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Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

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Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#391

Post by falcolas »

kodablah wrote: post #383
marcus_holmes wrote: post #373

I've built a team from trained-up junior devs, and it was great, I would recommend this route for anyone building a team. BUT... you have to have people who can train and teach as well as code. There are personality traits that don't align with this. The typical "aspy Dave" stereotype of a rockstar programmer is not good at this. So you have to align the entire team from day 1 as being a training environment as well…

> But then, we hired for people who were hungry to learn and create. Less graduate programmers thinking they knew it all, more college dropouts who loved coding but couldn't stand academia. I think when people say they can't find good devs, it's not that they are only looking for seniors, it's that they can't find the eager ones you are talking about either. Amongst the realm of juniors, they are quite rare in my exp…

Perhaps they're just not making it past the filters. Have a look at the ratio of people interviewed to the number of applications filed. If it's particularly low, it's likely a case of a lot of false positives on the filters before the interview.

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#392

Post by tonyarkles »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #373

I've built a team from trained-up junior devs, and it was great, I would recommend this route for anyone building a team. BUT... you have to have people who can train and teach as well as code. There are personality traits that don't align with this. The typical "aspy Dave" stereotype of a rockstar programmer is not good at this. So you have to align the entire team from day 1 as being a training environment as well…

> new trainees leave when they realize they can get better salaries elsewhere

This is one of my biggest gripes about software companies, particularly larger ones. You hire someone fresh out of school and they work for you for 5 years? They damned well need to be paid at that point like someone with 5 years experience, not someone who started at a fresh grad salary with a nominal 3%/year raise.

I 100% agree with everything you’ve said about training people up “from scratch”. The most loyal teams I’ve seen have been in that exact same situation.

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#393

Post by phyller »

marvin wrote: post #355
ryanobjc wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact in the good big companies, they crave for employee growth. Time and money for training, meaningful career growth, and pay growth, major tech switches without changing jobs. I find that small companies are often much worse in all these metrics. As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect - your friend, the cofounder, has that job. And is never giving it up. Plus thanks to cash crunch, making shortcu…

> the company’s health plan was on the hook for a million in costs As usual, this is the craziest part of the comment to my European mind. Your healthcare system spent somewhere around an entire lifetime of effort for something that, while relatively dramatic, should still be quite routine for a sophisticated medical organization!

The hospital bills a million dollars, the health insurance says, no we'll pay you $125,000. That's it. I don't know enough to understand how this situation came about, but the bill the hospital provides is often 2x to 10x the reasonable cost and the insurance company only pays the reasonable cost. And has sort of negotiated this beforehand with the hospital. This is the situation that truly ends up screwing people without insurance, because their only negotiating power is that they literally do not have enough money to pay.

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#394

Post by wikibob »

Merad wrote: post #382
Bombthecat wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you make a binding / contract? My company did that with me. Basically forbidding me to quit for 12 months. Ways you can do it in germany: hire. After 2 or 3 months to see if he is a good fit. Give him a bonus to stay. The contract allows you for up to two years without issues, maybe three. If he quits earlier. He must pay back the bonus back (Valles Heilung des bonus in german, healing 9f bonus) after a few mon…

Roughly 2/3s of the states in the US have “right to work” laws, which basically means that either employer or employee can terminate the job at any time for basically any reason.

You are thinking of "At will employment".

Right to work means you can't be forced to join a union.

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#395

Post by Misdicorl »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #45
Misdicorl wrote: post #5

I think it's totally doable, but you need two important things 1) a good exit process 2) a good promotion process 1 brings serious culture issues/questions with it. See horror stories from people who went to grad school in the 80s and 90s where year two cut rates were 50% or worse. I don't know how you deal with this, but it will certainly deeply affect your work environment. 2 is easy on the face, but requires huge…

> Realistically you're looking at a 2-10x increase in this person's compensation over a very short time frame or you'll lose your training investment as they jump ship. This is actually a very helpful risk-mitigation strategy. If you hire someone with less experience at a lower salary expecting to train them and it turns out they're terrible, all you have to do is not promote them. Once they realize they won't be pro…

I'd definitely worry if I were relying on this strategy.

