Who Killed the Junior Developer?

https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/who-killed-the-junior-developer-33e9da2dc58c

803 775 8 years ago

taylodl• 8 years ago

This has been going on for years. Back in the mid 80's when I was going to college I knew a lot of people had come back to get their masters are even change fields because they couldn't find jobs. Employers wanted 2-3 years minimum experience and the new grads lamented how were they supposed to get said experience? My first job I worked FREE for the first 3 months at a startup (they didn't have the money to make a payroll anyway). Ultimately that launched my career and got me past the 2-3 years experience issue. This was back in the 80's!

danjoc• 8 years ago

the rate is anywhere from $190-$300 an hour

Well there's your problem. Valley pricing. You can get Sr Devs much cheaper than that. Then you can afford to train up some juniors.

I don't think that's the real problem though. Companies want you to take the risk/expense of learning a technology that might be obsolete next year. They'll pay you back in salary if you lucked up and mastered the right stack. If you didn't, then you keep eating ramen until you strike gold.

The other problem is most Sr.s don't want a Jr. coming in and making negative contributions. Sr.s are frequently the ones doing the interviews. They see most Jr.s as "What's a computer?" level talent that will start fires in production systems.

randomdata• 8 years ago

Well there's your problem. Valley pricing. You can get Sr Devs much cheaper than that.

The article seems to be referring to how much agencies are hiring out their senior developers for. Which, $190-300/hr. does not seem atypical in that scenario, even outside the valley. The developers themselves won't be making anywhere near that much.

Since this company seemingly makes its money by having the senior developers doing billable work for clients, the article suggests that the business doesn't want them spending time helping junior developers and thus not billing (or, perhaps, billing at the junior rate).

ryan-allen• 8 years ago

The other problem is most Sr.s don't want a Jr. coming in and making negative contributions. Sr.s are frequently the ones doing the interviews. They see most Jr.s as "What's a computer?" level talent that will start fires in production systems.

I think this is pertinent, when you're already too busy doing things and keeping stuff running, who has the time to handle a run-of-the-mill junior?

The most successful launches I've seen is where a junior comes in and can already contribute _at some level_, this is always due to the extra curricular work they've done outside of their education (if indeed they had any higher level education at all).

The spectrum of jobs out there allows a creative (or lucky, in my case) junior to springboard. Think of 'started out modifying and configuring wordpress themes, ended up writing some custom code and extensions, ended up learning laravel and databases' type of progression. You won't be working in bleeding edge AI or at Google on their self driving cars, but you'll be solving problems for people, and that's a career.

fzeroracer2• 8 years ago

The other problem is most Sr.s don't want a Jr. coming in and making negative contributions. Sr.s are frequently the ones doing the interviews. They see most Jr.s as "What's a computer?" level talent that will start fires in production systems.

A system where a Jr can easily start fires is a system that's bound to fail. It means whatever you use for production is incredibly fragile and bound to be broken even by a more senior developer making a single mistake.

deathanatos• 8 years ago

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 doesn't seem to really have any junior developers, but we're also not hiring period AFAIK. Another company I worked for pretty much only hired interns, b/c hiring was otherwise tight and those were easy to get approval for. Not quite what I think the article means by "junior dev" (I interpret that to mean "entry level software engineer") They were generally very helpful, though I think we learned how much we needed to learn about being mentors.)

Also their hand wringing about the costs seems like crocodile tears knowing all the time they waste (at least in my opinion) on things like meetings.

I echo this opinion.

klobo2• 8 years ago

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

dabockster2• 8 years ago

If you even get a reply in the first place.

emodendroket22• 8 years ago

The article seems to be about the idea that nobody is seeking to hire junior developers.

nathanaldensr• 8 years ago

I love mentoring. I always have. I used to help out other kids in my high school programming classes. Despite holding several high-level software development positions, what is the total number of times I've been asked by management to mentor more junior folks?

Zero.

I did it because I love sharing knowledge and I like seeing looks of understanding appear on my colleagues' faces when they "get something" for the first time.

The short-termism that's infested our culture--it seems like all Western culture--is truly sickening. It feels like "Well, I got mine, screw the next generation." This goes way beyond just junior developers.

Firebrand• 8 years ago

How would you feel about mentoring non-technical people? Uber seems to be piloting an apprenticeship program for people from non-technical backgrounds:

https://eng.uber.com/engineer-apprentices/

I don’t really know why Uber is doing it, but I wonder if in-house apprenticeship programs are going to become more of thing now.

adventured2• 8 years ago

Vocational + apprentice systems of all types are going to be a massive thing in the next ten years. Most likely we'll all be sick of hearing about it a few years from now. It's starting to pop up everywhere in the US, an idea that has caught the culture's imagination again. It's the ideal counter to the stupid practice of everybody must get a four year degree as a base qualification. And it's the only way the bottom half in the US are going to finally start making progress again.

zerkten• 8 years ago

How would you feel about mentoring non-technical people?

I'm not sure what you mean by "non-technical" people. Didn't we all start at zero technical skill? If Uber have gone about this the right way and have some motivated hires with some of the right basic competency then they should do well.

In terms of technical mentoring I'd be very happy to engage with individuals inside a program like this. It's a very different story when you've got someone who was originally hired for a different role and you are tasked with helping them make the jump from a non-technical role to technical one. This can fail for a number of reasons, but it often boils down to motivation, and the individuals might have been better quitting to do something like a bootcamp.

I will say that I have gotten a lot of benefit from coaching/mentoring non-technical people on specific things. An example would be teaching a customer success manager how to capture useful info from the browser dev tools. They have a superpower and that results in them getting better troubleshooting info to help customers.

twblalock• 8 years ago

The short-termism that's infested our culture--it seems like all Western culture--is truly sickening. It feels like "Well, I got mine, screw the next generation." This goes way beyond just junior developers.

It's a bit of a leap to conclude that on the basis that you weren't asked by management to mentor junior devs. In fact, it's possible management assumed you would do mentoring and didn't need to be told.

mistermann• 8 years ago

Do you read the newspaper? Watch TV? Have you genuinely not noticed an increase in short term thinking and f*ck you, got mine mentality in North America?

If not, over what time span are you considering?

JauntyHatAngle• 8 years ago

The impression I got was not that he was inferring that short-termism has infested culture due to the fact that he is no longer able to mentor junior devs.

I believe he was saying that short-termism (which his belief is everywhere and I assume he has this opinion based on external beliefs not listed here...) is the root cause of this. Not many people hire junior devs anymore.

I tend to agree with him, and believe it has a lot to do with the death of "lifers" in business.

The quickest way to progress a career nowadays is to jump every few years, and that applies to both management and tech people. If people do this, what incentive is there to properly mentor a junior developer? Train them up for them to get nabbed in a few years?

There is not much loyalty in both directions nowadays and that has some genuine downsides.

TheDauthi• 8 years ago

This... has made me realize how lucky I am. I do get asked to mentor our junior people, and I also enjoy the look on people's faces when they get that sudden realization of how something works. And I like explaining how things work anyway; I find it's the second-best way to realize what pieces of the system -I- don't know.

And - being perfectly honest about myself - I also enjoy the (brief and usually undeserved) "wow, he's a wizard!" that I get right before - just as a random example that has nothing to do with today - spending two hours trying to debug why some simple iptables rules don't work without testing that the network was working before adding them.

raducu• 8 years ago

I've worked at 5 companies during my 13 years of programming and while I live in Eastern Europe and not North America, I can still confidently say luck has nothing to do with it. Companies who work on long-term projects usually hire junior devs, companies that work on short therm projects don't, it's as easy as that. Companies that hire more junior devs tend to pay less and usually struggle to keep the rising star devs that they helped train for the last 3 or so years. It's just the way things are, I don't get the entitlemend of the article.

whiskyant• 8 years ago

I don't think dedicated mentorship is required for junior devs.

There's usually code reviews in which they can pick up on a lot, a mountain of resources online, and there's nothing stopping them from asking for help/opinions from fellow co-workers when tackling a problem.

sidlls2• 8 years ago

Junior programmers may not (even probably don't) have a good idea of what questions to even ask. Younger juniors (e.g. right out of college) may even feel intimated or anxious that their question is "stupid". This isn't helped by the software industry's reputation (well deserved, in my opinion) of being populated by arrogant people with little or no tact or empathy.

Reliance on online resources is, in my view not a substitute for experienced mentorship: there is the paradox of choice, and the plethora that creates this paradox is of generally poor quality. Except for textbook or trivial problems, moreover, much of the resource material online is too generic or only marginally applicable to the depth and breadth of technology issues that face a real business and its needs.

watwut6• 8 years ago

Code review is horrible way to teach. Especially with reviewers common in tech who just can't tell difference between differences of opinion and crappy code. Or difference between "how I would did it" and bad code.

fyfy18• 8 years ago

When I started my first job out of university I worked in a team where we were tasked with fixing various issues and requests (e.g. reports or minor features) from the business, so that teams working on features could focus on those. Even senior developers would be rotated around into this team, but as a junior develop it was where you first started, to learn the ropes.

It was a great experience, as other members of the team, who were more senior than you, may not have even understood how the application you were looking at worked (we had ~40 applications/services), so you would have to work together to figure it out - both completely clueless. Usually we would pair because of the unfamiliarity, but if we were familiar with the application we would occasionally work solo, even as a junior.

The best bit was the management: there was enough pressure that you knew you had to get this fixed soon, but not so much that you were stressing out.

cturner• 8 years ago

When you hire a junior developer, they are themselves a project. How else could it be? The need for mentoring is what makes them a junior. If they didn't need mentoring, they would not be a junior.

Code reviews are a reactive exercise. They allow people of influence to criticise work. But it is important that people of influence have first stepped up, and laid out a clear direction.

As the mentor, you should have a mental plan for their one month, three months and eighteen month progressions. If you do not have this in mind, you should not have hired them.

From here, you should set a tempo that steers the junior to grow. The things you are growing are their skills, judgement and initiative. You need to balance the need to make sure they are heading down a good path against the momentum of their own initiative, which is valuable but also prone to misfiring.

This path will be different for each person. So: have a plan, but be prepared to adjust it regularly.

There comes a crossover point where their judgement and ability becomes strong. You realise that your steering efforts are holding them back vs their own initiative. There should be some conversation where you explain that you are stepping back, and that they should be careful with the extra rope they will be getting. With graduate hires this will be at least eighteen months out.

godot• 8 years ago

I feel like the current trend of agile development process common in startups now somewhat works against senior devs' interests to mentor junior devs. There simply isn't time allocated for this. Senior devs are held accountable for what they deliver, and doing so on time. This is among other things like code reviewing PRs and attending meetings. For most senior devs working under this circumstance, the best they could do is answer questions of junior devs when they ask them.

