341–350 of 495 posts
The problem is, if we want to extend our expertise, and we do, we want to hire people that can train us. So yes, apart from hiring juniors, we do have senior positions that we close in months, sometimes year(s).
It's all about the balance. We want people with their own experience, and we are ok with training juniors at the same time.
One of the reasons that I saw, is that training is very expensive for the company (both in terms of money, opportunity cost, time of other people, etc) which combined with people changing jobs often produces low, or negative ROI. By the time person is trained, they leave, before they start to meaningfully contribute. More experienced folks also change jobs often, but you have higher chance of getting some productive…
Speaking with a CTO of a small web company recently I got to understand the issue from both perspectives.
CTO’s thoughts when hiring junior devs:
- Can be great for company but only if it makes economical sense I.e the developer stays with the company long enough after training
- From experience, the best devs from training move on to other companies soon after training
- Junior devs ask for frequent pay rises that aren’t viable for the company, holding the companies investment in the dev against them
Thoughts of a junior when considering other roles: - How respected & valued will they be old vs new
- How interesting is the work, and will there be continued opportunity to develop themselves and learn new skills old vs new
- Salary old vs new
- The potential for future career prospects old vs new
Good junior devs will naturally be very enthusiastic and eager to learn, and the company needs to support this through and beyond the training to keep them motivated and engaged. On top of this, juniors will want to see regular progressions through the training process in forms of clear recognition and increases in pay and responsibilities as they progress. If these are not given, it’s likely the junior will feel under appreciated / taken advantage of.
Progression through a training course like this is motivated by success, and rewards, not unlike video games.
In my opinion the best way a company can keep a junior happy is to follow this and apply some of the proven methods researched and applied all over the video games industry.
- Progressively difficult but achievable tasks (missions)
- A sense of accomplishment from these (contributing towards real projects)
- Regular checkpoints ( targets and 2-3monthly reviews to support these)
- Regular rewards (small but regular pay increases, matched with greater responsibility and clear recognition of progression in the company; mutual respect is important!)
The list goes on.
If an approach like this is followed, the dev is much more likely to come out of training with a great sense of achievement and an attachment to the company for the support and rewards that were received. I think this massively increases the chances of a dev staying on, Provided salary, job title and sense of respect are matched with other members of the team in similar roles. I feel this is something many companies don't put enough thought into considering the large investment they're putting into the dev.
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A friend of mine runs a web dev shop and I have seen him train at least six people from zero-to-pro (very smart, fast learners with a math background) and what you described is exactly what happens. Once they become medium/advanced-level proficient they often quit and move on to other, bigger companies. If there was some formal, or informal understanding that candidates "trained on the job" would stay for a few years…
> if there was some formal, or informal understanding that candidates "trained on the job" would stay for a few years, I think companies would be more open to building junior devs. There are already many companies that lock you in contract in exchange for comprehensive training.
You could go back to the real apprentice (no modern apprentice shelf stacking mc jobs) route but in that case the apprentice signs for x years and you cant make them redundant - and you also not guaranteed a job after it finishes
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I had a conversation the other day with some work colleagues where we were talking about a friends dad who just retired from working as an engineer at AT&T for something like 35 years. We made some jokes about how that would be unthinkable these days and the conversation moved on. Loyalty goes both ways. If you want someone to stick around, incentivize them to.
This only works in a monopoly or oligopoly, where you can’t easily switch careers. If you were out of AT&T, your experience there couldn’t translate easily to other companies. This works even today: there are few ex-Googlers, because experience inside Google is most valuable to Google; there are few other gigantic search-first companies to move on to (OK, you can go to Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft and that’s about…
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>Don't quit your job without your next source of income secured. I guess this is the takeaway from a self preservation standpoint, but the alternative is worse. Spending months of your employer's time completely mentally checked out, taking sick time and vacation for interviews, pretending like you care in meetings, it's all too much. I watched that happen multiple times before I left, and it's really discourteous to…
When you quit, you lose leverage. It's not unethical to use personal and vacation days as you see fit.
Not if you have any other kind of safety net, e.g. savings or frugal low cost lifestyle.
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In Australia, you'd probably make more money in construction vs software engineering.
That doesn't necessarily mean you'll be happier, however. Most construction jobs are very hard on the body.
So are sedentary jobs. Obesity, heart disease and everything else that goes with them are no joke.
It's great now, a year later, though.
I’m kinda curious what a developer with a couple years experience and making his own company would be able to demand back in the states. I think “apprenticeship “ isn’t a thing in tech. Things change quickly and companies don’t want to pay more money for people to develop software. Mostly because developers are viewed as a cost (a well-paid cost) and not money makers. And then the ageism problem. my biggest concern i…
I went on the custom mech eng "higher" apprentice course (that had been developed for the local industry) at my local college.
1 day a week plus an extra half day a week for the first year to get my tech drawing O Level (GCSE)
of course the Jammy buggers who worked for the civil service at RAE got an extra afternoon to do the home work
It's not a tech hub and so while we have had positions open for senior developers at good salary for the area by any stretch, we just cannot hire them.
I believe as others have said, we run the risk of training them and then they leave. However, that has not been my experience so far.
Perhaps one thing that I do with training that may be different to elsewhere is that I make it clear that they do control the codebase, and the challenges are always getting more complicated, the number of customers we get is growing and the markets we are in are expanding, so they should definitely see personal development opportunities within the company.