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Who Killed the Junior Developer?

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Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#671

Post by entered_val »

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?

Why are you so eager to call out what you perceive as "preferential treatment" towards women that you ignore logic? It's beyond obvious that he meant half the people hired happen to be women.

Are you that misogynist that reason doesn't matter?

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#672

Post by JAFTEM »

kenhwang wrote: post #647
JAFTEM wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Poach said junior devs from the Bay Area to LA or in general? Sort of confused with your second statement. The crazy thing is that every one of my CS major friends I graduated with at USC moved up the coast to the Bay Area or Seattle, or to the east coast in NYC.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#673

Post by dabockster »

klobo wrote: post #5
deathanatos wrote: post #4

What trouble are candidates looking for junior developer positions running into? Lack of openings? Lack of response from companies? Can't get past the interview? (Also, are these people advertising themselves as a "junior developer"? Perhaps this is just my experience, but I don't think I ever used that; I started my search looking for simply "software engineer" positions.) (One the one hand, one company I worked for…

Once you apply, it's usually - 'We're looking for someone with more experience right now' or 'Experience of 10 years with React'

If you even get a reply in the first place.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#674

Post by fouc »

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…

It seems to me that it's not uncommon for upper management to try to goad developers (and others) into becoming managers.. The catch is that it involves lots of free work by taking on increased responsibility with no increased pay. So I suspect most developers will think that it's not worth the hassle.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#675

Post by Declanomous »

sage76 wrote: post #514
Declanomous wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because fixing 1 and 2 are really expensive. On top of that, the further removed someone is from the work being done, the more they want people to look "busy". I got moved from a desk in in a dead end office with to a desk in a bullpen so that I could be "closer to the people who I work with." My performance fell off a cliff. People would stop by all the time to check up on things, there was always a conversat…

> He and HR were like "you should have let us know before it got to this point." Why is this so common? What kind of brain dead morons are becoming managers? Why do they even become managers if they don't want to manage. At my firm, it was the same. Some people were automatic fits and managed to do fine. The others were left to fend for themselves. No mentorship, no management, nothing.

I'm fairly aware that the about half the management at this job thought I was inscrutable. Someone who kind of knew me was interviewing for a position and asked my boss about me. His reply was something to the effect of "He's the genius who we leave alone in the corner while he does mad science experiments."

I guess it's complimentary in a way, but I can articulate exactly what I did in a way that my mom, who is an artist and barely uses a computer, can understand.

I think a lot of the problem is that some managers are really inflexible. They only know one way of management, and if that doesn't work they don't know what to do. They are a lot like teachers in that regard. We've all had teachers who could only explain things one way, and they constantly confused students who didn't grasp that explanation.

I even got my boss and HR to admit that I was really self-aware, and was able to articulate what I needed to succeed. It was like that meme where you break a logical explanation down into atomic parts and get them to agree with every step along the way, but they just said "no" to the conclusion.

I guess it's maybe an example of the Peter Principle in action.

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#676

Post by amriksohata »

cimmanom wrote: post #300
amriksohata wrote: post #192

Got a side question.. how do I tell my junior developer who's still junior that he's not ready for being promoted. He feels he is because he understands more of the code base now, he often makes a lot of mistakes and is ready to point out the mistakes of others. He also does not get off his desk to communicate or question requirements.

Find or create a skills matrix for developer seniority. There are a few floating around out there if you Google.

Thanks

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#677

Post by petraeus »

dbingham wrote: post #447
binarycheese wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then they aren't a rockstar. And frankly, I've spent my career cleaning up the obfuscated, badly documented, untested code of "rockstar" devs. The idea of a "rockstar" you seem to be referring to has, in my experience, been a dev who can go into a corner and pump out high volumes of code with little supervision or collaboration. That's great, except no one else can make sense of the code they pump out, so when it com…

I like to go with master developer and not rockstar for the very reasons you state

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#678

Post by myth_buster »

To quote Feynman...

  When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get an idea for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
  Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#679

Post by scardine »

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…

Most certification programs can be gamed. Generally there is a simulator - if you play enough with it and memorize the questions you will nail 60% or more in the official test. Take the test a few times and luck will kick-in.

Last year I worked with a certified LPIC-3 system administrator and deploying a trivial wordpress website at AWS took him 1 week. He was fired 1 month later. His CV is very impressive with lots of certification badges (I checked the codes of several badges and he is really certified).

Re: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

#680

Post by wu_tang_chris »

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?

that's a super regular bar that anyone who's moderately able to program or learn new things should be able to jump over easily. details are important in a technical field.
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