I was fortunate enough to be moved into a lead role at the current place after a few months, and expectation of my amount of individual-contribution is set lower than that of other IC members of the team. This has allowed me to spend a little more time on mentoring junior devs. I can see that for other senior devs, it simply isn't realistic to expect them to spend time on mentoring, with the agile schedule. This is how I had felt myself before moving to the team lead role.

pbourke2• 8 years ago

I feel like the current trend of agile development process common in startups now somewhat works against senior devs' interests to mentor junior devs. There simply isn't time allocated for this.

If you're a senior dev, you should be gaming the system a bit to create the time needed to fulfill your role. Never let the keeners fill your time up to 100%, unless it's truly neccessary. There's always going to be some infrastructure that needs fixing, research that needs doing, refactoring that should happen, etc. And you should always have some slack for mentoring and whiteboard discussions.

I almost always start an agile sprint with a self-generated task or two already in my queue for just this reason.

lkrubner• 8 years ago

Strongly agree. I would like to spend more time teaching junior developers what I know. But anything that slows down a small, agile startup can mean the death of the startup, so this tends to undercut my ability to do any kind of mentoring.

Excerpt from a real life situation I was in:

===========================

June of 2015:

Sital was a beginner. In general, there is nothing wrong with being a beginner. All of us are beginners at some point. And for the most part, I think corporations in the USA can do more facilitate apprenticeships to help people start their careers. However, we were a startup that needed to move fast. Could we succeed when we had a beginner in a critical role? I had doubts.

July of 2015:

I felt no sympathy for John. Hiring Sital had been his call, as was failing to hire Arthur. These last few weeks had offered plenty of evidence that Sital was a liability to the team. If John wanted to stick with Sital, he would have to live with the consequences.

I would feel very differently if Celolot had a formal commitment to an apprenticeship program, and if I had clearly been given the responsibility of running that program. And I do think corporations in the USA can do more to help people start their careers. But it was ridiculous to both want to run an aggressive schedule and also train a beginner. The one contradicts the other.

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...

stctgion2• 8 years ago

Working in an agile team at the moment. I have zero time to be able to help the junior members of the team. Having a mentor is important but having a good mentor, somebody with the right skills and attitude is crucial. I'm watching helpless as the junior Devs take advice from the worst possible sources because they are the ones with the free time

shams93• 8 years ago

Agile doesn't really foster collaboration in general. You can't have one ticket assigned to two developers and have them pair program, from the business perspective rather than the best way to develop inexpensive new talent pair coding is a massive waste of time and resources. However agile works really well for remote workers who have little social contact outside of the daily standups and slack. It helps to be an autodidact in the industry in general no matter where your skill level is. I've had kids with almost no experience smoke me on react because we were both having to learn it at the same time and the kid was a better autodidact than me.

JepZ• 8 years ago

I doubt that agile is the problem here. I've seen organizations which weren't even agile having the exact same problem, not just for devs. It's pretty much the same with manager/project manager positions.

I think a much better explanation is outsourcing. A company which does a lot of outsourcing only needs a few people managing the partners. Managing an outsourcing partner is next to impossible for a junior as they lack the crucial experience. So they try to focus an experienced personnel. I don't know if that is the way outsourcing is supposed to be done, but at least its the way I have experienced it.

There might be other reasons for this senior-only sickness, but I am pretty sure pointing at agile is the wrong direction. If you are unhappy with the 'agile schedule', maybe its time for

Responding to change over following a plan

mwdalrymple3• 8 years ago

I agree with what you are saying in that it needs to be called out that time needs to be specifically set aside in agile / sprint planning for mentoring. My manager understood this and I was allocated at least a day sprint to just 'mentor' my junior dev through a 8 months rotational stint in the team. Mentorship is very rewarding and I found out that I got just as much out of the relationship as they did. It also helped that for the first 4 weeks I was allowed to run her through a self lead learning program that I designed for them. Giving a new hire out of univiristy time to learn enough of what they needed to tackle some high value work just made the final outcome so much more successful.

tixocloud2• 8 years ago

I have the same suspicions about the agile process as well. Great to be fast and producing but it's counter-productive if not everyone is at a similar level of output.

atoko2• 8 years ago

You are supposed to modify and fit Agile into your specific process, not follow it dogmatically. It's literally the first thing on the manifesto: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". Change the process, or change the culture around this instead of blaming a broken process.

To add an example: At this company they have the concept of an IP (Innovation and Planning) sprint. This means that one sprint out of 5 we take to fix technical debt, add instrumentation, verify documentation. You should have some time carved out for mentoring.

At the very least, don't count the juniors in your capacity. This way you'll be able to handle their pace while keeping your velocity.

sethammons• 8 years ago

We account for that during spring planning. We plan on pairing on tasks/stories for general knowledge transfer and mentoring. If this affects velocity, that is actually a good thing (tm). Velocity should decrease when onboarding and mentoring, and then should increase as those team members become more efficient.

fsloth• 8 years ago

I've never been explicitly mentored but I've been lucky to work places where there have been colleagues with things to learn from by example and inference. There does not need to be an explicit mentor relationship for knowledge to spread if work is done in teams and culture of open communication is cherished (at least on the team level).

kbart• 8 years ago

Well, you don't have to be asked directly to do that. I assume, you work in senior position, so read your role description and contract, for most senior positions I have seen "mentoring" and "team leading" is explicitly written there. Sure, don't expect to get assigned time and classroom with whiteboard for teaching in typical company, as it is expected to be done on fly ("don't know something? go ask our guru").

wanderr• 8 years ago

Full disclosure: I work at Dropbox. Dropbox is a company that values mentorship. It is something that is explicitly called out and rewarded in performance evaluations, and it's one of the reasons I chose to accept the job offer from Dropbox. I have been lucky enough to work at a place that pushed me to be a mentor, and another place where I got to influence culture to value mentorship, and I have seen junior developers who barely had any idea what they were doing and needed lots and lots of guidance, grow into some of the most amazing and capable engineers I've ever worked with.

cptskippy• 8 years ago

The short-termism that's infested our culture--it seems like all Western culture--is truly sickening. It feels like "Well, I got mine, screw the next generation." This goes way beyond just junior developers.

This is a byproduct of the erosion of loyalty that's pervasive in business these days. Businesses use to be loyal to their employees and in return their employees were loyal to them. That's no longer the case because over the last 30-40 years businesses have shown they aren't loyal to their employees.

Pensions are gone in favor of the 401k scam with many employers no longer even matching contributions. Medical Benefits get worse every year while the cost to the employee rises. Merit increases are virtually nonexistent and in many cases you're lucky to get a cost of living increase.

Why would an employee have any loyalty to a company that treats them like a commodity? It's gotten to the point that many functions are just outsourced to another company (e.g. HR, Maintenance & Facilities, Administration, IT). The staff are employed by the contracting firm and thus they are a fixed unit cost commodity and there's no long term obligation to them.

mypalmike• 8 years ago

The way to learn professional coding as a junior dev is to consume massive quantities of programming books while working on side projects. Mentoring is great, but its value is usually very local to the current needs of a team.

jarjoura• 8 years ago

Most junior level positions are being filled with the massive influx of new grads from really strong intern programs at most companies now. If you're in college now, make sure you get an internship at a company in your field. If it's too late for that, then you'll have to do a little extra work and probably work on a couple side projects and post them on GitHub. That first job will always be the hardest to get, so don't feel bad if you keep getting turned down.

adjkant2• 8 years ago

This. If you're graduating without an internship or two, you're in trouble.

mac01021• 8 years ago

Define "trouble". I'm ten years into my career now, but I graduated with no internships and feel like I've done OK.

wilsonnb• 8 years ago

As someone who graduated in the summer of 2016 without having done any internships, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment.

Finding a job was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Part of that is because I was looking in a very specific geographic area so I could live with my girlfriend (now wife) , part of it was a low GPA, but most of it was because I didn't have any experience outside of college classes.

Eventually I lucked out and found a job with a company that was looking to train someone because they develop software for IBM mainframes and weren't having any luck finding people in that field in the area.

kenhwang5• 8 years ago

Definitely agree with this. It's not that the junior developer position doesn't exist anymore, it's that there's an overwhelming supply of strong candidates with the CS pedigree, multiple internships, side projects, and well balanced technical/soft skills.

For juniors to be cost effective/neutral, you can only really have 1-2 per mid/senior engineer. Most companies don't have that many mid/senior engineers to begin with, much less ones that are willing to take on a junior to mentor for a year or two.

It takes a better part of a decade to transition a junior into an independent, mentoring capable senior. The current software boom only started in 2009ish. That means there's only a few cohorts of seniors created in this cycle, and I would guess not very many of them given the job market in 09. Give it time, years of experience don't just happen overnight.

CydeWeys3• 8 years ago

For juniors to be cost effective/neutral, you can only really have 1-2 per mid/senior engineer. Most companies don't have that many mid/senior engineers to begin with, much less ones that are willing to take on a junior to mentor for a year or two.

I think you're off by the reciprocal of the ratio. It should be something like two experienced devs per junior dev. Any more junior devs than that and your senior devs are spending too much of their time mentoring and not enough time getting their tasks done, which is going to frustrate them. Fortunately, with a good junior dev, it doesn't take long at all to reach mid-level dev. I've seen it happen in under a year for smart new grads.

krankthat• 8 years ago

/agree

I love hiring and mentoring junior developers, but the barrier to entry is quite high. Employers love junior developers with aptitude and enthusiasm.

thehappysellout• 8 years ago

This is 100% true in my experience as well. I hadn't thought of it before, but this seems like a major ethical problem for the industry -- from MegaCorp's perspective, internships are by far the best way to find junior talent, but access to internships is gated on being in a program at a top school with all the accumulated bias that implies.

I've seen some efforts at work along these lines, but nothing within even probably two orders of magnitude of the established internship program.

Curious if anyone is aware of companies offering entry level contract positions that aren't conditional on active enrollment in an academic program?

toastercat2• 8 years ago

I remember being a Sophomore in college 5 years ago, and it was hard even finding an internship. My first internship was unpaid because it was the only one that actually called me back.

It's funny how many business cards I picked up from recruiters during career fairs, only to have none of them return my calls or emails.

mercutio22• 8 years ago

This seems like a pretty common misunderstanding of the point of recruiting events.

The recruiters aren’t there to let you know they’ve got jobs. They’re there to talk in person to young people, and figure out which ones have passion for the company/project/etc., and put the passionate people’s resumes at the top of the queue.

