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Who Killed the Junior Developer?

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Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#681

Post by retbull »

commandlinefan wrote: post #545
shoover wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, sounds like smart preparation to play the game on its terms. Did those questions end up being seriously relevant to the work? If so, then you prepared yourself better for the job by learning the answers. If not, well, then maybe it's the interviewers who weren't so honest.

> Did those questions end up being seriously relevant to the work? Oh, God no. I've never been asked a question in a job interview that was in any way relevant to the work I actually ended up doing.

Only one question has ever been relevant for me. It was about map reduce for locations and the job was using map reduce on location data...

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#682

Post by Anchor »

vinceguidry wrote: post #663
logfromblammo wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hire the rockstar to write version 1. That's the one that gets you to market fast, and the one you should be planning on throwing away. It's the one you keep in production as your non-rockstar ninja and guru coders write version 2 from scratch. Once you release version 2, you really need to fire your rockstar. They will never be happy in maintenance mode, and that's fine, because they're usually bad at writing fo…

I'm a guru. Still looking for that project to master with that company that values me. It is literally a dream of mine to finally finish paying off tech debt while putting in policies to never have to take any on again.

I have that dream too. It seems that the more years I spend as a developer, the less I am comfortable to taking on technical debt. Maybe it is because there are so rarely opportunities to pay it off - and the interest rate is almost always way higher than anticipated.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#683

Post by marcosdumay »

zemanel wrote: post #345
marcosdumay wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which they are in their full right to do They seem to be scamming the shareholders diverting money from productive investment into their self worth. It's not your problem, but it's not in their full right to do either.

I do not believe they have shareholders. Afaik, the company business model is around providing tech services for humanitarian aid institutions and at least some revenue comes from that type of donor funding

If they don't have money for buying proper productive equipment, but spend what they have in unproductive ostentatious stuff for management, they are very likely defrauding somebody. It may be shareholders, donors, tax-payers, or somebody else, but they are hurting somebody.

It is also almost certainly not the employees (unless it's a cooperative).

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#684

Post by mercutio2 »

toastercat wrote: post #607
mercutio2 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a pretty common misunderstanding of the point of recruiting events. The recruiters aren’t there to let you know they’ve got jobs. They’re there to talk in person to young people, and figure out which ones have passion for the company/project/etc., and put the passionate people’s resumes at the top of the queue. If you just pick up a business card, it’s indistinguishable from being a cold call/spray an…

I did not mean to imply that I LITERALLY just collected business cards and spoke to no one. Of course, doing so at recruiting events would be absurd. So, I don't think it's a common misunderstanding. I think it's common sense that you're supposed to speak to the recruiters and build your network.

Ah! In that case, sorry to hear you had such a hard time! If you talked to recruiters with enthusiasm and gave them your name/resume, I think you did the right thing.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#685

Post by songzme »

The ideal hiring process imo is actually a training process that is less focused on 'finding the best' but rather focused on helping their local community become good engineers. Companies fund their own bootcamps and pay students $15/hr (with no engineering experience). Students learn and help each other how to code (following a structured curriculum) with mentorship by engineers from the company. When students have finished the basics, they work on open source projects or internal projects following proper engineering process / tools that the company use. When a student has proved that he/she learned how to work well with other engineers and has built a few features, they get hired by the company as an engineer and this engineer would be immediately productive.

This might seem like a crazy idea, but its actually not. The previous companies that I have worked for all offer paid volunteer hours which could go directly to this initiative. The cost of hiring is around 30k per engineer (conservatively), which could help train someone living paycheck to paycheck for an entire year.

This non-profit does this: https://garagescript.org

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#686

Post by zanny »

yomly wrote: post #649
brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. 100. Do you have any revolutionizing ideas about how to change this for the better? I think you could start a movement right here.

Well for starters, losing the mentalities "well if I got paid x when I was a junior, then this junior should also be paid x" and "if I'm a senior earning a, this junior should not be earning more than b" when you reach leadership positions will help. Having profit-sharing schemes when you run your own business are also helpful. Another alternative would be reserving a sizeable proportion (like 20%) of your company's…

Absolutely this. Income is not zero sum. Someone else fighting to earn more should be incentive for you to do the same, not villainize them as "greedy".

You cannot be greedy in salary negotiations. A company will not keep you on staff if you demand to be paid more than you are worth. If someone can get paid more by fighting for that raise you should be there supporting them 110% and fighting your own battles to be paid justly for your productiveness.

And you cannot feel guilty about the millions who struggle on substantially lower incomes. It is a problem way larger than an individual that only a small fraction of the working class produces trillions in revenue while the rest make close to parity with their productive yields at fractions of what the top end make. That being said, its not something to ignore, but at that scale its social and political. You have to fight the fights in the arenas they are suited for. Avoiding your own right to the fruit of your labor because your labor produces substantially more revenue than someone elses contributes to holding everyone back when competing for just wages.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#687

Post by 0027 »

virgilp wrote: post #223

> 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…

> You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!

I think this is a stereotype that will lead to more harm than good. What if a junior dev doesn't code just as fast or faster? Does that mean we hired the wrong junior dev? I agree we can should be open to junior developers, just implanting this stereotype is harmful

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#688

Post by TheCoelacanth »

nawitus wrote: post #584
corpMaverick wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sr Dev with 26 years of experience. I get my edge not by coding fast. I maximize the amount of work that we don't have to do. - Better (usually simpler) designs. - Breaking the problem and choosing the order in which things are implemented. - Setting up usefull feedback loops. - etc, etc. It is a lot about judgment.

That is "coding fast". Coding fast doesn't mean literally churning out a lot of code and pull requests.

Managers often have trouble recognizing the difference, though. Even if they know the difference, measuring actual productivity is difficult and subjective, measuring number of pull requests or number of JIRA tickets closed is easy and objective.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#689

Post by Raphmedia »

runedog wrote: post #446

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make myself available for mentoring over the internet? I'm sure there's many possibilities, but has anyone had actual success with any? Preferably I could get paid doing it, but if that's not really feasible then I wouldn't mind pro bono.

Find a Slack or IRC channel and hang out there. Example: I spend a lot of time in #FoundationSites, #Symfony, #Aurelia and answers questions there.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#690

Post by virgilp »

g051051 wrote: post #664
virgilp wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Read it again. What I was saying is two things: A. GOOD junior devs can (and often do) outperform good senior devs at the metric of "quantity of code produced" (I later added that IMO in fact they should , not just can ) B. (the central point of my argument, really) If you're working on the premise "we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor juniors" , you're misusing the senior devs. It's not just cost…

And I'm saying that your arguments are wrong. I don't care how good the junior dev is, I can out code them every time. > If you're working on the premise "we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor juniors" , you're misusing the senior devs. Actually, no argument there. Mentoring is indeed a critical function of senior devs. > It's not just cost-ineffective (you're paying a senior do to a junior's work) And…

Look. Aren't you spending time thinking? Do you imagine you think faster than everybody aged 23?

Could you do an MSc at a top-level US university (in your primary domain of expertise) in a week? Because plenty of people (juniors by definition, almost all of them) can do it in 2 years, so if you're "100x" in the sense that you say you are, you should be able to do all that work in 1 week. At least that much should be plainly obvious to you, that you can't possibly be "100x" in the sense that you claim to be. Or well, if you are... you're rather unique, I definitely haven't seen anybody that can even come close to you, and I know some top-notch engineers. So you're definitely the exception, not the rule.

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