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Who Killed the Junior Developer?

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Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#431

Post by throwawayfh9 »

Itaxpica wrote: post #408
consp wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked on my own laptop for a while (due to startup lack of money, it was either wage or the laptop at some point due to liquidity issues), with one point made to my employer: All copyright on work done on my laptop belongs to me, and only me. You can 'rent' it by paying me my wage but as soon as I leave, all code on it is mine and I'm taking it with me for future 'reference'. Don't know how this works legally…

All copyright on work done on my laptop belongs to me, and only me. You can 'rent' it by paying me my wage but as soon as I leave, all code on it is mine and I'm taking it with me for future 'reference'. Don't know how this works legally but since I'm not a self employed person who has a business contract, I'm pretty sure you cannot legally force someone to use their own stuff without compensation. In the US at least…

Why are the people who are so cocksure always the ones who know the least? “I’ve (incorrectly) interpreted copyright law, and I admit I don’t know how the law works, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.”

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#432

Post by JoeAltmaier »

padobson wrote: post #425
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't see anything said that's incompatible with the 'Den mother' stigma. If its about pay and promotion, not about being friendly with Engineers, then you want to avoid the role that won't be respected. You can't imagine all the ways management can dismiss women's actions - "she's a great connector in that department. Let's leave her there, that's working great." or "sure she's got all the guys eating out of her han…

If its about pay and promotion Pay and promotion is about making yourself valuable. If you mentor engineers and gain a reputation for doing so, you're effectively shaping the culture of the organization, not to mention gives you a ton of leverage with the productive employees you taught to be productive. It makes you far less disposable. When mixed with even amateur negotiating skills, that leads to promotion and bet…

If you ignore the part about stigmatizing, which happens to women by default, then sure. An objective management team would act as described.

But the 'den mother' comment comes out of a real issue, of womens roles being sidelined. One pragmatic response is to avoid roles that feed into the stereotype.

In a better world, this would not be a thing. But here we are.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#433

Post by donkeyd »

dep_b wrote: post #319
zemanel wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my current job, for a tech company with less than 12 people, at least 5 are interns. Two of them were recent hires (January) and before they were onboarded, i had a meeting with my boss and the other senior developer regarding the new interns and my boss stated he didn’t want me and other senior dev spending too much time mentoring the interns and that if they couldn’t manage by themselves, he would just let them…

The Netherlands is a special place in Software Hell. Where the non-suits are only a cost. "Devs can't be cheap enough! We can't find decent devs!"

As a Netherlander, I agree. There are so many bad developers here, and that's from somebody who considers himself barely able. Also, as a developer you're expected to do lots of unpaid overtime while getting paid the absolute minimum.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#434

Post by jdc0589 »

I agree that the fault does lie largely with employers, but it's not just them. Jr Dev positions are there, but more often than not they are at small local companies that likely aren't paying market rate (or at least their mico-local market rate). For example: there are lots of places in Birmingham (AL) with Jr dev positions, paid internships, etc.., but you can't expect to make > $65k out of the gates.

Then again, small shops are the best place for a first dev job in my opinion. You get exposed to WAY more stuff than you would at larger more established places most of them time. There are downsides, but I personally think the most important thing for a first job is getting exposed to a lot of new stuff and learning to get comfortable in an unknown environment/stack quickly.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#435

Post by wakkaflokka »

bkovacev wrote: post #298
derrekl wrote: post #122

The problem is squashed salaries. I’ll have junior devs or people straight out of code school asking for 75-80% the salary of a solid senior dev. If I have to make a bet on who will be easier to manage and get productive 4 seniors vs 5 juniors for the same total expenditure I’ll choose the seniors every time. Even at 2 to 1 I’m taking seniors. Maybe around 3 or 4 to 1 juniors might look better. But that means junior…

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.

We've been getting something similar - data analysts with solely Excel and SQL experience who've been in the industry for that interested in the position and just fishing to see if some company will pick them up (and maybe some will, but there's not even close to a shortage of analysts/data scientists to command that type of salary for that experience).

