Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?

> That's the weird thing — they (because there are two cofounders) were actually paying very competitive salaries (for the local market). I was impressed to hear what some of them were making. So it's not the money.

This is only half of what I asked. What about the raises? As someone in another thread chain pointed out, the expected raise from job leaping is maybe 15%. How did the raises your friend gave compare to that?

I'm not saying they have to meet it, but if you're sitting there doling out 1-2% raises per year people are gonna leave when they get what they need from you.

Also, small companies (frankly, especially 'web' companies) are not even remotely immune to demanding people just "do their job and not ask questions" or forcing their employees to sit in the same box for 3 years doing the same thing. Often the lack of room for career growth in perpetually small companies almost demands this.

I'm guessing you're looking for a job in a saturated market (west coast, NY). I'll suggest looking elsewhere at companies that are not primarily tech (but have large IT shops). I mean Fortune 500s, not mom-and-pop. And be willing to shift out of front-end, unless you just love UIs. The pay will be lower, but the cost-of-living will also be muuuuch lower. And you may have the opportunity to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. It worked for me :).

Show those folks that you learn outside of work. Your silly Raspberry Pi project or learning a new JS framework for the fun of it shows that it's something you care about. But don't ever expect on-the-job training or mention it. Show that you'll pick up anything they need you too as the industry changes.

Nothing pisses me off more than peers complaining about not getting training. This is IT, our job is to keep up. If you're not getting it at work, then you need to work on it outside. It sucks, but it's true. Show that you're the teach yourself person, vs the whine about lack of training person. Unless you're pulling genuine 60 hour weeks. Then you're just getting ripped off.

Look at companies where folks put in 10+ years, vs. hot tech companies where 2-3 is the norm. They're more willing to invest in learners vs people who know everything they ask for. Honestly, I wouldn't trust a company that wants you to know everything you need to do the job, because they don't care about you developing. And any hiring manager who expects to hire experts in the position is a fool. You want people to develop, and you don't want them to come in with 1000 preconceptions about how to do X based on prior (possibly irrelevant) experience.

As someone shopping a position at one of those big companies where we have 1000's of developers with 10+ year anniversaries in a fly-over state, it's impossible to find folks with 2-5 years of on-the-job experience that have not only done contract programming.

We just hired a person with almost no relevant experience because they showed the ability to learn fairly unrelated technology in their previous position in a mom-and-pop setting. Everyone else who applied used "the tech lead/business owner rejected my user story" as the answer to every behavioral question and ended with "I accepted their decision." I hate behavioral interviews, but with a big company our hands are tied in the interview process and an answer like that just shows that you just work tasks.

Contract-to-hire is a rip-off that you should avoid unless you're jobless. No one invests education in a contractor because there's no ROI, and you'll never get any experience making decisions in those type of positions.

Also consider the fact that maybe you are not interviewing well. Make sure to show your flexibility, problem solving, self-motivation, and positive attitude, even if you think it's not necessarily work-related. If you don't have those traits, work to develop them. A lot of times interviews are more about these than technical skill. Senior vs. Junior is more about leadership than out-nerding your peers. At least if the interviewers know what they're doing. If they didn't then you're probably better off for not landing the gig,

These are just my thoughts, take them with a grain of salt:

Success makes more success. If you're a billion dollar company, you can afford to pay more for employees. This lets you hire better developers, which lets you be even more successful. If you're in a poor country and you're trying to start a company... you're still poor. The fact that you need developers doesn't suddenly make you rich enough to afford the same wages a billion dollar company can afford to pay.

These lower wages mean that good developers in such regions are often swayed to move elsewhere to get paid better, leaving that original area even worse off than it was to begin with.

JetBrains has managed to build a globally successful company in the Czech Republic, where engineering wages are usually about a third of what the US pays. Call it luck, elbow grease, whatever. They did it. From a quick google search, JetBrains pays wages that are competitive with Silicon Valley. They can only afford to do that because they have been so successful. This success is making them even more successful, since they can afford to pay competitive wages, and it probably doesn't hurt (now that they're successful) that the cost of living in Prague is super low compared to much of Europe. But it's not like anyone starting a company in Prague can suddenly afford to pay $120k+ per developer.

This cycle of brain drain is very hard to counteract. Banks aren't usually excited about freely giving out large sums of money to try out this whole "paying people more" thing and seeing if that yields better results than the other tech startups they tried to fund, but failed due to a lack of talent, random chance, or mismanagement.

If a company becomes successful, but they're only successful locally, then they're tied to the low economic success of their area. They don't have any more money than other employers, so they can't pay wages competitive with other places.

I'm no professional economist or anything, so I'm sure I'm missing some of the nuances of the situation, but a shortage in one thing (developers) doesn't somehow imply an abundance in another thing (funding), it just means that there aren't enough developers available within the funding that these companies have available.

It takes a certain amount of dish soap to clean dishes, but an absence of dishes doesn't mean your home suddenly has an excess of dish soap... you might not have any dishes or dish soap!

If the companies had a bunch of money, they probably wouldn't have too much trouble getting developers to work for them... but without those developers, how can they get the money?

Banks don't write blank checks, especially not to people who have no track record of success. If someone has a track record of success starting companies, they probably don't need the banks to give them a loan nearly as much.

The whole thing is a catch-22. There are solutions, they're just not obvious or every smaller economy in the world would already be employing those solutions. Stuff like this might help: https://tulsaremote.com/ It's hard to know.

Some companies in my home country have a clause in the contract which says approximately this: "The company will provide $FOUR_TIMES_MONTHLY_SALARY worth of training to employee. If employee leaves the company within first 2 years he will have to pay $TWO_TIMES_MONTHLY_SALARY back".

That's fine if you have the cash to burn and people to squander. Larger firms probably do (after all some have daily banquets and onsite gyms), but it is just burning cash and squandering time.

If you're on a tight budget like I usually am, I let someone else do that investment. I simply don't have the resources. Early stage startups are the most enjoyable nightmares I've had.