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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?

#91

Post by edanm »

deepGem wrote: post #57
eximius wrote: post #54

EDIT: to people emailing me (thanks!), I am currently on PTO overseas so I will respond, but maybe not super timely. Also, we're looking for our first QA and our first DevOps role if non-SEs are reading... If you're willing to work in Texas, send me an email (check my profile). We absolutely do not mind if you have gaps. semi-OT: To all people in this thread who say there is no shortage of developers: if you know any…

I am just curious, why do you need to test somone's ability to find max of a list. Language designers have recognized this as a basic utility and incorporated them into the language. Is the hypothesis that - if someone cannot write a simple algo to find the max of a list then what other difficult tasks he/she can perform ? Even though in reality we all understand no one needs to write a max algorithm.

Yep, being unable to write a function to find the max of a list correlates pretty highly with being unable to do pretty much anything else in programming. It's one of the simplest possible things you can do.

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

#92

Post by beilabs »

Over the past three years we've employed a team of 19 software engineers in Nepal. Bar 3 of them, we've trained up 16 developers from Interns to fantastic engineers working across phoenix, elixir, ruby, kubernetes and javascript projects.

We've treated them well, trained them up, brought them on board interesting projects. When it comes to staff so far we've a great retention rate. Nepal has a huge problem retaining the best and brightest, many leave the country straight after high school or college to seek better opportunities. I think we'll keep hiring juniors but I'd love to have more senior (20+ years experience) engineers on board. They don't seem to exist in Nepal.

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

#94

Post by xwolfi »

Usually it's not related to checking boxes. Both HR and recruiters closer to the actual work know it's not what makes a good employee (image a guy that check all the boxes but is an insufferable asshole and can't produce any value).

What you need to show in a job interview is your ability to produce value, work in a team, work until tasks are done rather than until the clock is up, a salary in line with the company's budget, etc.

It is disastrous for any company to hire negative value producers and is usually the biggest focus of any interview. When they ask if you know this or that tech, they mostly look at your ability to be excited, have an opinion, ask a few clever questions rather than say "Yes and I'm a rockstar" or "no and I think you shouldn't ask but provide training".

The best interview is when you do the interview, and start understanding all their problems and business in front of them. The simple fact you ask "I'm rejected by job interviews, why is on-the-job training dead?" is a bad sign, I feel. I would ask "How can I reskill to help companies more?" instead.

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

#95

Post by toomanybeersies »

deepGem wrote: post #57
eximius wrote: post #54

EDIT: to people emailing me (thanks!), I am currently on PTO overseas so I will respond, but maybe not super timely. Also, we're looking for our first QA and our first DevOps role if non-SEs are reading... If you're willing to work in Texas, send me an email (check my profile). We absolutely do not mind if you have gaps. semi-OT: To all people in this thread who say there is no shortage of developers: if you know any…

I am just curious, why do you need to test somone's ability to find max of a list. Language designers have recognized this as a basic utility and incorporated them into the language. Is the hypothesis that - if someone cannot write a simple algo to find the max of a list then what other difficult tasks he/she can perform ? Even though in reality we all understand no one needs to write a max algorithm.

Not GP, but I'll add my 2 cents. It's to test that you have at least a tenuous grasp of the programming language at hand. It should be an absolutely trivial task and take only a couple of minutes to do.

It shows you can iterate over an array and use conditionals, something literally everyone should be able to do if they know the language. These kinds of tests are a quick way to screen out applicants who are straight up lying about experience with a particular language.

It's not like asking them to write a sorting algorithm or implement Dijkstra's algorithm, which requires specific knowledge of algorithms and isn't trivial to implement. And it's not some obscure brainteaser that has no relevance to their normal work.

Iterating over arrays and using conditional logic is something I do every day. In fact, I'd say that's basically 80% of what my job is.

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

#96

Post by hvaoc »

Spooky23 wrote: post #70

My employer does... many of our best candidates come in as interns and outperform experienced consultants, but snotty tech companies won’t touch them because they are not from the right schools.

Schools are overrated in tech industry, at this point in time, you would do much better if you just spend your time learning and trying things on your pace and time rather than wasting on spending in a school.

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

#97

Post by RickSanchez2600 »

On the job training is very hard and takes away time from senior devs to teach and mentor junior debs as far as management and HR see.

I used to mentor junior devs in Visual BASIC in the 1990s and got written up for doing so. It helped the junior devs become more productive and experienced. It is usually management that is against it not the developers.

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

#98

Post by hnruss »

The company I work for (which is fairly small) used to hire college interns and provide training, but to be honest, it just wasn’t worth it for us. Their turnover rate was too high, their work quality/quantity was too low, and they significantly distracted the more experienced developers. We also spent years cleaning up after them.

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

#99

Post by hvaoc »

fzeroracer wrote: post #15

I figured I'd add my two cents since I'm still a juniorish developer (sitting at around 2.5 years of experience) and I definitely noticed during my my more recent job search that there was a dearth of Junior job postings. I'm of the opinion that there are two major issues in play: 1. There's the myth of the junior developer breaking prod or wiping databases. This is usually the result of teams not having enough proce…

If you don’t break you are not learning enough. What you said is right, process should manage things from being broken. Even a seasoned person will break things if he / she is overstretched for too long. To err is human after all. Junior folks break things is a lame excuse. Am a senior if 15 years is counted as such.

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

#100

Post by wpietri »

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…

Personally, I think this is very dependent on the culture and work practices of the company in question. I agree that for the average company, training is very expensive. But I don't think it's universal.

If you have a strongly cross-functional, collaborative team, then a new person isn't nearly as much of a problem to bring on. As an example, Atomic Object is a midwestern software development shop that follows practices like pair programming, collective code ownership, short iterations, and a lot more. For them, interships and apprentices aren't a big problem, and have been key to their growth:

https://spin.atomicobject.com/2011/10/04/interns-and-apprent...

I also think it's worth looking at why people change jobs. I agree it's common, but I also believe that sucky jobs are common. If people leaving is such a problem, I'd like to see companies put more effort in to making them happy where they are. Not only would that be the humane thing to do, but it would make the ROI on investing in employees higher.

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