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Who Killed the Junior Developer?

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Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#691

Post by lkbm »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #513
megaman22 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who graduates from a reputable school with a Comp. Sci. or InfoSys type of major is also fully capable of entry-level employment. No, they're really not, for at least a year. It takes at least that long for most new graduates to get over the hump and learn enough of the practical skills and industry practices that their university left them woefully ignorant of, so that they can start being marginally useful…

>Once in a while you find somebody who has been doing real work on the side for years during or before college, and thus has a clue how things work, but that's a diamond in the rough, usually. Can you define "real work"?

I assume essentially anything that isn't a school assignment.

Something built for a need--whether profitable business, or personal need--tends to provide more meaningful experience than a "write this contrived program to learn how [specific programming functionality] works" project.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#692

Post by laythea »

CryoLogic wrote: post #654
bovermyer wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building diversity is an important component of forward progress, since it engenders a broader experiential pool to draw from. In the case of gender, female developers have been shut out of the industry for long enough that corrective action has to be taken to balance the scales. Until such time as that happens, "sex discrimination against men" is impossible.

It is still descrimination. "Discrimination: the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually" - Merriam Webster Dictionary Please don't bend what the word means just because others do. If we have our own meanings for every word, than the words mean nothing.

well said.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#693

Post by violinist »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #555
jfasi wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And I hate to say it, but this right here is the problem with the industry. You're expecting a junior dev to know and apply details of edge cases, complex character sets, runtime and space complexity, parallel processing and behavior of caching. This is not junior level knowledge. You're looking for a mid-level to senior developer with zero experience. Yes it's possible to find, but that's not junior level knowledge.…

I see where you're coming from on some points, such as complex character sets and caching. But runtime and spacetime complexity are basic concepts which should be taught in any respectable CS degree program. Looking for edge cases and writing good tests ought to be taught as well. Also I'd hope parallel algorithms would get some time in a CS degree, but that one could be somewhat negotiable.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#694

Post by rossdavidh »

I've seen junior devs hired and trained/mentored in pretty much every shop I've worked in (could be an Austin, Texas thing). But, if this is a problem generally, would it not just be a consequence of not expecting to be able to keep junior developers long enough to benefit from them? Or, if the hiring managers intend to flip the company in a year or two, not really caring about the long term pool of senior developers?

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#695

Post by firstplacelast »

yomly wrote: post #470
bkovacev wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've recently started hiring for a junior front-end position and we've stumbled upon code bootcamps graduates asking for 120k with one or two demo projects on their github. NYC Area, which I find absurd. Unsure if it's the mentors at those schools that are telling their students to ask for that much or the students themselves think that companies that want to hire juniors usually have that deep of a pocket.

I'd argue that it's absurd that we still think 120k is a lot of money when we look around at how expensive things like property are. My father, with a modest education and a modest first job, was able to get married, raise a child and buy a house near London well before he was 30. Property in that area is now worth hundreds of thousands and would require a six-figure salary (supposedly a lot of money!!) to be able to…

This is exactly how I frame salary negotiations living in a big city. If you want to pay me less, fix the housing market. Otherwise, you need to pay me enough to buy the shittiest home/condo within 4 hours of the office.

That's a six-figure salary in a big city. If boomers and management are upset that they have to pay adults, adult salaries, that is their own over-entitlement causing their distress.

Fuck you, pay me. Garbage-men get paid 85k in the city I am living in with no education required. If you want someone that had to invest lots of time and money into getting two degrees, you need to pay a premium.

I really wish boomers would hurry up and die. Fucking hell, they have turned America into a shithole country.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#696

Post by jronsomers »

emidln wrote: post #532
torbjorn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is referring to people entering the field now. If they don't have internships then it will be hard for them to compete with others vying for Junior Dev positions that have done internships.

Anecdotally, I didn't factor in internships at all when I was last hiring for a jr. I didn't interview a single person who didn't have a public code repo.

You don't consider real world work experience relevant when hiring? Just side projects or contributions to open source projects?

That seems like you're looking for someone who lives and breathes programming. Do you have something against developers who work 40 hours a week and instead of programming as a hobby as well, they do other, non-tech, things for their hobby?

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#697

Post by Nullabillity »

aperrien wrote: post #558
delecti wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your story reminds me of the joke/anecdote of the way to cheat on tests. You religiously look over your notes and the textbook in the weeks leading up to the test, so that when you take the test it's like you have a comprehensive cheat sheet with you, but in your head . If the hiring process wasn't able to distinguish between you or who they thought they were looking for, then it wasn't your responsibility to inform…

I may be dense here, but what's the difference between a cheat sheet in your head and actually knowing the topic?

Knowing canned answers vs being able to come up with it yourself.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#698

Post by DannyBee »

dtech wrote: post #528
DannyBee wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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. I don't agree, senior tasks are often much more high-level and related to figuring out requirements/stories, or their tasks are hard enough that explaining them to juniors is not the most productive.

I'm kind of confused here, so i feel like i missing something. The way this is written makes feel feel like you you don't think the junior devs need to become competent at those high level tasks over time? Otherwise, how do they become senior devs if not by things like "gradually delegate higher level work, see what happens, help them learn by mentoring them based on results". It's not like they read a book and suddenly know how to do that.

"hard enough that explaining them to juniors is not the most productive" I strongly doubt this. Most of the differences i've seen over the years are in approach to complexity, and not level of complexity themselves.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#699

Post by Caveman_Coder »

jronsomers wrote: post #696
emidln wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I didn't factor in internships at all when I was last hiring for a jr. I didn't interview a single person who didn't have a public code repo.

You don't consider real world work experience relevant when hiring? Just side projects or contributions to open source projects? That seems like you're looking for someone who lives and breathes programming. Do you have something against developers who work 40 hours a week and instead of programming as a hobby as well, they do other, non-tech, things for their hobby?

I was asked about that kind of "programmer universe" stuff during my interview process with my current employer. I said I didn't have a GitHub, never been to a programming conference, didn't participate in the local dev scene, and didn't really program on my free time. I said in my free-time I like being outside, hiking, camping, and fishing...It didn't hurt me because I got the job, of course, I'm working for a utility company and not some flashy SV/NY tech startup...

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#700

Post by whb07 »

violinist wrote: post #693
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I hate to say it, but this right here is the problem with the industry. You're expecting a junior dev to know and apply details of edge cases, complex character sets, runtime and space complexity, parallel processing and behavior of caching. This is not junior level knowledge. You're looking for a mid-level to senior developer with zero experience. Yes it's possible to find, but that's not junior level knowledge.…

I see where you're coming from on some points, such as complex character sets and caching. But runtime and spacetime complexity are basic concepts which should be taught in any respectable CS degree program. Looking for edge cases and writing good tests ought to be taught as well. Also I'd hope parallel algorithms would get some time in a CS degree, but that one could be somewhat negotiable.

Can you define what a 'respectable' CS program is? I'm currently taking a core CS class online for fun at a major public university and its nothing earth shattering. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that I get more out of blogs and study aides like 'cracking the coding interview' than this class.
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