Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends if the leaders even care what 3 junior devs think.
The leaders will care a great deal if the three devs are well trained and capable.
The leaders should care a great deal.
Who Killed the Junior Developer?
491–500 of 803 posts
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 clos…
> I'm currently a contractor, and was told because of this that I may not become an actual hire
They are never going to hire you. The contract is, in a way, a more airtight way of paying you under the table. Depending on the size of the business, labeling everyone as 1099 can reduce taxes for the business quite a bit. Thing is, though, is that it's illegal. But it's usually up to the worker to report it, so it is extremely under-enforced.
Bottom line is that you're being abused. I encourage you to file Form SS-8 as soon as possible with the IRS and check into your state's labor office to see what they can do.
https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-ss8
Source: I left a contractor role in October after realizing that I was a victim of misclassification.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#493> When they didn’t understand there would be a lag as I taught these people.
In a world run by MBAs who figure that any programming task, regardless of complexity, ought to take an hour (MAYBE two) and if it takes longer that means the programmer is incapable, this is hardly surprising.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#494It was the Middle Manager, in the Small Conference Room, with the PowerPoint.
Did I win? Nope.~
"Junior" implies training, and American companies don't do training. If you're lucky, they have an internship program, which is apparently enough experience to get you a 6-month contract-to-hire as a "regular" developer.
It's a name game. "Developer" is actually "Junior Developer", "Senior Developer" is actually "Developer", and "Lead Developer" or "Principal Developer" is really "Senior Developer".
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#495In Germany at least we have apprenticeships and working students.
There is a apprenticeship program for developers (Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung -> Qualified IT Specialist for Application development) which gets rather much practical knowledge, since they only go, I think, 2 days a week to school and 3 days a week to work. This takes 3 years, so they have much time to transition from a newbie to a junior to a senior.
The main problem is, most "professional school" are quite shitty. So if your company doesn't have good apprenticeship programs, you're basically stuck with learning outdated stuff at school and nothing of value at your company.
I studied computer science and worked as a web developer on the side, so I wouldn't finish my studies without practical knowledge.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#496So I've read through most of the complaints listed here and it seems like having a Software Developer Union would be one way to go. You could then have your jr devs undergo an apprenticeship similar to how we did it in the trades (5 years to become a Journeyman).
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#497My two cents: simple supply and demand. The slow deflation of the startup bubble of the past five years or so has killed the junior developer. Once upon a time, there so much competition for engineering talent in the startup world that even developers with little to no experience and/or formal training were being handed lucrative jobs. Looking back we see clear signs of a seller's market in talent: companies went out…
As someone starting to teach myself how to code, I'd be interested to hear more about the basic coding tasks people are failing at.
We have a pre-interview test that is basically "use flickr's api to show some pictures", with a few details about how the pictures are sized and arranged. Applicants that have gone to bootcamps and even college frequently fail this miserably. Many of the rest fail to understand the details. We even had one use a completely different end point than the one specified by URL to the documentation. Some have just given up and turned nothing in, or something that they admitted didn't work.
These are candidates that we liked their resume enough to give them a shot, not just anyone who applied.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the system has to be gamed to achieve the best results for your team then the system is flawed.
The system is flawed.
My team counts new devs and juniors as 1/2 person from a point perspective when we are doing planning. Juniors usually get this sand bag until we start beating our sprint goals again.
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
My "standard" team typically has two jr engineers, and two Sr engineers. When we hire Sr engineers we hire people that like to mentor others and see it as part of being Sr. Jr engineers know that in order to become Sr one of the skills they need to master is mentoring. This is 100% a management issue, and it starts at the hiring filter. Hiring Jrs btw is its own skill as you are filtering for potential not skill or k…
Then you will need two senior devs. This is because rockstar devs rarely want to mentor junior devs nor attend meetings. Most inventors are not professors.
"Most inventors are not professors"
This is not a great example. In academia, that's because they are fundamentally different jobs in most cases.
Most of the professor roles are not teaching their research, and where they are, i would bet your best professors are the inventors. But most are researching x and teaching y.
By contrast, in software development, the devs should be teaching, because what they are teaching is what they are doing on a daily basis, and the knowledge they've learned in how to do that well.
The notion that people who refuse to mentor or attend meetings (assuming these are symptoms of the same "not team player" phenomenon, and not something else) are rockstars is, imho, pretty misguided.
Even if you assume the 10x people silliness is true, each person mentoring 2-3 new people and building them will make the organization more productive than your 10x person fairly quickly.
(Again, situation may be reasonably different if you only will have a team of one or two, etc)
Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?
#500> 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…
What kind of dev job are you looking for? The company I work for is hiring.