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On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

lizmrush.com

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Re: On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

#51

Post by UK-AL »

hcho wrote: post #49
peteretep wrote: post #9

That's a pretty impressive starting salary range for a junior. a) You must have interviewed exceptionally well, and be in practice "not really" a junior (which would imply Ada are doing an incredible job, and is freakin' awesome), or be bringing to bear some other skills and/or b) Salary range where you are is broken You said the range you got offered was $75-$95, which in Great British Pounds is £47-£60,000, and I'v…

Apples to oranges comparison, really. Give up the job security aspect of British jobs and you'll find out companies are more willing to pay numbers close to what's seen in the US.

You have no job security(No right for tribunal) until 2 years in. They can literally make anything up, and fire you for no reason if that's what they feel like.

Re: On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

#52

Post by sqrt17 »

e12e wrote: post #24
forrestthewoods wrote: post #8

$95,000 for someone with 6 months school + 6 month internship is fucking insane. Holy shit!

If you subscribe to the idea that colleges/universities teaches how to think - and how to study, and not a (set of) subject, she has a BS+1 year of programming specialization.

If you look at Nordstrom's interviewing site (linked in the article), you see that they require people to have some technical background but also general communication skills. All the talk about "t-shaped" people boils down to the fact that in their line of work, understanding requirements (including non-technical descriptions given by a customer) is a non-negotiable requirement of the job, whereas purely technical excellence isn't as useful to them.

In that sense, having good communication skills and some programming experience, on top of being good at "getting stuff done" is better than what they'd get out of an average CS graduate. Put in other terms, current CS curricula don't serve these companies well, because they yield people who are deeply technical, but bring neither good communication skills nor necessarily familiarity with the tools used by them.

Re: On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

#54

Post by xiaoma »

>Because Hsing-Hui and I gave our first conference talk in August, we mentioned during our talk that we'd be looking for jobs in October.

Wat? How the heck did she give tech conference talks before landing even a junior dev job? It sounds to me like she had some significant advantage most people trying to break into the industry don't.

Re: On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

#55

Post by anullptr »

_RPM wrote: post #2

> I did a code challenge that involved ranking soccer teams, and while going over the code a developer at the company asked me if I needed the rules of the game explained to me. While it's a good thing to make sure the candidate understands what the problem is, companies need to be aware that these things carry extra cultural baggage and asking a female candidate if they understand a basic sports rule (or any other m…

100% agree.

It's nothing to so with sex. If they were implementing rules for the TV game show Countdown would there be an issue there? I doubt it. You shouldn't have to be scared of checking if someone is familiar and briefed on the subject matter.

Re: On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

#56

Post by jarek »

gedrap wrote: post #41
_RPM wrote: post #2

> I did a code challenge that involved ranking soccer teams, and while going over the code a developer at the company asked me if I needed the rules of the game explained to me. While it's a good thing to make sure the candidate understands what the problem is, companies need to be aware that these things carry extra cultural baggage and asking a female candidate if they understand a basic sports rule (or any other m…

Totally agree. There's absolutely nothing sexist about it at all. I am male and there loads of sports I have no idea about the rules. Now, let's say I stumble across this bit before I interview her. Red flag: tends to treat things as sexist when they clearly are not. Meaning a potential law suit or what not for nothing. Sorry, too big of a liability.

> Now, let's say I stumble across this bit before I interview her. Red flag: tends to treat things as sexist when they clearly are not. Meaning a potential law suit or what not for nothing. Sorry, too big of a liability.

Eh, that works both ways.

"Red flag: assumes I will sue the company based on one blog post they misunderstood. Meaning a potentially shitty company afraid of a lawsuit exposing their shittyness. Sorry, too big of a risk."

Congrats! You're not a match. I doubt either of you will spill many tears.

Re: On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

#58

Post by jacalata »

xiaoma wrote: post #54

>Because Hsing-Hui and I gave our first conference talk in August, we mentioned during our talk that we'd be looking for jobs in October. Wat? How the heck did she give tech conference talks before landing even a junior dev job? It sounds to me like she had some significant advantage most people trying to break into the industry don't.

She attended a year long coding boot camp. Many of the boot camps are very proactive about getting their students involved in meet up groups, and getting them to present - I've seen quite a few from Code Fellows at various Seattle meetups, for instance.

Re: On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

#59

Post by hcho »

UK-AL wrote: post #51
hcho wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples to oranges comparison, really. Give up the job security aspect of British jobs and you'll find out companies are more willing to pay numbers close to what's seen in the US.

You have no job security(No right for tribunal) until 2 years in. They can literally make anything up, and fire you for no reason if that's what they feel like.

Still, your year 3 salary is a function of your starting salary.

Re: On Interviewing as a Junior Dev

#60

Post by anullptr »

pookieinc wrote: post #25

This article was interesting to read from my standpoint. I'm currently unemployed and am currently looking for a jr. dev position as well. Background: Received CS degree, have worked for 3 years as a full-stack developer internationally with lots of code written, and am now looking in the Bay Area for front-end developer position. > Red Flag 1: Asking me to dedicate over ten hours to a code challenge before meeting a…

Speaking as an interviewer at a corporation, referrals put your name higher on a list of people to interview, and they get you absolutely nothing else.

Internal recruiters/HR are also terrible. I've lost count of how many times we'll receive a CV from someone that applied online and then when we call them they tell us they applied months ago and aren't interested anymore. So don't feel too disheartened.

I can't get my head around coding challenges. When I was looking for a job when I wanted to leave my graduate position I encountered a few of these. Either it was homework that they reviewed (and printed out the wrong source code when interviewing me) or it was a C# written test when I'd never done any C# in my life. I'm not really a fan of super technical show-me-you-know-angulars-implementation-detail interviews, I think it's just an opprtubity for the interviewer to act like they're shit hot. If they've got (even a tiny amount of) programming experience, show they're interested, can work through simple problems and describe what they're doing they can probably pick up whatever the fashionable programmibg language/library is now.

On the topic of tailoring an interview, I think its nice to keep some common questions across candidates so there's some useful reference point and bechmark.

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