Who Killed the Junior Developer? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#641

Post by virgilp » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

g051051 wrote: post #561

atoko wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth I agree with the person you’re replying to. The OP is saying: given two senior applicants with the same coding skill level, the one most suited to the job is the person who can communicate to juniors and delegate effectively. I’m surprised you mentor, given all the hubris you have displyed on this thread.

> The OP is saying: given two senior applicants with the same coding skill level, the one most suited to the job is the person who can communicate to juniors and delegate effectively. If that's what he was saying, I'd be much more in agreement. Instead he said, effectively, that senior devs shouldn't be coding because they can't do it any better than junior devs.

No. Read it again. What I was saying is two things:

A. GOOD junior devs can (and often do) outperform good senior devs at the metric of "quantity of code produced" (I later added that IMO in fact they should, not just can)

B. (the central point of my argument, really) If you're working on the premise "we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor juniors" , you're misusing the senior devs. It's not just cost-ineffective (you're paying a senior do to a junior's work), but you also run into other risks as well (juniors that ask questions force seniors to explain stuff, which in turn forces them to think clearly about it; you may have experienced the phenomenon where you understand something much better after explaining it to somebody else)

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#642

Post by jxramos » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

Underwhelming article. I'd say the junior devs are now funneled through contract positions. My experience has been that my companies I work for typically take on junior level roles as interns or contract positions. Take on a couple of contract gigs in the early part of your career till you find a place you like and become a recognized and appreciated contributor. Then when your contract expires push for converting to full time, which usually works best with a counter offer in hand. Throw the dice on dice.com but withhold your full contact information and only give it out to roles you wish to filter. You'll thank yourself in the future in avoiding future spam.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#643

Post by taurath » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:04 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #269

virgilp wrote: post #223

> 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…

The problem I've seen with mentoring, in practice, is the 1 in 3 juniors that takes up all the time. Maybe the particular job doesn't suit them. Maybe they shouldn't be a dev. Maybe it's personality. Some managers, mentors or such seem to deal with this well. But, in the cases that I've seen having an employee that is not producing value is stressful and time consuming. Largely, it's driven by empathy. You don't want…

This has happened to me, but what it exposed was the hiring process gave absolutely no indication of whether the person could code. The 3 juniors assigned to me were interviewed by the VP, and I under him had no say or insight into the hiring process. 2 of them did super well and are now senior devs. One of them took up 30-40% of my time (with my putting up boundaries) and the basic understanding of the platform we were using never clicked for him.

The thing is - they got 2 very driven loyal devs out of it, and cheaper than normal at first. They also had an assessment period of 3 months after which the one who would take up all my time was let go. It was absolutely worth it for the company.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#644

Post by jfasi » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #555

jfasi wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And I hate to say it, but this right here is the problem with the industry. You're expecting a junior dev to know and apply details of edge cases, complex character sets, runtime and space complexity, parallel processing and behavior of caching. This is not junior level knowledge. You're looking for a mid-level to senior developer with zero experience. Yes it's possible to find, but that's not junior level knowledge.…

I should be clear, I'm not expecting someone to write up a bulletproof solution to every possible edge case on a whiteboard in 35 minutes. I expect them simply to be familiar with the things that can go wrong. Add a check at the beginning to return false if the array is empty. Tell me your solution will get hairy if I expect you to handle Unicode, have a three-sentence exchange with me as to why, and implement an ASCII-only solution as a first pass.

My time, and the time of everyone on my team, is far too valuable to be spent on teaching new hires things they should have learned on their own in junior year of college. Onboarding people means bringing them up to speed on the complexities and specifics of our own systems. We're not in the business of hiring people and holding their hand for a year until they know enough CS to be useful.

Also:

> This is not junior level knowledge. You're looking for a mid-level to senior developer with zero experience.

Zero professional experience, maybe. Zero experience period, no. This stuff is offered in almost all undergrad CS programs. If you didn't go to college or have a degree in a different field you can find tons of lists of topics for self-study. If you've ever done any project on the side, you're bound to have encountered or at least imagined a couple of these issues. Something as basic as finding the largest N elements in a array isn't a trick, it's something that should be painfully obvious to anyone who's coded for more than a month.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#645

Post by Raidion » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

mwdalrymple wrote: post #294

soheil wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing a rather obvious point. A junior dev after months of training could jump ship for much better comp now that they're less junior or that suddenly some other company's product interests them more. Another point missing is that sometimes there are very hard problems (eg. self-driving cars, fusion power, DNA pattern matching) that need solving quickly and that's what some companies try to do, there are oth…

I disagree with that statement. I find that a junior dev is far less jaded by the work world and will often develop a loyalty and dedicate to the team (if it is a good environment) that a sr. Dev wouldn't. Once your are 5 to 10 years into your career how you view your work/life balance and professional relationships changes dramatically. A junior dev will often stay with an organization much much longer than what is…

