someone who is excited by the platform and has shown a willingness to learn, as well as some autodidactic tendencies.
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#38Maybe you should make the first step a small automated coding challenge? No longer than 1-2h and it's a simple filter. Finishing the challenge on itself will be the first filter; then you can review the ones who finished it and interview the ones you like most. BTW if you are looking for a remote web dev (front-end or back-end) drop me a line "public at francisco.io" <= my CV.
I'd say a small coding challenge/puzzle/fizzbuzz test is a must-have if you get over a 100 applicants.
I'll always look for curiosity, passion, intellectual honesty.
Depending on the job I'd further look at what they did to distinguish themselves (extra-curricular, self-study, Github projects, etc.)
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#39Use HackerRank. Make a test that require them to write a program to print numbers from 1 to 10 then from 10 to 1.
That should filter 2/3 of the candidates.
Re: Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?
#40I agree with the other comments, but in addition, interviewing ten people a day is far too many. Either the interview process was too short to truly gauge a persons ability, or you're stretching yourself so thin that someone would be to be a programming god to stand out.
As others have said, you should create a take-home test for someone to complete on GitHub. Have them fork a repo, pass some coding test, and submit a pull request into your repo. That will reduce the number significantly, and you'll know with some certainty that the person you're speaking to has some basic skill. The interview should purely be an exercise in seeing if they are a good fit, and to gauge where they are in their journey.