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#436

Post by varjag »

opportune wrote: post #247
derrekl wrote: post #122

The problem is squashed salaries. I’ll have junior devs or people straight out of code school asking for 75-80% the salary of a solid senior dev. If I have to make a bet on who will be easier to manage and get productive 4 seniors vs 5 juniors for the same total expenditure I’ll choose the seniors every time. Even at 2 to 1 I’m taking seniors. Maybe around 3 or 4 to 1 juniors might look better. But that means junior…

I've noticed this too. There are only a few rational explanations 1. Senior devs aren't paid enough for the value they bring to the company (or conversely, junior devs are paid too much for that value) 2. Investing in junior devs gives a good enough ROI that it's worth overpaying them for a few years. That is, after e.g. three years, enough junior devs have stuck around that they've accumulated enough org-specific kn…

0. Junior devs are hired on current median salary trends, while senior coast from the ones they started with years before.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#437

Post by burlesona »

CSMastermind wrote: post #349

Do people really think this is a problem? I feel like everyone is taking the article at face value instead of reading between the lines: people don't want to hire bootcamp grads. Developers fresh out of college with a BA in computer science have no problem getting a job.

I had a similar reaction. Boot camp hires haven’t worked out very well when I’ve hired them in the past — even allocating a lot of mentoring time. I don’t care about degrees of big time jobs, but in my experience it takes several years of being a curious coder hacking on learning projects before you reach a level where I can give you work to do.

There are plenty of people who fit that bill, but we can only handle a ratio of 20-30% junior or we can’t really give them the support they need to grow, otherwise we’d hire more.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#438

Post by [deleted] »

tboyd47 wrote: post #380
vinceguidry wrote: post #364

There were never any junior dev jobs. You have always had to lie, cheat, and steal your way into the field. I have a buddy who legit cheated his way to the top Magento certification and now cycles through $150k+ jobs where they keep him on long enough to realize he doesn't have any coding skills then they fire him. Reason is software is always an ancillary concern to the business. You see this in other fields, like s…

Ok, the first part of your comment makes no sense to me. How do you lie your way into a certification? An interview I can understand, but don't you have to take a test to get a cert? From the second paragraph down, you're absolutely right for non-software companies. They still don't have an understanding of how to build software development into their business model. They don't realize that the low barrier entry to b…

[deleted]

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#439

Post by thomaslangston »

binarycheese wrote: post #403
jmvoodoo wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "standard" team typically has two jr engineers, and two Sr engineers. When we hire Sr engineers we hire people that like to mentor others and see it as part of being Sr. Jr engineers know that in order to become Sr one of the skills they need to master is mentoring. This is 100% a management issue, and it starts at the hiring filter. Hiring Jrs btw is its own skill as you are filtering for potential not skill or k…

Then you will need two senior devs. This is because rockstar devs rarely want to mentor junior devs nor attend meetings. Most inventors are not professors.

If you don't want to teach, you're not a rockstar. The best developers I know have always been ready to show and explain what and why and how. Inventors love to talk about their inventions.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#440

Post by burlesona »

cyberpanther wrote: post #11

I teach at a Bootcamp and see a lot junior developers looking for jobs. Many of them complain of it being hard to find jobs and it is. But I don’t think it is any harder than say 10 years ago when I got started. The main the problem is they’ve never interviewed for a technical position before or aren’t looking in the right places for jobs. Also a lot of jobs are perfectly suited for juniors but it doesn’t reflect tha…

I’ve helped several friends get into programming with no prior experience. A few of them did a boot camp. I told all of them that what they needed was to spend a year working hard on a personal project nights and weekends to get enough hours coding, to hit real world problems and have to deal with them, and to have a portfolio piece. The boot camp, if they took it, would be a jump start to get going, but not a guaranteed job.

This recipe worked out for all of them so far. Just being able to code “off script” without the guidance of an instructor, and having something real on Github to show for it, seems to be the difference.

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