If you just pick up a business card, it’s indistinguishable from being a cold call/spray and pray resume sender; companies and recruiters get so many of these there’s a good chance no human ever even looked at your resume.

ben_jones• 8 years ago

Its a large mix of problems. There is infinitely more demand for the top ~20% of developers then the bottom ~80%. There is a glut of new undergrads and transitioning professionals. There is a larger-then-other-industries capital expenditure in hiring, training, and managing, developers - which compounds the hiring difficulties of most small companies including almost every start-up. Oh and there's massive conglomerates with near infinite resources (Google, AMZ, FB, MS) hoarding top tier talent - which plays into developer validation of who the top 20% is.

It's a mess, and it paints a single reality. The tech industry isn't as easy to break into as pop culture has labeled it over the past decade, and in my view it won't be getting any easier... sorry to the younger generation paying big $$$ for a CS degree.

emodendroket22• 8 years ago

Well, sure, but I think this is one of the few industries left where someone with the talent can not have any credentials and just be able to do the job. I've never sat in a computer science class in my life (which is not to say I've never learned anything about the subject). It's not easy but it's not outlandish, like it would be in many other similar fields.

paulddraper• 8 years ago

paying big $$$ for a CS degree

This isn't law...even the cheap universities offer CS degrees.

aphextron• 8 years ago

I think the "Junior" title is used entirely by companies to get a discount at salary negotiations these days. I work with a large mix of mid level, senior, and "Junior" developers by title. The practical difference in our technical skill levels is almost nonexistent. The proper progression should be: Intern -> Developer -> Senior/Lead, with Senior/Lead denoting that certain expectations are made of your organizational and management skills moreso than seeking genius rockstar programmers.

tensor2• 8 years ago

There is absolutely a skill difference between senior and junior. The problem is that junior developers today somehow think they deserve mid or senior level salaries despite not having the skills.

Developers are being told not only that higher level skills like algorithms and big-oh don't matter, but that they are such special people that they can even do jobs completely outside of their specialty like design, management, and other things.

Developers want to be paid like lawyers, but without the equivalent domain knowledge in CS that lawyers have in law.

emodendroket22• 8 years ago

Hey, man, if people want to pay me well and give me lofty titles I am not going to dissuade them. As developers I don't think that's our problem to worry about. Seeking out the most benefit for yourself is just common sense in the job market we live in and I'm not losing a lot of sleep over the prospect that I'm not as "expert" in my job as a lawyer is.

s73v3r_• 8 years ago

"The problem is that junior developers today somehow think they deserve mid or senior level salaries despite not having the skills."

If other companies are willing to pay those salaries, why would you say they don't deserve them?

dsfyu404ed2• 8 years ago

I don't think you know many lawyers. Lawyers tend to have a lot of depth and little breadth of knowledge. They specialize. Most good computer people have one or two things the specialize in.

chrisper4• 8 years ago

So if I work at company A as a junior and get paid the same salary as a senior at company B, why is it bad that my expectation is to keep getting paid at the level of A even if I want to switch jobs?

Or does your comment apply to fresh grads? Because then your comment would make more sense to me.

mattmanser2• 8 years ago

But algorithms and big-oh don't matter. All the CS stuff, by and large, doesn't matter. It's like learning biology when you're a Doctor. Might be slightly useful if you have certain jobs, but if you're a GP it's almost entirely useless. The difficulty in programming a web app is almost entirely complexity management.

I just recreated a multi-million pound company's functionality without a single algo or any thought of big-o.

Can you explain what deep algos or big-o knowledge I need to recreate booking.com. uber, airbnb, etsy, flickr, imgur, etc., but without their scale? Or maybe making an internal data input app with a basic rules engine, which virtually every business needs these days? No big o, as if you're only handling 10 million or so hits a year, you can make some pretty big mistakes and still have a nicely performing site. For algos maybe you might need one algo depending on the business, a ranking algo, or perhaps a pathfinding algo, something that will be extensively discussed on SO and laid out entirely for you, or you might just plug a library in. No CS knowledge required.

cyberpanther6• 8 years ago

I would say in addition to Intern -> Developer -> Senior/Lead where Lead is Org and management skills you need a Senior/Expert path too.

Some devs will never want any management duties and you shouldn't give it to them. However, they then probably are going to be a master or have really deep knowledge in something valuable to the company.

crimsonalucard3• 8 years ago

There are differences in skill between developers. Titles rarely reflect this though. Titles mostly reflect politics, perception and luck.

brett40324• 8 years ago

I think the "Junior" title is used entirely by companies to get a discount at salary negotiations these days.

I think there's some truth here. What I consider some proof of this, is an unsolicited recruiter email I received today. The role was called junior web developer, a $25.00/hr contract only position, but listed a mathematics or CS degree as a requirement. Like, am I nuts to think this is preposterous?

chrisper4• 8 years ago

When recruiters reach out to me, I just list them what I expect including salary expectation. If they still respond after that, then it is mostly worth my time.

But I noticed hiring practices here in Europe are much better anyways than in the US.

rumcajz• 8 years ago

Isn't the problem the high turnover rate in the industry? Why invest in educating someone if they are going to quit in one year or so?

lovich4• 8 years ago

It's a bit of a chicken or the egg problem. Why stay at a company that doesn't invest in you?

tensor2• 8 years ago

Most developers doing the one year stint thing don't care about anything other than salary. No matter what you do for them they will jump after a year. Seeing that pattern on a resume a big warning sign. These people are simply mercenary and deserve to be treated as such.

klobo2• 8 years ago

'Why invest in educating someone if they are going to quit in one year or so?'

'What happens if you don't invest in them, and they decide to stay?' - Quote from a management guru, can't remember his/her name

throwaway9116• 8 years ago

But what if the company's plan is to exit or bust in a few years? There's not much of a future for them either way..

emodendroket22• 8 years ago

What I've seen (and frankly even what I experienced in my own career) is that really junior people are grateful to the company that gave them their first opportunity and also (to a degree that might even be called naive) invested in what their companies do, and for that reason tend to stay at companies a long time compared to more senior people.

autotune• 8 years ago

More ops than dev, though still have to do both, but this has been the case with me as well. I have been open to staying at a company longer given they are willing to pay a reasonable salary and have the right type and amount of work. No point in switching every year if you're somewhere decent.

rosege• 8 years ago

It should just be budgeted in as part of their total cost

ashelmire• 8 years ago

The problem is that devs can get much larger salary increases by jumping to a new company rather than staying put. The solution to this problem is to reward them for their performance and increased usefulness, especially in their first few years.

cyberpanther6• 8 years ago

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 that in the job description. So there are a lot of things that make the job search hard and frustrating but the jobs are out there. And I would love to see more companies more actively mentor people too. But those companies do exist today. It’s just a numbers game. If you can hold out, you’ll find it.

emodendroket22• 8 years ago

Searching for a job is way easier if you have a professional network to draw on and beginners, pretty much by definition, really don't.

cyberpanther6• 8 years ago

totally agree.

I would say a good 10-20% do have some kind of contact in the industry though and get a job that way.

patmurraydev• 8 years ago

Completely agree, among my peers at university those who had spent the last four years creating a network on Twitter and Github did significantly better at finding a graduate job than those who didn't.

Most of my friends have the job they have because of a combination of Twitter and attending conferences on discounted student tickets.

Double_a_923• 8 years ago

a professional network

How? Let's say I work at some company...Then I know exactly my coworkers and customers. How does that help me build a network?

I could maybe ring up some buddys from uni that are working somewhere else... But contact to them also gets lost over time.

crimsonalucard3• 8 years ago

I think bootcamps are flooding the market with juniors. This may be the source of the issue. It could be a supply side issue. Too many juniors leads to the perception that nobody is hiring juniors.

Double_a_923• 8 years ago

Or maybe too many badly trained people (sorry a 6 week JS course doesn't make you a good developper) are trying to bullshit themselves through interviews, which casts a bad light on all of them.

burlesona3• 8 years ago

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.

vegetablepotpie• 8 years ago

This reminds my of my job search 5 year ago after I graduated college. It took me 8 months to land my first job and I was living with my mother. I did work on some side projects to build my knowledge on some technologies. When my mom asked me what I was doing and I said I worked on project 'x' she would say "I think you should be sending out more job applications instead." Working on side projects is not an option for everyone.

What did get me hired was neither working on side projects nor blanket submissions of applications. A friend introduced me to another friend who's company he worked for was hiring and he gave me a list of open reqs for jobs he knew managers were looking to fill. I got two calls for interviews the next week and got an offer for one job by the end of the month.

IMHO your network, not even what you know or what you've done, is your most important asset when looking for work.

mgenglder2• 8 years ago

Couldn't agree more, I feel that this is extremely under emphasized. Meetups and networking events are the best places to get your foot in the door imo. It's the easiest way to separate yourself from the troves of resumes a recruiter may be sifting through on a daily basis, bypass all the politics and nuances of looking perfect on paper, and in the very least be set up for an interview (where you can prove your skills through explanation and whiteboards).

I'm biased though because I got my first two jobs this way.

sdiupIGPWEfh• 8 years ago

I can relate to that. Fresh out of college and having to move back home during the recession, my parents insisted I be delivering resumes full-time, preferably by mail and in person, rather than "dicking around" on the computer. (No comprehension of what I had studied, of course.)

Eventually I worked things out, with a dose of luck, but I can't help thinking I'd be far better off today if I'd managed to publish some personal projects during that time and networked those around to like-minded associates.

CryoLogic4• 8 years ago

The growth of undergrand CS program enrollment is pretty insane, same with bootcamps. Lots of these people have no real interest in the positions outside of pay, which is fine for most careers. But in tech we put a lot of value on self learning and interest.

I've definitely seen the number of new grad applicants and bootcamp grad applicants at least quadruple in the past few years.

Most of these can make an Angular app or write an algorithm on a whiteboard but know nothing outside of what was taught in the school/bootcamp.

I find these types really hard to work with, because software is evolving ever so fast and requires such rapid uptake of knowledge that those who aren't self motivated require a lot of reinforcement and have drastically reduced productivity on the job.

maxxxxx4• 8 years ago

That's something I have noticed too. In the 90s most people I worked with were genuinely interested in the work and often came from very eclectic backgrounds. Almost nobody had a CS degree. Now it seems a lot of people go into programming because it pays well and looks like a good career but they don't really care for tech. I definitely found the industry more fun in the 90s but that may just be the fact it's becoming a mature industry.

emodendroket22• 8 years ago

I don't think someone necessarily has to live and breathe code to be good at their job. That kind of focus is hard to maintain forever. When I was new I was constantly reading programming books and now, like, I'm still interested, but other things are going on in my life that also need my attention, you know?

tejasmanohar• 8 years ago

I didn't work in the 90s, but I'm with you here. I joined the industry out of interest. I didn't know a thing about pay when I started programming. As demand for developers increases and the industry becomes "mainstream", it's inevitable that we'll attract more folks who are purely in it for the high-paying job and "secure lifestyle".

