Who Killed the Junior Developer? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#651

Post by Raidion » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #540

skjerns wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is 50k really such a bad starting salary or is there such a big difference between US and EU?

If you are living somewhere with 2k a month rent, then yes, $50k a year is awful and nigh unlivable. You should not be in a position where you are working professionally and full time where you have to worry about having enough money each month to survive. The cost of living is out of control and nobody wants to acknowledge that should reflect rising salaries. It is why there was so much momentum around a $15 minimum…

To be fair, in the 50s and 60s a lot of the jobs were more engineering than technical, and the US had the advantage of being one of the few nations whose industrial capacity wasn't damaged by World War II. Now, software developers of similar skills in the US and India are paid massively different rates, simply because of cost of living. All the "missed gains" the US has is because money is being funneled to other countries who are starting to produce wares (both soft and hard) that compete with what the US basically had a monopoly on.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#652

Post by rapind » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

tropshop wrote: post #588

vinceguidry wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll see your management issue and raise you a leadership one. At my last job, a $40MM cosmetics and skincare company, the CEO had a great deal of trouble figuring out how to get his e-commerce department properly managed. I was willing to step up, and for a brief time they allowed me to bring in candidates for a position that would report to me, but I didn't have enough political cover over me so that fizzled out. I…

E-commerce is unique in that it has such a massive impact on revenue generation, but the skills needed to effectively manage it are rarely inline with the core competencies of the business. Most companies attempt to tackle this problem in house, but without proper expertise, there is massive waste in hiring and poor execution. As a consultant, I’ve seen teams waste _years_ fumbling in this cycle, only for me to ship…

I've seen the same issue, only they never tried it in house. Instead they spent a million or so over 5 years with different consultants who all did an extremely poor job and each time through out previous work and requirements.

This problem isn't unique to in house teams. It's hard to find and motivate competent people whether salaried or consulting.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#653

Post by jfasi » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:17 PM UTC

VexorLoophole wrote: post #254

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…

Dunno how i should feel about this. Somehow i got into Tech Industry without a fitting degree and found myself in a smallish (30 people) company as the only SysAdmin. Exploring, setting, and controlling all technical parts this office needs: Multiple Linux VMs with different services like smb, confluence, ...; AD- and Terminal Windows Server; Device-Managment of all used MacBooks; and so on. I always also liked to co…

First off, congrats on landing in your role! Sysadmin and development are completely different skillsets in my mind, and I have as much admiration for sysadmins as they seem to have for me.

My company doesn't really do small projects anymore, so we take a lot of care to make sure we hire people with the discipline and ability to handle large systems. There's certainly a lot of organizations that don't have that requirement, though, so some of this assessment may be a little harsh.

As for code review catching errors, that sounds great in theory, but in practice it's just rarer than you'd think. Think about it, your reviewer is always going to spend less time on your code than you did, and they're always going to have less context. I find that unless the error is egregious, it's almost never the code reviewer that catches it. You're not really a one man show, but you're pretty close.

Unit testing is by far a better approach. I catch easily ten times as many bugs in my code by unit testing it as by manual inspection and code review combined.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#654

Post by CryoLogic » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

bovermyer wrote: post #626

laythea wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that bad? Jobs should be filled based on skill/knowledge. (The ability to learn is a skill too, one that means what you know currently matters less). I take slight offence to your statement. Why is being a woman relevant to anything, unless your company is going for 50/50 male female. But in my opinion that is wrong, and amounts to sex discrimination against men, because if 50% of roles are filled by men, even…

Building diversity is an important component of forward progress, since it engenders a broader experiential pool to draw from. In the case of gender, female developers have been shut out of the industry for long enough that corrective action has to be taken to balance the scales. Until such time as that happens, "sex discrimination against men" is impossible.

It is still descrimination.

"Discrimination: the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually" - Merriam Webster Dictionary

Please don't bend what the word means just because others do. If we have our own meanings for every word, than the words mean nothing.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#655

Post by jfasi » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

JCSato wrote: post #608

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

My thoughts kinda echo this, but I don't think it's outlandish for a junior dev to know a lot of this - what's less reasonable is knowing it with enough depth that they can bring it all to bear without prep in an interview. They've had fewer opportunities to put these things into practice, so I'd only expect them to demonstrate proficiency if they knew ahead of time to study those fairly specifically.

Exactly. In junior interview I accept passing mentions and hand-wavey verbal solutions. What I'm referring to here is a complete absence of awareness of these things.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#656

Post by msluyter » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

My undergrad degree was in music and when I decided to move into software development, I got into a master's CS program that was heavy on theory, light on practicalities. I graduated quite green and unconfident with basic tools/systems like vi or Unix. Hell, I could barely type.

Once out of school, I opted to take a software test development (SDET) position, which provided the sort of hands on training and practical exposure I needed at the time. And, while technically it was a "QE position," the role did provide opportunities for coding in the form of automated tests, deployment scripts, test frameworks, etc...

Although I ended up staying in QA longer than I desired -- the bursting of the web bubble in 2000 sort of pulled the rug out from under me -- I eventually laterally shifted into a dev role and have been quite happy ever since.

