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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?

#431

Post by gesman »

tonyarkles wrote: post #392
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 every…

"The only worse thing to training employees and losing them is not training them and keeping them"

-- Zig Ziglar

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

#432

Post by marcus_holmes »

falcolas wrote: post #391
kodablah wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

this. The really great people we found were an absolute no-hope if you just looked at their CV. One of our best database folks was recruited into the company as a data entry staffer, and we only found out that they knew SQL from some breaktime chats. They were so unconfident about their skills that they didn't think they should/could apply for a dev position.

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

#433

Post by marcus_holmes »

_1qd4 wrote: post #379
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…

I call this method of team building the "island of mistfit toys", it is something I practice on my team since I was a misfit toy myself. I disagree that training juniors keeps them loyal. When you bring someone the island of misfit toys and they get some experience and success, they no longer see themselves as a misfit toy. But when they come in to the office in the morning, they look all around them and see misfit t…

I didn't have that experience. Possibly because I didn't see this great team as being made up of "misfit toys", which is a bit denigrating to be honest. My team was mostly made up of awesome people who were being overlooked by completely shit recruitment processes.

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

#434

Post by mixmastamyk »

jogjayr wrote: post #300
mixmastamyk wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second will get hired, but may be a much worse employee. Also tech stacks are exploding, so learning everything is not possible any longer.

> The second will get hired, but may be a much worse employee. Why would they be worse than the first candidate in this example, if they've actually tried out React and the first has not?

There are many fantastic devs that don’t chase fashion.

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

#435

Post by mixmastamyk »

city41 wrote: post #399
mixmastamyk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spam is known to be a numbers game, don’t know what else to add.

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

#436

Post by city41 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #435
city41 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spam is known to be a numbers game, don’t know what else to add.

Then I come away unconvinced. I just can't imagine recruiters are going to spend all this time making such little money. People naturally gravitate to where the demand is.

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

#437

Post by rightbyte »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #128
ivansavz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Embed salary upgrades within the employment contract. We already know jumping gives on average a 15% salary increase every two years, so you just have to beat or match that. Now people might still leave for more interesting projects, but you get one of the larger motivational factors out of the way. People often leave because negotiating a salary upgrade is way harder than navigating an interview. So, unless your hid…

I wonder if that job jumping statistics is "poisoned" by causality.

You could argue that head hunted employees that's a good match for the job they leave for probably get higher salary.

The current job of a dev is more likely to be the first job for the dev (after job jumping it's never the first job).

Since the dev age pyramid is quite base heavy, job jumping is a indirect measurement of more experience.

Just being able to job jump is a indirect measure that you are sought after and that brings higher wages.

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

#438

Post by wwweston »

bloomca wrote: post #159
wwweston wrote: post #52

The weirdest part about this is how many companies fail to properly estimate the degree to which per-project on-the-job-training / on-boarding is inevitable even if you check every language/datastore/framework/tooling box they could possibly ask for . Checking those boxes can be helpful, but unless there's no value in your software other than that provided by the l/d/f/t, your software has something like domain speci…

Onboarding in domain specifics is different. Language and programming fundaments have to be taught, and companies rarely have any decent processes around it, and it eats a lot of time from other developers. Domain knowledge can be gathered from literally anyone in the company, and also unless you are a senior, you don't need that much of understanding. Moreover, you can do some tasks without knowing anything – fixing…

The term domain knowledge may not be specific enough to convey what I'm talking about; "domain app logic" might be closer to what I'm getting at. It's the domain specific portion of a given system. It (hopefully) represents domain knowledge or is oriented around a process informed by that knowledge, but it's encoded in the software (and docs, if any).

I can see why many companies don't often have a process around teaching programming fundamentals and prefer to hire those who can demonstrate competence in one or more languages. I understand less why companies with a determination to build their team rarely have any kind of methodical approach to introducing developers to their systems and seem to prefer sink-or-swim ad hoc task assignment.

There's a consistency to that approach with the approach of a precise list of specific stack/tooling requirements, of course: it says "we want to rent talent, not develop it." And that approach has its merits, even. But there's an inconsistency, too -- if your primary approach to introducing people to your existing systems is learn-by-flailing, why be concerned about avoiding that with frameworks and languages, too? Especially when, as far as you're concerned, the familiarity that matters is with specific languages and frameworks as used by your system.

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

#439

Post by tmaly »

I trained a guy that was a analyst and now he is a great dev in my team. I am working on getting another non-programmer to train to learn Python. I find its much easier to get devs this way. You just have to have a self motivated person willing to learn.

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

#440

Post by Matthias247 »

ksec wrote: post #357
tokyodude wrote: post #329

Be careful what you wish for. This is the norm in Japan. Students are hired out of college. They often actually have no real programming experience but based on their major they are hired into an engineering track. Programmers in Japan start at $20k-$25k a year. Many famous Japanese companies have limits set by HR of $60k a year for a programmer regardless of experience. I'm not saying that's the result you'll get bu…

Again, are these total earning? in USD? Because many companies (especially in US ) have performance bonus, stock etc... where their actual "yearly" earning is way higher. And just to make it clear, The difference between a junior Dev and Super Senior Dev is only 3x? ( I am still baffled by how widely different the dev salary are in different region )

In most countries and companies of the world programmers are not paid any bonuses, and even less so RSUs. It's mostly just a base salary.

And yes, the differences might be normal. In germany it's even less. One might get around 50k€ fresh from university. But there will be far less than 1% of roles which offer a compensation of >= 100k. At least in engineering, management is different.

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