The job of a school teacher is to teach, but your job at a startup is to empower the company to succeed. Part of this is helping the team succeed, but a big part of this is prioritization. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing your resources on someone who is more motivated and has more growth potential by their own choice. After all, if you don't put your all into something, you can't expect others to put their all into you.

kokey2• 8 years ago

During the dotcom boom there were a lot of people attracted to the industry that were ill suited to it. I feel it's a bit like that now again. Then the dotcom crash came and many of those people lost their jobs in the industry but it had a limited impact on those who had true skill and passion for the technology. The rest had go back to the kind of careers that suited them better, like real estate agents...

matwood5• 8 years ago

Now it seems a lot of people go into programming because it pays well and looks like a good career but they don't really care for tech.

This was already happening in the late 90s. Initially my undergrad was filled with people because CS paid well, but back then at least the first two classes were setup to weed those people out.

kilroy123• 8 years ago

People in my life have expressed interest in becoming developers and going to bootcamps, and such.

I tell them, it's not really a job, it's more of a lifestyle. You need to love learning, tinkering, and hacking. Want to go to conferences and play around with pet projects. It's a forever evolving field.

preordained• 8 years ago

I hear you on almost everything...I love tinkering, hacking, reading, pondering, side "experiments" (I think "project" is a bit grandiose for what I hack on from time to time)...but holy hell do I hate conferences and things like that. I just don't get it...most every conference I've seen could have been summed up in a quick article or powerpoint...and I don't get any personal thrills from the "live experience". That, and this is mine own super biased experience, every developer I met who was a conference nut was that guy who was obsessed with the "new shiny", who never seems to do any work that isn't greenfield and leaves others to deal with the fallout of various short-lived infatuations...yah, I'm not bitter, heh...but I'll be damned if these guys don't love their conferences;)

diiaann• 8 years ago

I liken the bootcamp business to the mortgage lending business before the subprime crisis.

In the beginning, there were plenty of candidates that were suited for careers in software engineering. Now we are at the point where each school has fewer great candidates so they market to a bigger audience.

brooklyn_ashey5• 8 years ago

They have fewer great candidates (if that is even true) because the hip candidates are looking for the ladder somewhere else-- they can now see they will never get hired based on skill alone, however well developed for a beginner.(and if they had golden personal connections to add to it, they were in the first wave and/or would not be desperate for work) They all have ambitious, skilled, motivated friends who recently spent money on these bootcamps and who didn't get work that was any better than the work they took the course to get out of in the first place. Many can't find work at all. This is getting out there now, from student to student. There is now enough of a din to finally hear above the denials. But I agree, the bootcamps need to demand more of themselves so they don't end up all being hucksters to the few people who are so far away from tech in their lives, they have not yet heard that the ladder has been pulled up long ago. I hope they can learn how to innovate on a grand scale.

protonimitate• 8 years ago

How to you filter out those who are genuinely interested in self learning and motivated to keep up with evolving software trends vs. salary chasers? And more importantly, how can someone from a self-taught background convey that they are not just chasing salaries, but have a real interest in this stuff?

I fear that there is a bias in the industry that bootcampers = salary chasers and CS undergrads = real deal, when I've seen (anecdotally) a huge uptick in people entering CS undergrad programs just for the high salaries fresh out of school.

spicytunacone3• 8 years ago

How would you filter for a "technically curious" candidate at the junior level (I'm assuming someone who, for example, pursues a Master's or beyond demonstrates this to a degree)?

It certainly doesn't help that an overwhelming amount of junior postings are more interested in the candidate being experienced with the particular stack, so, unless your interests happen to align with what's industrially pragmatic, I imagine the kid who stays overnight in the lab doing something in Haskell or some other "obscure but requires a non-trivial amount of autodidacticism" activity wouldn't be very happy about those valuable nights in their youth bearing them no fruit.

emodendroket22• 8 years ago

But let’s say they do start sticking junior devs back into teams again. You have the additional issue which is now senior developers have no experience working with junior devs or training people at all. When I first started working with junior devs I had no idea how to do it. I felt lost and confused. My company was just like basically “give these people something to do so they can learn something.” But that’s really not a lot to go on.

I don't really agree with this. I've had to mentor people and there is not really a special trick. I just kind of pair program, and when we start I drive and eventually they drive and then once that's comfortable I leave them alone and leave them to ask me questions. I've found this mostly effective.

Explaining things to junior developers isn't so different from explaining things to anyone else. In the course of your job you probably have to explain concepts to your co-workers and to non-technical people, right? A junior is somewhere between those and you can calibrate as you go.

kenhwang5• 8 years ago

In the course of your job you probably have to explain concepts to your co-workers and to non-technical people, right?

I love how this is becoming the norm for engineers. I still run into engineers that seem to just code by themselves in a cave all day and the only human they communicate with is their (often non-technical) manager once every other month.

Communication is one of those skills that feels effortless if you're used to it, and like an nonstop anxiety attack if you're not.

almostApatriot1• 8 years ago

pretty sure the easy answer is Bootcamps

Clubber3• 8 years ago

Or just read a "Learn FancyNewLanguage in 14 Days" book.

broodbucket2• 8 years ago

Is the junior job shortage just a valley bubble thing? I'm a young dev and there are grad/entry level positions everywhere I look, none of my peers have really had issues either.

How good (or bad) companies are at actually training their employees is another matter.

edit: typo

Apocryphon• 8 years ago

Well, where are you based at?

broodbucket2• 8 years ago

Australia & haven't heard of junior shortages anywhere around the country, I would hazard a guess that this applies to most places that aren't this overinflated Mecca of programmers

mooreds4• 8 years ago

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 benefits to senior developers and the hiring pipeline of bringing junior folks in. Again, the OP:

* senior folks get the chance to mentor, exercising a different skillset

* senior folks learn more about the problem domain by having to explain it

I'd add:

* junior folks bring in new ideas/concepts

* some level of loyalty is inspired. If nothing else, a beneficial brand among other new grads.

* the company matures and has to think about career path and retention

* good junior developers can be more "bang for the buck" as they grow. they still need raises, but will be able to do more work per $ than a mid level person might (because of their familiarity with the tooling and the domain)

CydeWeys3• 8 years ago

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 can tackle that problem first and solve it, it doesn't make sense to jump head-first into expanded junior dev mentorship.

Joof• 8 years ago

You could poach them too. It could be a tragedy of the commons scenario, but it would be nice.

AFNobody3• 8 years ago

Market rate compensation, non-toxic culture, and realistic expectations for work output solves 90% of the reasons reasonable people leave jobs.

People claim all sorts of reasons for leaving jobs but its always one of those three or uncertainty about company longevity. (i.e. acquisition/financial difficulties for the company)

The other 10% is people who are naive or have a family/relocation related issue that you can never control for.

And yes, before you say it is impossible, I've worked at a company where "voluntary quits" was _that_ low and no one voluntarily left because they knew how good they had it. Literally, in a team of 20+ I knew all 3 people who voluntarily quit over the span of 10 years there.

wlesieutre2• 8 years ago

Once they're trained up to a point where another company is willing to pay them more for a more senior position, you could give them a raise? Congrats! You trained a junior dev and they turned into a senior dev.

kokey2• 8 years ago

Not just the risk of them jumping ship, the problem is that because mid to senior dev salaries are highly desirable it attracts juniors into the field who are not suited to the job but like the idea of working in the industry or the potential money in it. So, you spend time training a group of people where some aren't suited for the job but you spend a lot of time on them and the better ones leave quickly. If you don't pick the juniors carefully in the first place and if you don't have the environment and renumeration to keep the better ones from leaving then it's probably better to just not spend too much time on recruiting them. It actually might work well for a company that doesn't want or need a large dev team. Also, not everyone is good at mentoring, some of the best people are often self taught and some of them find it difficult to teach others.

mooreds4• 8 years ago

I did say "they still need raises" :) But I get what you are saying.

As a junior dev, I have received at least one double digit percentage raise. This was a while ago, and perhaps I worked for an enlightened boss, or maybe I was just really really undermarket. But it can and should happen.

The long term approach would be to give the juniors raises and challenge them and keep them within the org. Unfortunately the short term perspective doesn't value that and so jumping ship is the best way to get more money, causing the org to lose all the training and the institutional memory.

taurath3• 8 years ago

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.

a_t482• 8 years ago

Junior devs can also be great for sticking on smaller\simpler\more rote things that might be boring for a senior developer, but for a junior is new territory. Depending on the size\complexity of your codebase, a senior will take lot of time to actually be useful anyhow.

Alex3917• 8 years ago

No one wants to train junior devs.

Many dev shops want junior devs, and that's a great place to get experience if you get placed on-site with a good client. Also cash cow businesses where tech isn't their core competency (media, fashion, pharma, etc.) will hire junior devs.

Basically if you're spending all your time trying to get hired by a startup or by FAAMG then you're going to have a bad time, but if you focus on the types of companies that actually hire junior devs then you shouldn't have too much trouble at least getting interviews. It's obviously still very difficult because you're pretty much useless, but if you're at least willing to put in the time to do the hiring homework assignments then you'll get taken seriously as a candidate.

opportune4• 8 years ago

That's weird, in my experience FAAMG (maybe less so Apple) hire junior devs by the truckload. However, I don't think they are typically in the business of hiring bootcamp graduates; it's mostly new grads or people transitioning from a similarly technical job/advanced degree in e.g. physics or math.

jlaurend• 8 years ago

It's pretty interesting -- as a startup founder leading a dev team of ~10 people now, I've hired almost all junior level candidates. We never had a posting for "Junior Software Engineer" though. We just had one posting and considered everyone who applied separately and within the context of their experience.

enra• 8 years ago

One reason I see especially in larger companies that there is specific hiring headcount allocated. Always it doesn’t specify if the allocation is for junior/mid/senior level. So to optimize your team’s output, you tend to look for the mid/senior and not even consider junior people.

curun1r• 8 years ago

This. If more managers were given a budget rather than a headcount, they'd hire more juniors. At my last managing gig, I was the only manager at my level to hire junior devs.

I prefer a little mentoring/supervision to the "too many chiefs" problem. And juniors have fewer bad habits I need to break, so I can more easily mold them into the kind of developer I want. Also, junior devs are much more willing to take the crap tasks that seniors find less challenging/interesting. I can stick a fresh college grad on bug duty and they'll often churn through them faster than the senior devs. The raw horsepower of some young devs is damn impressive just as long as you keep them pointed in the right direction.

But I've also found that mentoring is a rewarding part of the job and now that I manage, I really enjoy mentoring mentors. Helping turn great experienced devs into great teachers helps take them to the next level and I've had guys that didn't want to do anything but write code thank me for pushing them to mentor.