I think this sort of path is still a viable option for aspiring Jr. devs, especially given our increasingly complex ecosystems/stacks. It's a great way to learn, and these days there seems to be less clean separation between QE/Dev roles in any event. QE people write code, devs write tests (or rather, they should ;)). (Note, I'm explicitly recommending an SDET role, not a manual testing role.)

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#657

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:21 PM UTC

Caveman_Coder wrote: post #548

logfromblammo wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bottom-up control of the development process. Our own apprenticeship pipeline. Our own certifications. Genuine influence over interviewing and hiring practices. Minimum contract terms. Our own lobbyists. Promoting business for members outside of Silicon Valley. Our own jobs board. A general strike fund. Our own retirement planning and pensions system. A backup health insurance option. The lobbyists can start by bring…

> "loosen immigration restrictions on the people of our industry" I don't think a U.S. union would try to loosen immigration restrictions...they'd care about protecting the rights of U.S. workers...also, why would a union representing U.S. workers want to increase the labor supply?

Naturally, it would be to ensure that all the best people in the world are members of the union, and employing filthy non-union scabs would therefore mean lower quality product.

The companies are multinational, so the unions have to be multinational, too. If the company tries to skirt around the union by doing the work in India instead of the US, the union should anticipate the move and surprise the company by already being there, still demanding a better deal for our people.

I anticipate the demand for people with technical skills will continue to rise in the future. There is no need to artificially limit the labor supply anywhere, even worldwide, because the world's universities already can't crank out enough people with official credentials. (And when they do, the new graduates still can't get jobs, because that degree apparently still isn't good enough to meet business expectations.) The union could still eat up much of the bootcamp and intern business with its own apprenticeships. That's when it might try throttling the supply, after gaining some control over it, by operating at the optimal point for monopolistic competition. Restrict it just enough to squeeze more money out of the market, but not enough to allow a new competitor to enter.

And it benefits all of us to be able to shop around to different jurisdictions as easily as those who employ us. The countries and companies that provide the most attractive environments will get more of us, and therefore prosper, while those who are hostile will get less of us, and therefore rapidly descend into a new dark age of wretchedness and despair, where nothing works properly and half the kiosks and infoscreens either show BSoD or a console screen with no attached keyboard. Then they will rue the day they snubbed the nerds, and weep into their low-tech cloth pillows.

(WARNING: This post may contain hyperbole.~)

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#658

Post by Raidion » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:22 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #574

wccrawford wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a pre-interview test that is basically "use flickr's api to show some pictures", with a few details about how the pictures are sized and arranged. Applicants that have gone to bootcamps and even college frequently fail this miserably. Many of the rest fail to understand the details. We even had one use a completely different end point than the one specified by URL to the documentation. Some have just given up…

That's, errr, a very high bar you got there. People got it working, showing they can code just fine, and you fail them because they got some details wrong?

If you have only one or two positions open, have no trouble finding applicants, why not give a test that has a 5% pass rate if that means you end up with 6 people to choose from and still have to turn people away? What would the advantage be of making it easier just so you would have to review and turn even more people away?

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#659

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

tropshop wrote: post #588

vinceguidry wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll see your management issue and raise you a leadership one. At my last job, a $40MM cosmetics and skincare company, the CEO had a great deal of trouble figuring out how to get his e-commerce department properly managed. I was willing to step up, and for a brief time they allowed me to bring in candidates for a position that would report to me, but I didn't have enough political cover over me so that fizzled out. I…

E-commerce is unique in that it has such a massive impact on revenue generation, but the skills needed to effectively manage it are rarely inline with the core competencies of the business. Most companies attempt to tackle this problem in house, but without proper expertise, there is massive waste in hiring and poor execution. As a consultant, I’ve seen teams waste _years_ fumbling in this cycle, only for me to ship…

Hm. I get what you're saying, but I think the three managers they had in my tenure were pretty good in that regard. The team was just me and a front-end guy, and we had no problem keeping up with the workload.

My impression was that we'd squeezed all the blood we could out of the stone, yet the CEO wasn't going to accept "focus on other business problems" as an answer.

Eventually my pleas were heard and they consulted out a new platform. They didn't pick a platform that I wanted to administer, so I moved on. The fourth manager they hired after I left did not appear to have made any purchase on the problem the last time I talked to her.

I naively thought the problem was technology, but the real problem was the expectations of the CEO. There was nothing I could do about it, of course, so it worked out for the best.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#660

Post by risotto_groupon » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #387

tboyd47 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I should have said cheated, he got a copy of the first part of the test and memorized it. The second part of it which requires actual coding he barely passed.

1) The test itself is randomly generated from a huge set of master questions many of which are actually IN the study materials. Everyone studies "from a copy of the test". Its like saying you cheated at a spelling bee because you memorized the dictionary.

2) There are several parts to the exam but none of them involve an evaluation of how you write code, its all multiple choice.

3) The cert itself and studying for it doesn't prepare you for actually building a Magento site in any way. The Magento certification program is really just a way for businesses to get access to "leads" and get free advertising from Magento. Having more certs just helps a company look good.

4) If your buddy is experiencing a lot turnover my experience of the eCommerce industry and Magento shops specifically is that they are more inclined to put a heavy emphasis on "culture fit" and be high stress environments. They say, "If you see assholes everywhere, maybe you should look in mirror..." but it might just be your friend is experiencing the reality that eCommerce development is NOT the same environment as the Wordpress chop shops he may have started in.