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Who Killed the Junior Developer?

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Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#221

Post by zackya89 »

cturner wrote: post #199
whiskyant wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think dedicated mentorship is required for junior devs. There's usually code reviews in which they can pick up on a lot, a mountain of resources online, and there's nothing stopping them from asking for help/opinions from fellow co-workers when tackling a problem.

When you hire a junior developer, they are themselves a project. How else could it be? The need for mentoring is what makes them a junior. If they didn't need mentoring, they would not be a junior. Code reviews are a reactive exercise. They allow people of influence to criticise work. But it is important that people of influence have first stepped up, and laid out a clear direction. As the mentor, you should have a m…

Im hired as junior dev. at a relatively large non-tech company, to provide them with software tools, I built all these tools by myself with no mentoring and no help, My fear is this, my code looks clunky (probably not written according to good software design ?), and hard to read for others, I also have no skills in collaboration, how would I be able to grow these skills without a mentor ?.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#222

Post by thirdsun »

adrianN wrote: post #156
Trundle wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to end up paying market rate anyway, why not just skip the training cost and hire them after someone else has put in the hard yards?

Because the problem domain, process and tooling is specific to your company and a senior person also needs time to learn them.

Plus, turning a junior into a senior developer isn't exactly a boolean switch, that is turned over night. It's a process and that junior developer will spend a lot of intermediate time between both states, in which he's still very useful, yet affordable since he's probably paid below senior level.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#223

Post by virgilp »

> 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 actually code all that stuff themselves! "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do... how can people say with a straight face that they can't afford to let them do it?

I don't view this as "tragedy of the commons" as other people here suggest. I view this as plain human stupidity (which we're all guilty of, sometimes... it's just good to realize when you're being stupid before it seriously hurts you).

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#224

Post by zackya89 »

aerotwelve wrote: post #109
wlesieutre wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once they're trained up to a point where another company is willing to pay them more for a more senior position, you could give them a raise? Congrats! You trained a junior dev and they turned into a senior dev.

This is the answer, but they just won't listen. Management at so many firms have convinced themselves that developers leave because of all these magical reasons that aren't either 1) they're dissatisfied with their pay and you're not listening 2) they're dissatisfied with their working conditions (bullpens or open offices anyone?) so they'll never keep their best people and they'll never learn.

This I can nod agreed with, Im forced into open office, with a lot of marketing people, and I cant be productive, often times I end up spending my time at home fixing the hard problems, and just doing the easy ones at work. btw. I'm a junior dev. without mentor working with non tech people.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#225

Post by vkou »

austenallred wrote: post #104

I’m the cofounder of a YC-backed Computer Science academy ( https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science ), and we’ve noticed a few things: 1. The junior dev market is flooded. It’s also flooded with people that cannot code. We’ve done quite a bit of analysis, and we’re talking 10% can write fizzbuzz. Bootcamps are pumping people out as fast as they can collect money, and while some are solid juniors many are just compl…

> All that said, we take it for granted that we’re in an industry where people go from cold start to 6 figure salaries in 3-6 months. I’ve not aware of that ever having happened in the history of the world.

There have been plenty of trained or semi-trained labour shortages in the history of the world, with similar results.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#226

Post by thaumasiotes »

jfasi wrote: post #176
mgenglder wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about what the common deficiencies that your encountering are. Do you mean lack of knowledge and testing and more applicable skills?

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…

> Sorting the entire array when I ask you for the top N elements! Getting the top handful of elements is a linear-time operation, people!

Unlike your other points, this one seems unlikely to cause any trouble in practice. From a polynomial-order perspective, a factor of log N is literally infinitesimal, essentially free.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#227

Post by dglass »

Shameless plug: I’m starting a newsletter writing about career advice for junior developers. I’m at the point in my career where I feel like I can share my experiences and give direction on what I learned and what junior engineers should focus on when it comes to soft skills. I won’t be getting too technical. It’s the soft skills that I struggled with so it’s the soft skills that I want to help with.

If you’re interested you can subscribe at https://exponentialbackoff.substack.com

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#229

Post by shams93 »

godot wrote: post #152
nathanaldensr wrote: post #6

I love mentoring. I always have. I used to help out other kids in my high school programming classes. Despite holding several high-level software development positions, what is the total number of times I've been asked by management to mentor more junior folks? Zero. I did it because I love sharing knowledge and I like seeing looks of understanding appear on my colleagues' faces when they "get something" for the firs…

I feel like the current trend of agile development process common in startups now somewhat works against senior devs' interests to mentor junior devs. There simply isn't time allocated for this. Senior devs are held accountable for what they deliver, and doing so on time. This is among other things like code reviewing PRs and attending meetings. For most senior devs working under this circumstance, the best they coul…

Agile doesn't really foster collaboration in general. You can't have one ticket assigned to two developers and have them pair program, from the business perspective rather than the best way to develop inexpensive new talent pair coding is a massive waste of time and resources. However agile works really well for remote workers who have little social contact outside of the daily standups and slack. It helps to be an autodidact in the industry in general no matter where your skill level is. I've had kids with almost no experience smoke me on react because we were both having to learn it at the same time and the kid was a better autodidact than me.
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