So yeah...lots of companies give their managers perverse incentives and allow them to be lazy. But if you're conscientious and put a plan in place, mixing in around 30-40% juniors can be cheaper, more productive and better for everyone involved. It's just harder and most managers are more interested in playing politics to increase the size of their fiefdom than they are in actually shipping software and thinking about their reports' careers.

soheil4• 8 years ago

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 other type of companies that solve move mundane problems (hr software, customer relation management software, email tool) that have been solved over and over again. To bundle all companies into one category when it comes to training junior devs is a mistake, junior devs could be trained at companies working on easier problems much more cost effectively and efficiently.

mwdalrymple3• 8 years ago

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 probably good for them, especially if they are actively mentored and engaged.

GVIrish• 8 years ago

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.

Sure, but that's why you need to give people raises in line with market rates if you don't want to experience high turnover. That goes for junior and more senior people.

Companies often don't want to give big raises as junior people transition into mid-level, then senior. So many companies have a standardized 2-8% pay raise scale, which results in developers being drastically underpaid as they gain experience. The silly part of that is that those same companies are gonna have to pay market rate to replace those skills when their employees leave, and they have to eat the additional recruiting costs, lost institutional knowledge, and ramp up time for a new employee. Penny-wise and pound-foolish as it were.

perseusprime11• 8 years ago

The word ’Junior’ killed the Junior Developer. Nobody wanted to have that title and it was also an easy target for recruiters to hire them away promising software developer roles.

ThrustVectoring2• 8 years ago

Related: "Senior" developers with two years of experience.

There's just a hell of a lot of title inflation in general, I think.

mrweasel• 8 years ago

In many of the companies I worked for in the past, the word "senior" was also seen as an alternative to a pay raise.

One telco I worked for opted to change the title from developer to senior developer for five people in one year, this is on a 15 person team, where 4 people where already senior developers. The title change was seen as an alternative to a pay raise, equal in value.

Personally I don't care about titles and I prefer to just have the title of developer, and no "junior" or "senior" prefix. It's not helpful anyway, you just use the salary to compensate for the difference in skill levels.

behindmyscreen• 8 years ago

I like the premise of the article. I think bean counting, short sighted companies killed the junior dev....and that role died a long time ago in many places (even farther back than 2010).

I also think the article needs some copy editing. A few paragraphs were rough to get through.

pan69• 8 years ago

My personal experience with this is that the ratio matters A LOT. I.e. having juniors out number the seniors is bad.

When you have a team that mostly consist of junior and mid-level developers, then they will clique together and they will mostly likely "behave" like juniors. Typical junior behaviour is e.g. to rather than digging into the backlog for the next thing to work on when you're done with one thing, to just sit around and wait for a senior to give you the next task.

However, if you have a team of seniors, who behave like seniors, adding one junior to this team, the junior will in no-time start to behave like a senior. Act by example. Before you know it you will have a really valuable team member.

alkonaut2• 8 years ago

This is insightful. A senior dev shouldn’t be a “manager” for a group of juniors. It should be the norm.

The mistake I think is seeing junior/senior devs as a management hierarchy (in which you normally have a more senior person manage more than one junior staff member).

methodover• 8 years ago

I've had the opposite problem with juniors in the past -- rush to solve tickets and get them committed, but the work done is awful. I honestly preferred the lazy juniors on the team. At least they were doing poor work but there was less of it to code review and fix.

I used to be on the pro junior side of things... but when you're on the earlier side of a startup (series a/b), juniors are a huge liability.

Best "junior" hire I made was recruiting someone in support who I thought was smart and conscientious. Turned him on to programming, mentored him, and now he's great.

I have no idea what the lesson from this has been. hiring is hard.

tbrownaw• 8 years ago

I remember being a junior. I'd either go looking for more to do, or take a bit of extra time to experiment with different ways to do whatever I was given.

Maybe this is more a personality thing, and it's just that people who don't think a certain way don't really make it to senior?

bvod• 8 years ago

Graduating and going through the hiring process last year, I realized how true this is and how important your tech pedigree is. I recieved no full time offers before interning at Apple last summer, and after the internship I had no trouble getting offers (ended up with 5 full time offers). There wasn't any difference in how I described my interests before and after the summer internship, the only difference was companies wanted to see that I was vetted by a big name company. The real experience I had, working at a startup for three years before that yielded very little value in recruiting, even though the experience there made me a much better engineer and it was a successful startup that got acquired.

fzeroracer2• 8 years ago

As a near-Junior level developer myself sitting at two years of experience I've found myself wondering the same thing. I've put out my resume across the country and found few companies willing to look at it and even fewer positions. Most are looking for mid-tier to senior developers. Even worse I've kept in touch with friends who despite having far more internship experience than I ended up having quite a bit of difficulty find a job post-grad.

Though my current company has had large success in poaching interns into junior devs because we have a strong and genuine sense of teamwork + effective mentoring.

austenallred4• 8 years ago

Two years experience? It’s 2018. You’re Senior now :)

I’m only mostly joking.

nidx• 8 years ago

When I hire, It's ONLY junior devs.

I prefer just out of University before they can get bad habits. Training a dev takes me 6-12 months for them to break even productivity wise.

When we have had intermediate or seniors hired they would not listen to anyone else or care if their software was easy to maintain in the future. I run a small team of 6, I have had 0 turnover for 3-4 years.

I don't want devs who "get it done" I want devs that enjoy the work and want to share it.

pestaa• 8 years ago

Not listening to feedback and ignoring future maintainability sounds like the exact opposite of senior behavior.

ChicagoDave2• 8 years ago

I mostly disagree with this article, but not entirely. I do think there's a trend by the bigger companies to look for senior talent, but there are plenty of firms that rely on one or two senior devs with a team of junior/mid-level devs and I'd say most smaller companies still hire and train junior developers. I'm in the Chicago area and it's possibly unique in its diverse market of employers and thus able to support all manner of dev team make-up.

I'd also say that many junior devs are offshore and are given test and support tasks, and this is especially true in larger corporations.

matt_wulfeck• 8 years ago

My company was just like basically “give these people something to do so they can learn something.” But that’s really not a lot to go on.

That really is how it works though. You need to start doing before you can learn.

austenallred4• 8 years ago

I’m the cofounder of a YC-backed Computer Science academy (https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science), and we’ve noticed a few things:

1. The junior dev market is flooded. It’s also flooded with people that cannot code. We’ve done quite a bit of analysis, and we’re talking 10% can write fizzbuzz.

Bootcamps are pumping people out as fast as they can collect money, and while some are solid juniors many are just completely lost. I’ve seen some code bootcamps with <10% placement, and their curriculum is 11 weeks of HTML and CSS and 1 week of jquery. Then they’re told to pound pavement for React roles. It’s worse than you think. Truly.

It’s also 95% of the same people who can’t code applying to every single job in existence. Remarkably many somehow get hired. Bootcamps as a whole have 100% earned their negative reputation. I can only imagine the learning curve encountered by some bootcamp grads.

As an aside, it’s not only bootcamps that pump out people that can’t code. Some CS programs are equally guilty, but probably not as many of them, and having four years to write code if you’re even a tiny bit self motivated is an enormous advantage. You give me a moderately intelligent person and I tell them to write code for four years and they’ll be hireable by the end for sure.

2. Many excellent companies, especially startups, have no appetite for junior developers whatsoever. Junior devs take a long time to integrate by definition, and rapidly moving companies don’t have the resources to care. It’s much, much easier to place juniors at mammoth companies that actually dedicate resources to training. A lot are just paying huge recruiter fees and bonuses to go after the people with experience.

3. Once you get even six months of experience the whole world opens up. I’ve never seen job security so quickly gained as a developer that has spent one year anywhere. Promotions come fast, offers come faster, and the big companies that actually are dedicated to investing in juniors see them poached for $30-50k extra by companies that don’t.

4. People that can still code absolutely do get hired, and quickly. We are dangerously close to 75% of the class that graduated 3 weeks ago being hired or contracted.

All that said, we take it for granted that we’re in an industry where people go from cold start to 6 figure salaries in 3-6 months. I’ve not aware of that ever having happened in the history of the world. It’s no longer write a couple lines of code and raise your hand for a job like it used to be, but software development is still an incredible industry to be in, and with a couple of years of experience you’ll reliably be complaining about salaries and working situations that almost any other industry would kill for.

vkou2• 8 years ago

All that said, we take it for granted that we’re in an industry where people go from cold start to 6 figure salaries in 3-6 months. I’ve not aware of that ever having happened in the history of the world.

There have been plenty of trained or semi-trained labour shortages in the history of the world, with similar results.

austenallred4• 8 years ago

Not sure any have been at this scale and lasted for this long.

burlesona3• 8 years ago

This all rings very true to me.

p0nce• 8 years ago

What I get from your post is that in less than 10 years, people that get such a short training will be good regardless. Maybe then good programmers will become a commodity: this will surely change a thing or two.

austenallred4• 8 years ago

I think that would be true if the demand for programmers weren’t also increasing exponentially

tannhauser23• 8 years ago

What bootcamps are teaching their students HTML/CSS for 11 weeks? You should call them out by name.

ajmurmann• 8 years ago

Having recently had to do a lot of hiring and also played too much FIFA, I couldn't help but wonder if a argument couldn't be made for software engineering job contacts to work more like soccer player contracts. One issue is you might hire a junior dev, train them and just when they start to provide value BigCorp makes them an offer they can't refuse and you are left with the bill. If on the other hand the was a contract where a new employer had to pay some amount of money to the previous employer that might help with the situation. Hiring a upcoming super star and coaching them might turn from a risk into a business model in itself. Of course there are lots of potential issues that would need to get figured out, but at least for junior devs this might be a net win.

dev_throw• 8 years ago

I thought about this idea too, but in practice, this should be what equity/options is designed for. So, a promising developer at small company A gets a lower salary, but greater share of equity that he/she has to forgo if they leave the company before they can vest their options.

But in reality, the amount of equity offered by most startups to junior developers is negligible, and is too low to form any sort of incentive to stay. Perhaps offering them a clear contract with lock in would make things more clear, but enforcing (no moonlighting) might be illegal in some states/countries.

PS. if you ever end up playing PES on the PS4, give me a shout!

ThrustVectoring2• 8 years ago

That is pretty ripe for abuse - junior developers take whatever since the first job is critically important to get, and then have zero negotiation power since it costs an exorbitant amount of money to "poach" them and pay them their fair market value.

I mean, yeah, it'd be good for employers. Not so much for employees. Likely an illegal or unenforceable contract, too.

joncrane2• 8 years ago

Why would it be illegal or unenforceable for software development but legal and enforceable for sports?

throwaway0255• 8 years ago

Are companies hiring differently, or are we just defining the terms differently?

"Junior developer" used to refer to someone who can program but who doesn't have a lot of practical experience.