1) What about the employees who won't or can't jump ship? These are the ones that are most important to push along in terms of company health.

2) I'm not a huge fan of the implicit 'firing'- the employee may feel a sense of responsibility to the company and slowly become more and more upset as theyre passed over for promotions.

3) I'd worry about the easy slippery slope towards terrible culture this would allow. A manager thats allowed to keep on sub-par staff because they're cheap might start stringing them along to keep the cheap and mediocre work. "Sure the promotion is coming, we just need to find the money in the budget next quarter...". Its hard to have insight into these issues from a level above the manager, and the manager has huge incentives to do it. So best not to create a structure where it can happen so easily.

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#396

Post by andrewflnr »

rootsudo wrote: post #80
justapassenger wrote: post #58

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…

It also depends on the culture. In Asia, it's not as cut throat as USA, where you shop around every 2-3 years. Japan they'll train you, and quitting isn't something that's easily done -- watch any Japanese netflix series about slice of life/normal life and you'll see the daily struggle or just read the news, or if you have the chance, go to Japan. Death by overwork is real and on the other hand, companies such as Rak…

What do they do if you just stop showing up for work? Can they do anything besides stop paying you?

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#397

Post by geggam »

adetrest wrote: post #378
marvin wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the company’s health plan was on the hook for a million in costs As usual, this is the craziest part of the comment to my European mind. Your healthcare system spent somewhere around an entire lifetime of effort for something that, while relatively dramatic, should still be quite routine for a sophisticated medical organization!

Which begs the question: what happens if the premature baby is born to a US family that can't afford a decent insurance plan? Does the hospital repo the baby? Is the family bankrupt and the baby's life ruined from the get go just for being born premature? I can't wrap my head around it, and it seems to suck either way.

To some degree yes everyones life is ruined. The people with nothing still get some medical care, it's the working poor who make too much to get welfare but too little to cover expenses after insurance who are really screwed.

In the US only the wealthy ( millionaires ) are safe from medical bankruptcy and even they can get taken down by some issues.

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#398

Post by howard941 »

adetrest wrote: post #378
marvin wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the company’s health plan was on the hook for a million in costs As usual, this is the craziest part of the comment to my European mind. Your healthcare system spent somewhere around an entire lifetime of effort for something that, while relatively dramatic, should still be quite routine for a sophisticated medical organization!

Which begs the question: what happens if the premature baby is born to a US family that can't afford a decent insurance plan? Does the hospital repo the baby? Is the family bankrupt and the baby's life ruined from the get go just for being born premature? I can't wrap my head around it, and it seems to suck either way.

The parents are on the hook to the hospital, to the myriad physicians involved in the in-hospital care, and for non-covered post-discharge costs. Their financial lives may be crushed absent bankruptcy, which carries its own problems regarding loss of assets and mortgage availability for ex.

The infant is also financially liable but likely uncollectable. The baby's life may or may not be ruined depending on where the US goes w/r/t health insurance coverage for pre existing conditions.

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#399

Post by city41 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #208
city41 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do developers get contacted by recruiters constantly? Every developer I know gets contacted. Yet no non-tech colleagues I know experience anything similar in their industry. I'm not saying I disagree with you, I'm genuinely curious.

Job reqs kept open but not filled, as mentioned up thread. Recruiters chasing an elusive paycheck just like candidates.

That doesn’t add up to me. In my experience a lot of the recruiting comes from engineering managers, the CTO, CEO etc of the company.

On top of that, this recruiting has been at a fevered pitch for at least 4 or 5 years. If it was as unfruitful as you claim, I’d expect the recruiters to have learned that by now.

Re: Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

#400

Post by vonmoltke »

sgarman wrote: post #167
pandler wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's hard to do at a startup though with FANG salaries and benefits being so extreme. You really have to double down on the value prop of small agile teams, culture etc. Even if you nail that it's hard to turn down 2-3x salaries.

> That's hard to do at a startup though with FANG salaries and benefits being so extreme.

Why is a startup in the early cash-poor stages competing for FANG-level people?

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