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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?

#421

Post by AchieveLife »

TheFattestNinja wrote: post #310
stormbrew wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the weird thing — they (because there are two cofounders) were actually paying very competitive salaries (for the local market). I was impressed to hear what some of them were making. So it's not the money. This is only half of what I asked. What about the raises? As someone in another thread chain pointed out, the expected raise from job leaping is maybe 15%. How did the raises your friend gave compare to t…

As a junior, the switch job raise is much higher than that, especially if you decide to move to a larger / more active city (which is not that big of a deal as a junior). During my first job I got raised 12% over 2yearish, and swapping and moving to a larger metropolitan area brought an additional 30%-45% (depending on which offer you looked at). Now ofc there are other factor (higher life cost), but still that's mas…

I was able to achieve a 264% raise in the first 2 years of my dev life by switching companies and roles.

Startup -> Medium sized company

I didn't have to move states.

Edit: I'm a college dropout too. Rapid learner so I learned a lot on the job at the startup. Did a ton of tasks nobody else wanted to do (devops, automation, performance, tests).

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

#422

Post by eldavido »

Simple: nobody has time.

Due to capital availability [1], the SV/SF ecosystem is highly optimized to favor spending money over time. That's why you get much-more-expensive WeWork over private office leases, everyone wanting to pay 2x as much for very senior staff, and few companies able to build a good content marketing brand.

Patience is a huge competitive advantage, if you can manage it.

[1] http://www.davidralbrecht.com/notes/2018/11/risk-capital.htm...

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

#423

Post by websitescenes »

Our startup is located in El Paso and it's super hard to find senior devs here. I had to start teaching programming classes at our local maker space to find our first hire. After a few months of teaching I cherry picked the most promising candidate and gave him a job. He's still learning but has quickly become an integral part of our engineering team and I see him as a future leader in the organization. I am very happy with our decision. I don't have to break the bad habits or cater to the inflated ego of a more senior dev.

As his skills are growing we are adjusting the pay accordingly; He already makes double what he started at. Being in El Paso, this model makes sense and works but may make less sense if you live in an area with a bigger base of techies. If we were located in San Francisco or Austin, we may have pushed for a more senior level hire but we plan on staying in El Paso and continuing to train and build up our employees.

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

#424

Post by vidro3 »

pandler wrote: post #139
oh-kumudo wrote: post #103

I think the reason is simple: once the junior dev is trained, they will leave. To be clear, I am not saying that they are obliged to stay in the company that trained them or being ungrateful in any sense, I am simply implying this is a common outcome from such training. In software industry, the first job switch in 2 years seems pretty common and reasonable, and the dev by that time would be able to strike a better j…

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.

defined benefit pensions were a huge incentive

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

#425

Post by xtracto »

oh-kumudo wrote: post #103

I think the reason is simple: once the junior dev is trained, they will leave. To be clear, I am not saying that they are obliged to stay in the company that trained them or being ungrateful in any sense, I am simply implying this is a common outcome from such training. In software industry, the first job switch in 2 years seems pretty common and reasonable, and the dev by that time would be able to strike a better j…

I had something like that happened to me at my previous gig where I was Head of Engineering (in Guadalajara, México).

We hired several good developers who were more or less jr. After an average of 2 years, 4 of them left to go to Google, Facebook, Amazon and some company in Austria.

For me it was an honor, a couple of them even told me that, they had been applying to those companies before but could not get in, and it was after they got into my team and got some specific experience, that these companies wanted to hire them.

In some other fields, it is expected that a Jr person will be for a couple of years and then "fly away". For example, I know it is a normal path for a just-graduated finance/economics person, who gets into a VC fund to get experience, and after 2 years he leaves for an MBA in a "top school". I've seen it several times (with people from VC funds that invested in companies I've been). That is something expected and accepted.

Personally I don't see anything bad for that. Maybe the only disadvantage is the "know how", but it can be mitigated if you establish the right documentation and knowledge transfer processes.

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

#426

Post by leonroy »

mdorazio wrote: post #412
leonroy wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here’s something the boss of my previous company did when I went to work for him straight out of university. First year I earned a low junior dev salary. Third year after delivering a few projects and company financials improving I received a 66% raise. Fifth year a 50% raise. And I was not the only one. The idea of raises pegged to inflation seemed absurd in our company when based on performance and company incom…

...So why did you leave then?

I left after 8.5 years...sometimes you move on for more than money.

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

#427

Post by ru999gol »

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.

Maybe more civilized countries can offer them asylum. Its just incredible to what degree the US is fucking its own people and how unwarrantedly proud they all are about their country.

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

#428

Post by marvin »

phyller wrote: post #393
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!

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 wi…

This is really screwed up. "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" is deeply immoral when applied to life and limb. I can hardly understand how a democratic society can accept a system like this.

I mean, can you even imagine other areas of life where every person you purchase from attempts to screw you over by demanding 2x-10x of the reasonable fee unless you had the information to be aware of it? It would be impossible, because everyone would just take their business somewhere else.

But you can't exactly say "oh, I'm not willing to pay my life savings for this, I'll just take this 3 months prematurely born baby to the shop across the street, or maybe get it done in six months time instead, when it's more convenient.".

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

#429

Post by gigatexal »

locklock wrote: post #324
gigatexal wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a residency permit aka a Bleue Karte - which is tied to my employer. I have to maintain a job and it has to pay above 50k euros but it’s good for 5 years.

I don't think German Blue Cards are tied to a specific employer. As far as I know you only have to let the authority know if you change jobs less than a year after getting the card, and beyond that you just need to make above the money limit and you can work anywhere.

I had to when I changed jobs change it into the name of my new employer. But that was probably because I changed jobs before a year.

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

#430

Post by [deleted] »

gambiting wrote: post #282
neya wrote: post #279

If you work in an intense environment like an agency, particularly one with high profile clients, then on the job training causes more problems than it solves. We had a guy who wrote a production web application software, completely untested in R lang (which is the worst choice for this situation) with terrible code (Think of mixing camel case and snake case, sometimes with same names (ExVariable and ex_variable and…

>>I had the bad luck of having to re-write his R code into Python which was suitable for this specific problem than R was and had to explain to this junior dev. Still, he wouldn't budge and kept writing untested production software in R when in reality most of his peers already knew Python and Ruby, whereas he was the only one with R knowledge and no one else in the company could understand his code, not even people…

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