Today "junior developer" refers to someone who can't program but who has a CS degree or went to a bootcamp, and there are more of those today as a proportion of the talent pool than there have ever been.

I think this failure of academic institutions to teach practical skills is diluting the talent pool, causing companies to favor more experienced engineers because they've been getting burned and don't trust their own (or academic institutions') ability to determine in advance whether a candidate will be a productive programmer or not.

beefhash• 8 years ago

As far as I know, academic education is not meant to deliver practical skills, but rather theory and deeper understanding. CS degree is not a programming degree but the equivalent of theoretical physics.

It's become an unfortunate trend that the academy has somehow become stuck with the role of doing vocational education, rather than research and theory.

throwawaypanda• 8 years ago

Or track the people struggling with development into a place where they can succeed like project management

Do you really want project managers who couldn't cut it as a developer?

I'm assuming we are talking about software projects here. If so, the idea of putting someone who couldn't make the grade on the bottom rung in charge of the whole enterprise seems like a bad idea.

Justsignedup• 8 years ago

Junior-to-Senior developer ratios are critically important. If I hire too many juniors, then they will write a ton of shit code, and force whatever seniors I have to spend all their time mentoring and not producing.

Seniors are valued because they can write great code, think long-term solutions, take on a project and see all the details to completion, have a more predictable development cycle, and yes, train Juniors.

So my point is... if you graduate too many too fast, you'll end up with people who you can't train, and who also think that working for "the man" a.k.a. big companies is bad, so the perfect combination of limited use, expensive, and unwilling to work in places where they can experiment.

thisisit2• 8 years ago

I have seen the "we don't want to waste time teaching people. So, hire only senior developers" scenario play out at couple of my previous employers. And, it doesn't end well.

Senior devs have expectations around salary, growth and work. Over time when the company starts running out of steam - funding, growth or even interesting work it gets difficult to keep the senior devs happy.

Once that scenario plays out, companies start scrambling to find interns or junior devs and find out, not many are not interested in working for them because they heard "rumors" about company's hard-ass culture on "not learning on the job".

Slowly, company realize that a team made of only senior devs is too costly for the value they provide. And company starts to cut down, put in hiring freeze telling the senior devs to produce more per person. Some even go to the extent of firing some seniors and getting junior devs and then allowing people to learn on the job.

chrisper4• 8 years ago

Senior devs have expectations around salary, growth and work.

A Junior Dev will have them, too, though. Not the ones fresh out of college, but maybe the ones that already worked for 6 months or so.

thisisit2• 8 years ago

No doubt about it. The only difference is Junior Devs expectations can be tempered a bit. Senior Devs are more demanding.

Jedi72• 8 years ago

Minimum wage killed the junior developer. I love mentoring and teaching, and I do this as part of my current role, and would gladly take on more people and train them and in 6 months they will be capable of going out and getting a 100k salary - I would have an open offer for anyone who feels like taking me up on this opportunity if I could, but that would be illegal. Much better we get people to spend 50k on a piece of paper /s.

mathattack• 8 years ago

I think some of this is based on the time horizon of the company. Larger companies (especially those who favored promoting from within) historically have had large batches of fresh graduates, and trained and mentored them. Without these programs, they wouldn't have future executive talent.

Smaller companies had less relative incentive. By the time someone is good, you might be flipping the company, or bankrupt. (This isn't to say it's not worth doing, just less incented)

This shift was one of the largest differences I had to adjust to going from large to small. (It isn't just that mentoring isn't rewarded, it's that there are short term disincentives - the benefits from mentoring likely come in the next company, or the one after that)

What's this mean? Just that the burden is on the mentee.

derrekl• 8 years ago

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 starting salaries around 50k which no one is taking. Salary range is too squashed in the industy.

opportune4• 8 years ago

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 knowledge and general tech competency to justify their initially high salaries

3. Senior devs aren't actually that much more productive than junior devs, they just think they are. They also may be averse to doing productive-but-boring work that feels "beneath" them.

4. New devs are valued for more than just their direct contributions to the software project's code base. For example, they may be valued for their ability to bring fresh perspectives, or for their proximity to formal education and thus their tendency to be knowledgable of relatively cutting-edge tech. I think universities lag behind the vanguard trendsetters by at least 5 years, but there are certainly software companies that are stuck 20 or more years in the past

5. The job market for developers is irrational with respect to experience and reasoning about it is as worthwhile as reasoning about the true value of Bitcoin.

I think it's a mixture between 1 and 2, with a little bit of each other explanation too. Worth noting is that senior developers at the big tech companies (AmaGooFaceAppleSoft) get paid a lot more than senior devs at most other tech companies, but most of that compensation is in stock. Full monetary comp (not counting benefits and perks) for a fresh grad might be about $150k/year, but senior developers with >5 years experience are making closer to $250k/year or more

rplnt3• 8 years ago

I think it's 2. I don't see why senior dev salaries should go any higher. At that point it would be easier to open office overseas even for smaller shops.

marcosdumay4• 8 years ago

I would bet heavily on 5. Not exactly on the hiring being irrational, but on companies doing crazy things that destroy the productivity of their senior people.

Just look at how many people are complaining here about open plan offices, agile time slots, heavyweight meetings, and inability to do what they do best.

bbarn• 8 years ago

I think #2 is just dead wrong. The easiest way to change your status - whether that's income or losing your junior title - is to move jobs. I think the real reason we see so few junior devs now is they just aren't good for the companies paying them. Why invest in a junior developer when almost certainly they will (and should!) leave your company to get more money and different experiences.

varjag• 8 years ago

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

EnderMB• 8 years ago

I think the gig economy has helped #1 considerably.

In the UK, at least, a lot of developers reach a point where their pay is limited to what a company is willing to pay them for a full-time role. When you get to this point, you have a choice: stick to the full-time market, or go into contracting. From a money and freedom perspective, it's almost a no-brainer. A competent senior developer might make £45-50k, whereas a contractor will earn considerably more if they find consistent work. If they're not lucky enough to find back-to-back contracts they get a lot of extra free time to build their skills even further, or to diversify their offering.

skjerns2• 8 years ago

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

rplnt3• 8 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when talking US salaries you have to compare it to EU salary before any taxes, deductions, or insurance.

loup-vaillant5• 8 years ago

There are 2 differences: first, US devs are paid substantially more. Second, their stated salaries is closer to what their employer spends than our salaries. Our employers pay various taxes before giving us our stated salary, they have private insurances. This is a gross oversimplification, but that's the idea. Third, the cost of living is often higher in the US.

To really compare salaries, you need to count what the employer actually pays, and factor in the various costs of living (taxes, insurance, home, food, transportation…).

lotsofpulp• 8 years ago

Depends what caliber person you want. Highly educated, motivated, top 10%, maybe even 20% should be able to earn almost $100k upon earning a Masters, maybe even engineering/science degree. In the bigger cities in the US, I would expect most technical/finance/medical professionals to be making six figures easily by the time they are mid to upper 20s.

zanny4• 8 years ago

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 wage two years ago.

The economy has not stagnated or contracted. Markets are larger than ever. Corporations are profitable as always and are somehow finding billions to buy each other out rather than pay their employees a respectable wage.

If the momentum and progress of the 50s and 60s held to today the mean salary should be in the $150k a year range, not $50k. The average person is way too complacent to the march of inflation and growth of the economy to think that since $50k was a lot in 1978 that it should still be sufficient in 2018.

aidenn0• 8 years ago

12 years ago I started out of college at $75k. Starting salaries are much higher now if you live in a major tech area (100k+ for SF Bay or new york city).

bkovacev• 8 years ago

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.

brooklyn_ashey5• 8 years ago

Are these just basic junior devs, or are they specialists in another field with multiple advanced degrees from top tier schools ($$$) and professional experience in that other field? (law, medicine, the arts) and (Yale, Princeton, Juilliard) If so, I'd say they are well worth $120,000, probably have a giant body of work in another field, and are motivated to make back their investment in a mountain of education that has led them over and over again to unemployment or low wage work. If not, my guess is that the math of buying so much schooling over so many years (even mid-tier) and then having to buy tuition at a coding school because the competition is so tight they have no time to waste teaching themselves just doesn't work out, especially when they have to pay $2000 a month in rent plus a 5 month security deposit in NYC, just to attend the "free", "scholarship-supported",or "tuition deferred" bootcamp, that is, if they are new to the city. If they are already New Yorkers, they are probably about to be evicted due to non-payment of same. No one is really talking openly about this with respect to this group of people; the affected must hide their ivy league scholarship homelessness at all costs if they want to ever get a job. It leads to a whole new breed of homeless: living as a homeless person/person-on-the-brink-of-homelessness, well educated, loans to pay, healthcare to pay because they aren't young anymore and really have to get root canals and cancer screenings, middle class props, lunches, and clothes to pay for so they can "pass" as middle class at interviews. It is not sustainable. This wave of unemployed people is exceptionally educated and professionally seasoned (in other fields) in a way that most in previous waves of new job seekers didn't have to be. And on top of all of this, they aren't good at the business of being poor-- they don't know how to get support because they were raised to behave like the middle class. Their families don't understand why they can't get jobs. I remember how little a junior dev had to know just 8 years ago in order to get work. The bootcamps aren't being honest about the lack of interest in bootcamp grads. The online programs aren't getting completed by students. Just a year ago on HN, very few would even recognize the lack of interest in junior devs. Now, we can't ignore it anymore. The tech ecosystem is unhealthy and dishonest with itself about its addictions to certain cultures and practices. It needs to take responsibility for educating newcomers (of all ages and backgrounds) because it is responsible for the fact that these highly skilled people are now useless in this increasingly tech-based society. Mentoring should be a natural part of prepping the soil. It should not matter if devs stay at the company that mentored them. The only reason this is a problem right now is because tech behaves like warring nations not like collaborating artists.

matwood5• 8 years ago

I've seen this attitude also, and it completely turned me off from interviewing bootcamp graduates. I'm sure there are great bootcamp people out there, but a 12 week course + a demo is basically an intern in my book.

wakkaflokka• 8 years ago

We've been getting something similar - data analysts with solely Excel and SQL experience who've been in the industry for < 6 months, looking for $120k starting salaries as data scientists in non-SF/NYC/Seattle locales. I'm sure they're not 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).

yomly2• 8 years ago

I'd argue that it's absurd that we still think 120k is a lot of money when we look around at how expensive things like property are.

My father, with a modest education and a modest first job, was able to get married, raise a child and buy a house near London well before he was 30.

