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

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

#351

Post by rb808 »

I work for a big corp who has always hired a lot of graduates for a grad program. We rotate people through two teams of 6 months each then place in a final team in one of those areas or a third if necessary. Traditionally it has worked well as we get a good source of smart people. Recently though grads are leaving really quickly, like 18 months, even just a year.

Maybe its because the job market is hot people can get mid level jobs with 1 year of experience. I don't think a recent grad with 1 year experience is worth paying mid-level salaries, but I guess that is all they care about.

Training grads really sucks, they are negative to productivity, but I personally try to spend a lot of time interviewing, mentoring, training, doing extra code reviews because I've enjoyed it and want to help people. When people leave after 18 months with the company though its really disappointing, almost insulting. I feel like I'm wasting my time. Our team is going to stop asking for grads because we are really getting nothing out of it.

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

#352

Post by merpnderp »

oh-kumudo wrote: post #103

I think the reason is simple: once the junior dev is trained, they will leave. To be clear, I am not saying that they are obliged to stay in the company that trained them or being ungrateful in any sense, I am simply implying this is a common outcome from such training. In software industry, the first job switch in 2 years seems pretty common and reasonable, and the dev by that time would be able to strike a better j…

This isn’t a hypothetical for my team. We filled a position twice with a fresh out of school dev and both times they left after a year or two for senior positions with massive raises even though they were both on the fast track for such things at our shop. Now we just hire seniors only.

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

#353

Post by ksec »

ivansavz wrote: post #171
stormbrew wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other replies touch on this, but I'm gonna get straight to the point: Does your friend give them actual, meaningful raises as they grow? Is he actually paying competitively to begin with? Because I think if you have this pattern that consistently, it's really likely that either you're underpaying to begin with or your raises suck or are not even present. I love working at small companies. It's by far my preferenc…

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. I think what's going on is that after a year at any job you start to see the problems with the code base, and it starts to get repetitive. It will be like that both in big-co and small-co, but in a differen…

Now assuming they got another three - four years of Soul Crushing big-co Life, that should be 7 years into their professional coding, turning 30s, questioning everything there is in life. Would they have rejoin their first company if they were given the same salary?

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

#354

Post by eximius »

deepGem wrote: post #306
deepGem wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just curious, why do you need to test somone's ability to find max of a list. Language designers have recognized this as a basic utility and incorporated them into the language. Is the hypothesis that - if someone cannot write a simple algo to find the max of a list then what other difficult tasks he/she can perform ? Even though in reality we all understand no one needs to write a max algorithm.

I don't mind getting downvoted but can someone please explain why - this is an honest question. Many devs have scoffed at interviews when I've asked them some really basic quesitons such as finding max element in an array.

I don't think you should have been downvoted. Likely, people expected you to already understand the purpose of the question because I called it a variation of FizzBuzz - which is fair as it's quite well known, though maybe not worthy of downvotes.

Those devs don't understand the reality of interviewing or take offense too easily. The reality is that people lie on their resumes, which makes such questions necessary. If they can pass, they can feel scoff all they want, but they had best answer the question or I will assume they are acting to avoid showing they can't answer it.

It's an unfortunate waste of everyone's time.

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

#355

Post by marvin »

ryanobjc wrote: post #203
stormbrew wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

In fact in the good big companies, they crave for employee growth. Time and money for training, meaningful career growth, and pay growth, major tech switches without changing jobs. I find that small companies are often much worse in all these metrics. As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect - your friend, the cofounder, has that job. And is never giving it up. Plus thanks to cash crunch, making shortcu…

> the company’s health plan was on the hook for a million in costs

As usual, this is the craziest part of the comment to my European mind. Your healthcare system spent somewhere around an entire lifetime of effort for something that, while relatively dramatic, should still be quite routine for a sophisticated medical organization!

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

#356

Post by majortennis »

fastbeef wrote: post #307
hnthrwy1 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you react when someone fails to implement the max of a list? And how do they react? I can't imagine how awkward it is for both the interviewer and interviewee.

Can you imagine how awkward it would be to discover it a week into their new job?

On the job you'd have a computer and just google 'list max min median '

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

#357

Post by ksec »

tokyodude wrote: post #329

Be careful what you wish for. This is the norm in Japan. Students are hired out of college. They often actually have no real programming experience but based on their major they are hired into an engineering track. Programmers in Japan start at $20k-$25k a year. Many famous Japanese companies have limits set by HR of $60k a year for a programmer regardless of experience. I'm not saying that's the result you'll get bu…

Again, are these total earning? in USD? Because many companies (especially in US ) have performance bonus, stock etc... where their actual "yearly" earning is way higher.

And just to make it clear, The difference between a junior Dev and Super Senior Dev is only 3x?

( I am still baffled by how widely different the dev salary are in different region )

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

#358

Post by mcv »

pandler wrote: post #139
oh-kumudo wrote: post #103

I think the reason is simple: once the junior dev is trained, they will leave. To be clear, I am not saying that they are obliged to stay in the company that trained them or being ungrateful in any sense, I am simply implying this is a common outcome from such training. In software industry, the first job switch in 2 years seems pretty common and reasonable, and the dev by that time would be able to strike a better j…

I had a conversation the other day with some work colleagues where we were talking about a friends dad who just retired from working as an engineer at AT&T for something like 35 years. We made some jokes about how that would be unthinkable these days and the conversation moved on. Loyalty goes both ways. If you want someone to stick around, incentivize them to.

My dad worked for the same company for about 40 years. My brother only recently left a job where he'd worked for over 20 years.

My sister and I are the only ones in our family who switch jobs every few years. Switching often seems to be better for our careers, though my brother has worked on some very interesting stuff. (All of us are in IT.)

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

#359

Post by sleepychu »

scarejunba wrote: post #147
stormbrew wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other replies touch on this, but I'm gonna get straight to the point: Does your friend give them actual, meaningful raises as they grow? Is he actually paying competitively to begin with? Because I think if you have this pattern that consistently, it's really likely that either you're underpaying to begin with or your raises suck or are not even present. I love working at small companies. It's by far my preferenc…

It doesn't matter what his friend gives them. I can beat it _and_ for those who prefer just working on technical design and code with an experienced team, I can offer them that. No forced mentorship taking up your time. Since senior engineer mentorship is a different thing, I can easily give them a better job than the "you have to help train junior engineers" guy. Altogether, this is the best approach. The guys at tw…

Care to disclose where you work/what your org does?

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

#360

Post by jcadam »

> To further stack up the frustration, it's not uncommon to see the same position listed and re-listed on LinkedIn and Indeed for months: certainly somebody could have been hired and trained to the level needed in that time.

There are a lot of companies that aren't serious about hiring. They post jobs, conduct a few interviews, but never actually hire anyone to fill a position. My guess is that they think it's a good idea to always list an open position just in the case a demigod of computer science happens to apply.

You can usually tell right away if a company is serious - they actively shepherd you through a short but intense hiring process, and if they want you, they make an offer quickly.

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