companies need to follow the 80/20 rule. 80% non-junior developers and 20% junior. Juniors should do 80% of the work and seniors should have 80% of the knowledge. if the juniors are busy doing things then the seniors that focus on hard tasks.
Who Killed the Junior Developer?
251–260 of 803 posts
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because fixing 1 and 2 are really expensive. On top of that, the further removed someone is from the work being done, the more they want people to look "busy". I got moved from a desk in in a dead end office with to a desk in a bullpen so that I could be "closer to the people who I work with." My performance fell off a cliff. People would stop by all the time to check up on things, there was always a conversat…
How is it expensive to solve the bullpen issue? Tell people to STFU or build a wall in the office, or at least put up some dividers. It’s not rocket science. Most CEOs and VPs are idiots, handing money around to each other in a circle jerk of old white guys club, backslapping each other for hiring each other and keeping the hegemony going. These idiots do not know what they are doing, they have just been conditioned…
I tried, and nearly got fired for this. Well, not fired, but I'm currently a contractor, and was told because of this that I may not become an actual hire. (This has since settled down, but I'm still not hired because of unrelated issues —they're still waiting for a government grant.)
The story is simple: we have a prefab building with 3 stories, a beautiful interior, 52 desks on each floor. All open, but for 2 closed meeting rooms per floor. And the toilet. The desks are arranged close to the window. The centre of the floor holds a couple meeting spaces, and the coffee machine. It was, unsurprisingly, very noisy.
I talked about the issue during a sprint's retrospective, and was told to lay out my proposals to HR. I had plenty, most of which didn't involve actually chopping up the "lovely" open space into actual desks. It was mostly about putting dividing half walls and generally muffling the whole thing, while mostly preserving that "open" look that is so dear to whoever doesn't actually work there (funny how most people who condoned the open plan end up spending most of their time in meetings).
I had indirect feedback later (through my team's product owner). Turned out the head HR was surprised to see me raise the subject—I was the first to do so. So she asked around. The feedback she got was mostly "well, yeah, it's an open plan, but it's okay", which she translated by "there is no problem, it's just a single contractor being difficult". I guess she was oblivious to the biases introduced by her being in a position of power. That nobody will say to her face that the noise is not okay, lest she thinks they can't fit in. (I no longer have that fear, for better or worse.)
I have later learned that a "Life in the Open Plan" group formed because of the noise issue.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the current trend of agile development process common in startups now somewhat works against senior devs' interests to mentor junior devs. There simply isn't time allocated for this. Senior devs are held accountable for what they deliver, and doing so on time. This is among other things like code reviewing PRs and attending meetings. For most senior devs working under this circumstance, the best they coul…
Strongly agree. I would like to spend more time teaching junior developers what I know. But anything that slows down a small, agile startup can mean the death of the startup, so this tends to undercut my ability to do any kind of mentoring. Excerpt from a real life situation I was in: =========================== June of 2015: Sital was a beginner. In general, there is nothing wrong with being a beginner. All of us ar…
> Could we succeed when we had a beginner in a critical role?
This is core issue. This has nothing to do with startup team vs team in corporation. Neither can have beginner in a critical difficult role. Both can make use of junior, assuming they dont put him to critical role.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious about what the common deficiencies that your encountering are. Do you mean lack of knowledge and testing and more applicable skills?
Unfortunately I can't share the exact questions we ask, but here's a smattering of the sorts of pitfalls I encounter, in no particular order: * Number one is probably no Big-O performance considerations, or Big-O is an afterthought. For the love of God, please please please don't do a linear search on an unsorted array anywhere inside a nested loop. If you're going to do any appreciable number of lookups, preprocess…
Dunno how i should feel about this.
Somehow i got into Tech Industry without a fitting degree and found myself in a smallish (30 people) company as the only SysAdmin. Exploring, setting, and controlling all technical parts this office needs: Multiple Linux VMs with different services like smb, confluence, ...; AD- and Terminal Windows Server; Device-Managment of all used MacBooks; and so on.