Property in that area is now worth hundreds of thousands and would require a six-figure salary (supposedly a lot of money!!) to be able to qualify for a mortgage to buy.

swyx• 8 years ago

hello, recent bootcamp grad in nyc here. pple are asking that much because other companies are offering that much. I'm sympathetic to the cost perspective for employers, but that is actually the price that many companies are willing to pay (source: got multiple >120k offers myself)

matwood5• 8 years ago

This is the exact same argument I made the last time we hired. If for another 20% I can get a more proven senior dev, that's the decision I will make every time.

mciancia• 8 years ago

Well, 50k might be a lot or really low depending on the area and CoL there.

And don't forget that a lot of interns make twice that...

spicytunacone3• 8 years ago

But that means junior starting salaries around 50k which no one is taking.

Where are these $50k/yr junior positions?

I finished undergrad at a time when $60k/yr was a safe starting point for negotiation but recent searches only show me $15.50/hr at best for a junior. I acknowledge the tenuous distinction, if any, between "junior" and "entry-level" may be a factor for the disparity here.

leetrout• 8 years ago

What I run into over and over are largely attitude issues in all parties involved.

"Junior" is not an insult nor does it / should it demand an insulting salary level. I don't look at someone's title and think "they must be bad" or "I am better than them" etc etc but I see that attitude a lot. I see seniors take interesting work for themselves, I see them shove off juniors and I see juniors complain about the work they have to do.

And even worse is when someone holds the explicit junior title they are only interested in getting the senior title. Then we have seniors that shouldn't have that in their title feeling threatened by who does and doesn't have / get sr added to their title. It's all a dreadful game and I'm tired of playing it.

As others have said- I enjoy mentoring. I'm not ashamed that I enjoy someone taking the time to listen to me and what I have to say. I have 13 years of mistakes I can share. I don't enjoy working with people that are only interested in the "title game" and that complain about the types of work they have to do. We're all paid very well to do the type of work we do and ultimately we're paid to do what the company asks of us. We don't have to believe it's the grandest technical challenge of all time yet I see Jrs complain they aren't given the "big work" without realizing they don't know what they don't know- they just see some sort of prestige associated with it.

And shame on the seniors for taking work that is interesting to others first and shame on management for not making time for a junior to tackle a bigger task. I do feel for Jr engineers that get stuck in the cycle of doing menial tasks because no one makes time for them to make mistakes.

If you've got Sr in your title did you get it by being hired in to the title or by earning it in some fashion? Did you earn it by being a workaholic? Did you earn it by putting in time with the same organization? Did you earn it by growing your responsibilities? Ultimately- who helped you do it? Who gave you the chances and which manager wasn't threatened by you and allowed you to be promoted? Try to imitate those values and lead by example. Sadly I see a lot of insecure engineers who don't want to help and would never stand for a coworker, not the least someone they helped mentor, surpass them. And it IS a shame.

jfasi7• 8 years ago

My two cents: simple supply and demand. The slow deflation of the startup bubble of the past five years or so has killed the junior developer. Once upon a time, there so much competition for engineering talent in the startup world that even developers with little to no experience and/or formal training were being handed lucrative jobs.

Looking back we see clear signs of a seller's market in talent: companies went out of their way to hire anyone remotely competent. Once hired, devs could hopefully rely on their company's mentorship, training, and experience opportunities to raise themselves up, and companies could rely on the same for retention. Coding boot camps sprung up to give people just enough skills and credibility to get their foot in the door. Salaries were high.

That gold rush has since dried up. Early stage funding has plummeted. Fewer and fewer companies want to go public. Large companies like Google, Facebook, etc. now dominate their respective product categories. Why is it now difficult to find senior people? Because for someone with years of experience and/or formal training, these companies offer the holy trinity of excellent pay, top-tier perks, and opportunities for career growth.

My personal opinion is that many of these junior devs simply aren't very good. As someone who conducts interviews at one of those aforementioned big companies, I'm consistently disappointed by how poorly most candidates perform on basic interview questions. And I don't mean the kind that test book knowledge of some obscure algorithm, I'm talking basic coding tasks.

From where I stand it's a matter of an oversupply of inexperienced, under-qualified developers that are no longer being absorbed into startups desperate for warm bodies to do rudimentary coding tasks, coupled with a strong demand for senior folks from big companies with the coffers to pay them.

apthnz• 8 years ago

As someone starting to teach myself how to code, I'd be interested to hear more about the basic coding tasks people are failing at.

accatyyc• 8 years ago

As someone else who have hired developers I agree with the parent post here.

Examples include:

- totally oblivious to standard library for the language/frameworks, reimplementing the most basic things (poorly)

- even after a 3 year CS education, lacks basic understanding of object-oriented programming/class hierarchies

- has trouble implementing even simple if/else-conditions without help

I’m talking really basic stuff here. You’d be surprised. I assume that if you are self-taught, you have the interest and because of that already much more knowledge than many graduates.

jfasi7• 8 years ago

I gave a little writeup to a sibling comment, PTAL.

odiroot2• 8 years ago

For me it would be lack of intuition / imagination for building software.

Some people just cannot come up with a high level idea of a solution. Many of them immediately jumps into code, even worse so it's usually some UI code.

wccrawford4• 8 years ago

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 and turned nothing in, or something that they admitted didn't work.

These are candidates that we liked their resume enough to give them a shot, not just anyone who applied.

mgenglder2• 8 years ago

I'm curious about what the common deficiencies that your encountering are. Do you mean lack of knowledge and testing and more applicable skills?

jfasi7• 8 years ago

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 your data into a hashmap, hashset, whatever.

* No or insufficient considerations for edge cases. What if the input array is empty? What if I pass in invalid arguments? What if the strings aren't ASCII? What if the numbers you're multiplying are very large? What if the input is coming from an untrusted source?

* No questions about the size of the input. Some of my favorite questions are those whose solutions bifurcate on whether the input can fit on in memory, or whether it's coming in on a network stream. Some questions involve multiple arrays, and I always like to ask "you assume A is much bigger than B, but what if A is much smaller than B?"

* We place a great deal of weight not just on the solution, but on justifying why that solution is the most appropriate one. More often than not, this hinges on the Big-O performance and the system on which we're running. It's a mistake to dive right in to your solution, because it robs you of the opportunity to demonstrate that you have multiple fully-formed ideas knocking around in your head and you need to choose which one to code up. Otherwise I might get the impression that you only have one way to solve a problem.

* Sorting the entire array when I ask you for the top N elements! Getting the top handful of elements is a linear-time operation, people!

Bonus points:

* No consideration for parallel processing. I've run maybe like two serial production workflows in my entire career. Try to parallelize your solution to handle bigger inputs.

* Don't forget cache performance! I usually let candidates working in Python or other high-level languages slide on this one, but those odd C/C++ candidates have a major opportunity to impress me by optimizing their memory access patterns for cache performance.

* I let this one go for intern and entry-level candidates, but testing should never be an afterthought. The moment you finish your implementation you should throw input/expected output pairs on the whiteboard. You don't even need to walk through them super carefully, just show me that you know how to design test cases.

GreaterFool• 8 years ago

Just few days ago some company's "Senior" developer posting made it to top of HN feeds. I clicked on it out of curiosity and the requirement was "2 years of experience writing code".

Such posts warrant a WARNING otherwise I may get permanent damage due to severe involuntary eye-roll.

taurath3• 8 years ago

This is one of the most important posts I’ve read on HN in a while. 7 years ago I broke in as an inexperienced dev without a degree because some budget strapped team took a (hedged) chance on me and offered a paid internship. They mentored me a huge amount in a way I have never seen at another company, as well as several other junior devs. Most every one is in a senior position today, and some have stayed at the company. This is not happening anymore as far as I can tell - I know plenty of people with the knack for it but the door seems to be closed, because companies do not want to take the risk.

banku_brougham• 8 years ago

Hire and develop the best: Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

edit: this is from the Amazon leadership principles

lifeisstillgood• 8 years ago

This is one of those "each generation thinks it invented sex" issues - each company looks like it never trains internally, and we assume it's driven by reasons X (cheaper to not train anyone than train people and lose them)

my personal view is that most organisation structures are designed to prevent code quality and hence the reason to train anyone (senior or junior) is diminished.

My idealised view of a software dev org is a well defined code area owned by a single dev lead. that person has responsibility for certain metrics from "quality" to "performance" and "style" and some business kpis derived from the code area - and then stop measuring features produced to measuring how well those features are implemented.

sorry it's a bit early to get this clearer - will revisit in an hour just wanted a opinion

trhway• 8 years ago

Junior devs are significant drain on senior devs resources which could otherwise be spent more productively. And once he or she matures a bit, he or she gets hired somewhere else as senior for double the money. Thus hiring seniors and not bothering with juniors have obvious business sense (until there is a way to bound juniors somehow - for example by immigration).

golergka• 8 years ago

I've built a new of 4 developers team since September. 2 out of those devs are Juniors; or at least, formally they are, as this is their first "real", paid job.

But at the same time, these two are much better than many, many "senior" developers who came in asking for very competitive salaries and couldn't answer the most basic of questions. (My satndard is to ask about stack and heap; most of them just say something along the lines "value types on the stack, reference types of the heap" and cannot even connect stack the data structure with stack in memory.) Meanwhile, one of these "Juniors", when I asked him to talk about something he knew very well and was passionate about, explained AI techniques (game AI, not ML) that I never even dove into myself – instead of checking him, I was learning something new from an intervewee, and it doesn't happen often.

I really feel that I got the best deal, sitting through all these interviews regardless of experience and without any real filters by CV, because in the end I found these two - hard-working, talented and with more knowledge you would reasonably expect from a junior.

Don't save time on hiring. Don't create illusion of knowledge by reading too much from CV or using labels like "junior" and "senior". Rather, admit to yourself that you don't really know someone's skill level until you talk to them or give em the test assingment.

spicytunacone3• 8 years ago

when I asked him to talk about something he knew very well and was passionate about, explained AI techniques (game AI, not ML) that I never even dove into myself

An aside, would you mind sharing what he shared with you, if you can recall?

bdreadz• 8 years ago

My company hires junior devs. We mentor them and train them up. When their skill level goes up they get paid more after reviews. Some have left and that's fine and is natural in a company. We take interns on too and have hired from that pool as well.

soheil4• 8 years ago

The OP is 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 other type of companies that solve more mundane problems (hr software, customer relation management software, email tool) that have been solved over and over again. To bundle all companies into one category when it comes to training junior devs is a mistake, junior devs could be trained at companies working on easier problems much more cost effectively and efficiently.

chrisper4• 8 years ago

I'd disagree with you in this part:

Another point missing is that sometimes there are very hard problems (eg. self-driving cars, fusion power, DNA pattern matching) that need solving quickly

If you have let's say 5 senior devs and 1 junior. Then the problem still can get solved quickly while the junior will learn a lot. Obviously, hiring 1 senior and 5 juniors would be a mistake.

soheil4• 8 years ago

If you have let's say 5 senior devs and 1 junior. Then the problem still can get solved quickly while the junior will learn a lot. Obviously, hiring 1 senior and 5 juniors would be a mistake.