I agree with this. My first job I was under a fairly good partner who took the time to mentor me, get me involved in decision making processes, and take me out to see clients. It was some of the best times of my life and I did learn a ton. I had to move for a family issue and immediately received a 35% raise in a similar COL location. If I didn't have that issue come up, I probably would have stayed much longer and continued to be underpaid.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#646

Post by taurath » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #61

mooreds wrote: post #39

It is a tragedy of the commons scenario. Everyone wants senior devs, who were at one point junior devs. No one wants to train junior devs. The OP points out why: * cheaper to have juniorish work done overseas * juniorish work is automated away * juniors on a team slow it down (compared to a team of all seniors) So everyone competes for the senior talent. A more sophisticated long term analysis might look at the benef…

A key point that you're missing is that junior devs are likely to jump ship at least once in their career trajectory before they become senior devs. So yes, junior devs do need to be trained by someone , but if you're going to put in a lot of work and not receive much of the benefit, it's not in your best interest. There's a variety of reasons for why devs jump ship so often (including compensation), but unless you c…

They jump ship more often when they stop or significantly slow growing than when for compensation, but eventually compensation becomes a problem just the same as at any job.

You're underestimating how quickly a junior dev can be putting out useful work - within a few months they'll be tackling a ton of bugs and freeing up senior people to work on bigger features. Yes, eventually they leave, but it seems like everyone seems to think they're just dead weight.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#647

Post by kenhwang » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

JAFTEM wrote: post #529

jnovek wrote: post #468

I've long maintained a maxim that's something like "Look in the opposite direction of everyone else." So when everyone flocks to the bay area, get the heck out of there. When everyone says "I have no space for junior devs" think about how you can take advantage of that underutilized resource. Junior devs are cheap. If you're willing to spend the time to sift -- and you will be doing a lot of resume sifting -- and set…

I understand the appeal of Seattle and the Bay Area, but it sometimes boggles my mind that larger tech companies don't build in cities where there are a large number of new grads looking for jobs. [0] LA county produces the most CS grads in the country, [1] and most of them are moving out of the area and up the coast for lack of junior SWE openings in SoCal. Any of the Big N could have a monopoly on talent coming out…

Hiring juniors in LA has been delightful; so many strong candidates, no real competing offers. That being said, it's also pretty easy to poach burnt out, fed up experienced juniors from the Bay Area.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#648

Post by badpun » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

dep_b wrote: post #610

jacquesm wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city-to-city variations in Germany are far larger than the city-to-city variations in NL because of the German history and the presence of Poland. So when you are comparing countries you need to go a bit deeper than that. I know very well paid developers in NL and very poorly paid ones, it is mostly a matter of knowing what you are worth and refusing to charge less than that. You might find 'your spot' taken by a…

Yet across the Polish border developers are relatively well paid versus the suits and it's actually an attractive profession for people that are career oriented. I always see more women working in IT where the job actually pays well, including the US. I know well paid developers as well, some niches pay pretty well. SAP for example. Or simply people that have domain knowledge that's irreplaceable and know how to nego…

> Yet across the Polish border developers are relatively well paid versus the suits and it's actually an attractive profession for people that are career oriented

My take on this: it's so easy for Polish developers to move to and find a job in Western Europe, that local companies have to pay salary that provides at least a roughly comparable living standard (vs the West)- as otherwise talented people would just leave. For "suits", on the other hand, there's far less opportunities abroad, so their wages don't need to track Western standards so much.

This effect is even stronger in Ukraine, where a teacher will be paid $300 (per month) while a dev will make $3000.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#649

Post by yomly » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:13 PM UTC

brooklyn_ashey wrote: post #632

zanny wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Its not that junior devs are overpaid, its that almost every single salaried job is underpaid for the amount of revenue they produce. If you work for a company and produce a million in value every year and they pay you 100k for it, you are basically accepting that the company was 90% of the reason you made any value at all. For almost every single developer that is not true. On average you could probably make t…

Absolutely. 100. Do you have any revolutionizing ideas about how to change this for the better? I think you could start a movement right here.

Well for starters, losing the mentalities "well if I got paid x when I was a junior, then this junior should also be paid x" and "if I'm a senior earning a, this junior should not be earning more than b" when you reach leadership positions will help.

Having profit-sharing schemes when you run your own business are also helpful. Another alternative would be reserving a sizeable proportion (like 20%) of your company's shares strictly for employee ownership.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#650

Post by antisthenes » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

steveeq1 wrote: post #556

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…

> Also, half of the Jrs we hire are women. We could never do that if we only hired experienced talent. Not enough women even apply for those roles. You're giving preferential treatment to your recruits on the basis of their gender?

It seems like men and women are applying to the junior roles in roughly equal proportion, while the applications to the senior roles might be more skewed to the tune of 80/20 or worse.

Just ball-parking numbers, but that's what I got from his post.