I always also liked to code stuff, and always found a way to archive what i tried to solve. But of course i never build something big or even though about things like super efficient ways to archive what i did. I always though that when i keep going and try to build my small personal projects, one day i can maybe start as a junior dev. Even without the degree. But your post somehow states that a junior dev has to think about edge cases even before they occur. As a Sysadmin i also have to do this. But i always imagined that the job as developer is no one man show, and that these edge cases will be found together. Code will be reworked when a more experienced team member found a pithole.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is absolutely a skill difference between senior and junior. The problem is that junior developers today somehow think they deserve mid or senior level salaries despite not having the skills. Developers are being told not only that higher level skills like algorithms and big-oh don't matter, but that they are such special people that they can even do jobs completely outside of their specialty like design, manage…
Hey, man, if people want to pay me well and give me lofty titles I am not going to dissuade them. As developers I don't think that's our problem to worry about. Seeking out the most benefit for yourself is just common sense in the job market we live in and I'm not losing a lot of sleep over the prospect that I'm not as "expert" in my job as a lawyer is.
>I'm not losing a lot of sleep over the prospect that I'm not as "expert" in my job as a lawyer is
I actually apply this logic in reverse. After seeing how lacking many "senior" developers are - given that we now call you "senior" after just 5 measly years - I've come to realize I shouldn't put much weight in the skills of lawyers (and other professionals) who only have 5 years of experience. Since we're not lawyers (for example), it's easy for us to give them more credit than they deserve, because we don't know enough about the domain to criticize them.
After just a couple of years experience, developers can still write pathetic spaghetti code. If you're gonna high a lawyer with a couple of years under their belt, imagine them bungling your case like it's the codebase!
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#256It's funny, my experience is completely different. I've always loved to hire juniors because you can mentor and they usually come with less preconceptions.
That makes discussions much more fruitful. And they usually make you think about your decisions much more, because they can challenge things that any engineer with experience with just take for granted or accepted.
The learning curve can be an issue though. You want to be constantly be welcoming newcomers to have a rolling scheme of new 'seniors'.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#257> we don’t hire junior developers because we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor them. That feels too dumb to be real (which is exactly why it's probably a real thing). You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too! You hire senior devs to guide you WHAT and HOW to code. And they can do that so much more effectively if they don't have to…
In my current job, for a tech company with less than 12 people, at least 5 are interns. Two of them were recent hires (January) and before they were onboarded, i had a meeting with my boss and the other senior developer regarding the new interns and my boss stated he didn’t want me and other senior dev spending too much time mentoring the interns and that if they couldn’t manage by themselves, he would just let them…
He is being paid with generous social security net (for which he doesn’t necessarily qualify) and with the priviledge of living in developed country with extensive infrastructure... /s
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#258300 $ / hour ? 300 * 8 * 5 * 20 -> 240K$ per month ? It seems far too much. This might be why they can't afford junior developer.
What's the "5" in your equation? :)
However it's still way too much. 300 * 8 * 22 * 12 = 0.63M per year. In my opinion you must be at least Linus Torvalds's deputy to pretend on that.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#259The problem is squashed salaries. I’ll have junior devs or people straight out of code school asking for 75-80% the salary of a solid senior dev. If I have to make a bet on who will be easier to manage and get productive 4 seniors vs 5 juniors for the same total expenditure I’ll choose the seniors every time. Even at 2 to 1 I’m taking seniors. Maybe around 3 or 4 to 1 juniors might look better. But that means junior…
I've noticed this too. There are only a few rational explanations 1. Senior devs aren't paid enough for the value they bring to the company (or conversely, junior devs are paid too much for that value) 2. Investing in junior devs gives a good enough ROI that it's worth overpaying them for a few years. That is, after e.g. three years, enough junior devs have stuck around that they've accumulated enough org-specific kn…
I think it's 2. I don't see why senior dev salaries should go any higher. At that point it would be easier to open office overseas even for smaller shops.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#260The problem is squashed salaries. I’ll have junior devs or people straight out of code school asking for 75-80% the salary of a solid senior dev. If I have to make a bet on who will be easier to manage and get productive 4 seniors vs 5 juniors for the same total expenditure I’ll choose the seniors every time. Even at 2 to 1 I’m taking seniors. Maybe around 3 or 4 to 1 juniors might look better. But that means junior…
is 50k really such a bad starting salary or is there such a big difference between US and EU?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when talking US salaries you have to compare it to EU salary before any taxes, deductions, or insurance.