When hiring someone as a junior developer, what do you look for if they don't have a college degree?
Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#2[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#3First, look for companies that you'd like to work. See if the technologies that they work with are the ones you know, and start developing more skills on them. That will increase your chances of getting hired.
Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#4Working in semi academia I do see these kind of applications. The following are personal opinions that work for convincing me when I am in an hiring committee.
* A good cover letter * Having worked with a version control system * Shown initiative
For me a good cover letter makes a world of a difference. Anything at all that shows you have thought about the problems that the organization you are applying to is gold and basically an guaranteed phone call.
I still see CV's and get people at phone stage that never used a version control system e.g. git. I don't care which one you used. Its just that it is my baseline for competence.
For a junior position our main aim is to have someone who is willing to grow to a senior and that requires initiative i.e. doing more than what they are told to do but seeing what needs to be done and starting on it. Being in semi-academia I also know that we can rarely keep people once they become senior level due to wage differences. Initiative can be shown in many ways, from the way you reach out to us in the pre-interview stage, to highlighting things you have started in your social live e.g. club activities etc...
Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#5Having a good understanding of things you claim to know (even if that is not a huge set), and ability to effectively convey that understanding to someone else.
Personal or commercial projects that demonstrate relevant skills. Bonus points if I can see the source.
Having a mentor really helps to prioritize your learning efforts in the right spots, both before and after getting the job.
Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#6I am a developer without a degree and transitioned from IT into development. I am in my last year of my Undergrad in CS now.
What you need more than anything are skills. Ranging from networking knowledge to having a good command on linux. In addition you have to be able to program in Python, Java, JavaScript, C. You also have to understand data structures like linked lists, queues, b-trees..., and to top it all of understand algorithm analysis to judge the efficiency of the code you write or look at.
My recommendation is to get the degree, medium to long term you will need it, and it will benefit you greatly. It seems to be popular to claim a degree is not needed for CS but if you want to do anything besides simple web apps then you will need the knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#7- a good working knowledge of the command line (up to say piping, xargs)
- basic networking
- show me a hobby or project you have worked on, I'll ask you questions
- I'll likely try to teach you a command or small factoid to see how receptive you are to learning
- I'll likely query you on this factoid at the end of the interview to test your memory and comprehension
- if you haven't said "I don't know" in the interview I'll ask you a very hard question to see how you react to not knowing something (hint: getting angry or defensive is not good)
- I will try and get you to teach me something, so I can make sure you know that senior members are life learners too. This is to identify if you're one of those people who lose respect for someone not knowing something you know, as I think this is a strong negative sign
Bonus points if you have competed an end-to-end project, it doesn't have to be deployed online, but being about to talk full stack is great!
Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#8I am a developer without a degree and transitioned from IT into development. I am in my last year of my Undergrad in CS now. What you need more than anything are skills. Ranging from networking knowledge to having a good command on linux. In addition you have to be able to program in Python, Java, JavaScript, C. You also have to understand data structures like linked lists, queues, b-trees..., and to top it all of un…
Lets go through this one by one:
In addition you have to be able to program in Python, Java, JavaScript, C.
This is objectively false. To expect a junior developer to know all these is unrealistic, plain and simple. If you have working knowledge of one or two programming languages and have an appetite to learn you are good to go.
You also have to understand data structures like linked lists, queues, b-trees..., and to top it all of understand algorithm analysis to judge the efficiency of the code you write or look at.
For 99% of the work out there, this is also not true. This is the horse crap that is fed to everyone so that folks can ask questions that have little to no relation to day to day development. If you are doing web development, then some knowledge of database query optimization will come in handy. But I don't remember the last time I had to figure out how a linked list worked whenever I was doing any server side or front-end optimization.
Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#9A brain, and the ability and willingness to learn. None of us really know what we're doing in this industry anyway, and you're constantly on the treadmill of learning new things to keep up.
Being able to effectively use the internet to search for information is a big deal.
Honestly, it doesn't make a huge difference if they have a degree or not. Most universities don't teach much of anything that is particularly relevant to actual software development in their curricula. If the practices and technologies that are taught are only ten years out of date, that's cutting edge.
You're going to be spending 3-6 months training up a junior developer before they are at all useful anyway. You just want to find the ones that will be continue to progress at the twelve month mark.
Re: Ask HN: What is the skillset required to be employable as jr dev?
#10I have a question for interviewers:
how much, if any, white boarding do you have the interviewee do for a front end junior position? And what are you looking for - memorization of common problems/solutions? ability to think through problem? something else?
As someone who has pretty poor memorization and does poor on tests in general - this portion of interviewing gives me the most anxiety.