Ask HN: What qualities do you look for in a junior developer?

On the resume, I look for a mix of:

* Technical education (college degree, classes, etc.)

* Hands-on technical experience. This can range from an internship, to just building computers for friends and family. Something that shows initiative.

* Some other work experience, even if it's a cashier at Dominos or a volunteer position at a library.

I avoid resumes of candidates that have degrees but no measurable hands-on experience outside of school. I find students that have gone through high school and college with absolutely no work experience to be entitled and often spoiled. I understand that is not a universal truth, but I've observed it enough to not bother with those candidates.

In the interview itself, I look for candidates who:

* Are excited about the job, learning new stuff.

* Don't have a bad attitude. This can often be evident when talking about your stack. If you have, say, a Java stack, and the candidate makes some offhand comment about how Ruby is so much better, it's a hint about how they'll act on the job.

* Can answer basic questions about the stack they'll be working on. I'm not talking algorithms here. This is mostly to test if they give a shit about the job enough to read up on the details for 20 minutes before coming in for an interview.

I'm a little worried you're never going to find a junior developer that's satisfactory enough to qualify for what you want, explicitly because you're looking for a senior developer at junior developer pay.

Junior developers need to be given time to make mistakes and learn. I know a senior developer might seem too expensive for your budget, but hiring a junior developer might ultimately cost more for your project over time. The time that they're going to take to have to ramp up and learn everything is probably going to eat into the time to deliver any sort of product. What I'm saying is that a junior developer is a time and money investment, and sometimes it just pays to hire a senior developer/contractor and have them get the project out.

Anyway... what I would look for in a junior developer isn't whether or not they're amazing at data structures etc. I could really give a rats ass as to whether or not they're able to do something like Codility. What I need to see is that they know at least some basics on how to code, and that they have the aptitude and motivation to learn.

The two most important qualities to me in a software developer is the ability to communicate and the ability to learn. Why is communication necessary, particularly in a junior developer? I need to know that they're willing to swallow their egos and come to someone for help. It's the fastest way to learn.

Hell, I feel like I learned much faster because I was able to swallow my pride and ask someone with seniority for help. It didn't mean that I would run to them at the first sign of a struggle, but if I was burning most of my day doing something that I felt wasn't really going to teach me much, but was causing me to struggle with something - I would go and ask someone senior for help.

You want people who learn fast: you don't have to explain everything three times. It's not easy to detect this during an interview though.

The way I would do it is to focus on side-activities. If a hardware engineer built a website for a side-project, that's a good sign. Anything that shows success outside their expected space. Smart, fast learners tend to pick up random knowledge and apply it quickly and successfully.

People who need hand-holding tend to know their core topic well enough (they spent years in college refining those skills), but are having difficulty learning anything outside those core topics.

High SAT / ACT scores lol

With 400 apps you'll need to send them a quickie programming challenge to thin the herd.

Smart, curious about code quality, no ego, hungry, and at least moderately experienced with the languages they'll need to use. You can't afford someone you need to spend months training and can't risk someone that has to break bad habits they learned cowboying shit. Vet that they're hungry to get good and smart enough to eventually be good.