Perhaps that is true, what I was saying is a matter of degrees not absolutes. Let me rephrase for you: to the extend that a company is working on hard problems they should minimize the ratio of junior to senior devs.

a-saleh2• 8 years ago

We kinda did. This is because we like to hire interns.

Usually intern in our area:

* studies programming at a university

* costs around a 1/2 of a junior

* is part-time with really erratic schedule

* work output still on on par with few juniors we hired

I suspect this is mostly because there isn't as much of a difference between what can one work in 8h compared to 4h (I spend 2h out of those on meetings an email anyway, so it can be productive to route most of these around your intern)

Second part is, we are well known as a good employer in the area, that has a tradition in accommodating for students erratic schedules, which means we get students who would get a full time non-junior position elsewhere, but they don't want to give up on school.

Double_a_923• 8 years ago

I suspect this is mostly because there isn't as much of a difference between what can one work in 8h compared to 4h

This is so true. I don't really understand why 8h workdays are the standard for "creative" jobs. Most people can't fully focus for that long. Tbh I personally just spread out 3-4 hours of proper work time to just fill the 8 hours. Otherwise I'd just run out of power / focus in the early afternoon.

a-saleh2• 8 years ago

In my case, I work 8 hours because I still get pay by hour :) If, one day I would manage to get into consulting, I probably would work less on average work-day.

kibrad• 8 years ago

the guy that code reviewed him

stephengillie• 8 years ago

Senior Developer in the Screen Share with the Pull Request.

gaius• 8 years ago

The roles that mentees would have been have largely been outsourced/offshored. The days of spotting a talented helpdesk or QA worker and growing them into a fully fledged sysadmin or developer are gone. Some of the finest engineers I know came into the field that way 20 years ago. They wouldn’t get a look in now.

RangerScience• 8 years ago

People talk about a "developer's union" ever so often, and one of the most commonly brought up counter-points is "well, but what would we need to fight for as a union?" (not that I agree there isn't anything (else) to fight for, but:) it occurs to me that this is an excellent possibility.

Devs change jobs. This is good, but (as pointed out) means you maybe don't want to train people up; it's the next company that benefits, not yours. But, maybe if everyone paid in - companies AND people - a scheme could be figured out where you'd know that it's fine to train up, since you'll get the benefit of someone else being trained up.

It's still long-term thinking, which others are pointing out isn't common.

Caveman_Coder10• 8 years ago

"well, but what would we need to fight for as a union?"

Improved compensation, benefits, bonuses, stock options, paid conferences, training, etc...

logfromblammo9• 8 years ago

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 bringing down the exemptions on overtime pay for tech workers, and by trying to loosen immigration restrictions on the people of our industry.

b0rsuk• 8 years ago

Junior developer here.

I worked as a programmer for 1.25 years. I left 3 years ago, the company went bankrupt yesterday. When I last checked about it, I saw several of my coworkers replaced with someone else.

The boss kept adding people to his 10+ sales team, and I remained the only developer. Not very long after I joined I prepared a speech about needing a lot of time and preferably an extra developer to clean it up. The web app was written by 1 person for 4 years. No documentation of course, not tests, guess what also no version control. The boss had a sales background and I guess he considered salespeople sources of income, while developers - sources of expenses.

I guess I should be grateful that he hired me? Yes, but the only thing he cared about was if it works and how it looks from the outside. The few online comments there were on the bankruptcy article included one that said the place had mobbing, and another he was lucky he was rejected when asking for a job there because the interview was terrible. (When I was applying, I got a proposal to work with no contract in exchange for higher pay. I rejected that one.). I thought I was maybe paranoid or oversensitive, but now I'm sure I got hired in the first place because I looked desperate.

If I performed stellar, I would have a good success story, but there's limit to how many advanced topics a junior developer can pick up alone while still cleaning up. REST endpoints could really have helped against competition, but then again if he hired an experienced dev after me he would have saved him too. I made a point to write reST documentation describing everything I learned during refactoring/upgrading process, how to run tests, what the various modules are for, where the bottlenecks are, the staging server image, etc.

I fucked up when switching jobs and didn't sign a contract immediately. I thought a verbal agreement was enough. Then I was fired after 4 days, citing poor performance, slooow work speed etc. I never thought I was amazing, but with his other hand the new boss offered me to enter an internship program. He said I would learn a lot. He also sent me some Python video tutorials made by his friend (who works at a university). I told him I took mine from MIT and certainly don't believe a country whose best university is not in the top 400 globally could produce something better... and it was basically a backwater university, not even the top one. Later I found out he had a deal with an (state-funded) employment bureau. He was providing internship programs for aspiring programmers, and the bureau was super happy to send people on "training programs with guarantee of employment". Both parties were happy - the crook had a constant influx of temporary cogs, the bureau had could boast high effectiveness. I keep seeing new entry level developer jobs from that place, and yet the company is NOT growing.

Let me tell you it takes a tremendous amount of willpower just to train at home and remain employable. I've found that hands down the best thing I can do to keep getting job interviews is to regularly commit to github. I enjoy programming, but I'm not passionate about it. You can like strawberries, but 3 pure strawberry courses a day is too much for most of us. It helps to have not one but a variety of side projects so you can alternate between them, and at least one extra programming language (I rewrote someone's glitch art app in Rust).

It doesn't help job interviewers are kinda autistic. I don't mean in the "they suck" sense, but that they have major communication problems. They never tell why they didn't like you, you must infer it from their behavior and observe what kind of behavior gets you more interviews. They always think they can get another one, so why bother explaining anything. Depression + anxiety doesn't help. Dating is super fun by comparison. At least you get to see a pretty girl.

The bottom line: some people only hire junior devs to cut costs.

amriksohata2• 8 years ago

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.

cimmanom2• 8 years ago

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

amriksohata2• 8 years ago

Thanks

bcbrown• 8 years ago

Along the same lines, decide what the bar will be for promotion, tell them where they're lacking, and when they reach that bar, promote them.

tanilama4• 8 years ago

In an industry, glorified itself with automation, it is not really that hard to find out the automation first happens within itself.

sterlind2• 8 years ago

There are always higher abstraction levels and new problem domains. If you lose your job to automation as a software dev, you've gotten complacent.

Put junior devs to work on the new stuff, not what you started on yourself.

tanilama4• 8 years ago

Junior dev needs to establish trust before they can be put into the 'new' stuff. They are called junior, for a reason.

Ultimately, this industry now has enough people to spare, impact is what everyone is fighting for, this applies for junior dev as well.

PeterStuer• 8 years ago

Most IT companies have not succeeded in having a technical growth path. So the 'new' acceptance is that technical people will just be with the company for a short time before moving on unless they 'mature' into management. With that comes the expectation that employees need to be productive from day 1. So there will be no 'investment' in training or mentoring.

tiuPapa• 8 years ago

Wait I see so many comments about how junior devs not being hired that much anymore. So is this really a bad time to consider software development as a career path if I have no degree or required formal training?

blauditore• 8 years ago

I find this surprising. My experience is that companies are generally competing for developers, even junior ones. Some actively go to universities to advertise their company for this exact purpose.

sterlind2• 8 years ago

Smart junior devs make good algorithm designers. Most senior devs don't remember algorithms unless they do that sort of work - they just call into it.

Hire several and put them to work under a good mentor, on a project that requires little domain knowledge. They won't slow the seniors down, and finding a single successful one is worth the cost of taking a chance on the bunch.

Remember, most startups happened with teams of fresh grads.

timvdalen• 8 years ago

Off topic, but this is the first Medium membership-exclusive content I've come across.

Discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13933550

virgilp12• 8 years ago

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 actually code all that stuff themselves! "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do... how can people say with a straight face that they can't afford to let them do it?

I don't view this as "tragedy of the commons" as other people here suggest. I view this as plain human stupidity (which we're all guilty of, sometimes... it's just good to realize when you're being stupid before it seriously hurts you).

giancarlostoro2• 8 years ago

Sounds like senior devs who can't even do teamwork. At my job I'm a junior and guess what I can ask a senior for help cause if my job fails they also fail because oh guess what? Its a team and we are all on the same boat and wait it gets better!

I end up spending my own time helping out senior developers in places they get stuck! (Inconceivable!) Yeah sounds like a management team and a bunch of senior devs who have no concept of a team to me?... Which makes them no-hire types at my job. I help people regardless of what they're working on. If any of us fails it affects all of us in the long run.

I love programming and helping others achieve it and working with others to learn is one of the better and more fun parts of it.

thepratt2• 8 years ago

Completely agree, it should always be team first.

sfpwork• 8 years ago

When I was a jr I could not understand how other engineers, jr or especially sr, did not share this passion for helping and learning. Over the years (decades now) I came to accept that even in software development there are all these different types of people.

I learned to not get upset by it but still help/share, trying to inspire others and always learning more in this process.

megaman223• 8 years ago

On the other hand, you have the schmucks that ask the same questions over and iver, make the same mistakes, over and over, and are utterly helpless without their hand being held. It's a spectrum.

My suspicion is that anyone my age or older had to do a lot of banging their heads against the wall, alone in a room with the machine, when they were learning their craft. It becomes very tiresome dealing with people that don't even try to figure things out on their own first.

zemanel4• 8 years ago

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 go (one is software dev intern, relocated from Lithuania).

As far as i know, management provided zero training (online courses, conferences, books etc) and the dev intern is receiving 500€/month for 40h work week, which around Amsterdam/Netherlands hardly covers housing expenses in shared accommodation, even though the intern is soon expecting Erasmus support, which will alleviate his situation apparently.

Needless to say i find the situation rather vile independently if it’s a common practice or even if non-paid internships are common.

Recently i took the dev intern out for dinner and beers, gave him a few tips on how to improve himself to be ready for a decent job (online courses, writing blog posts etc) and told him he could repay me by paying forward to an intern at his next proper jobs.

As a note, another intern (part time) is also working on his maybe 5 years old laptop that apparently crashes a lot and can hardly run something like Pycharm.

I’m looking for another job :-)

expertentipp2• 8 years ago

He is being paid with generous social security net (for which he doesn’t necessarily qualify) and with the priviledge of living in developed country with extensive infrastructure... /s

thepratt2• 8 years ago

Is there no room to fight management or make them understand?

gnclmorais• 8 years ago

I’m looking for another job :-)

Good, I was just going to suggest that!

teddythetwig2• 8 years ago

Just want to point out that often the interns will receive additional compensation from their programs. When we hire interns from Erasmus+, they are given 500 euro from us, as well as 500 euro from their program. Additionally, Erasmus students are eligible for student housing from UvA or the VU. Finally, because they are in a special class, as interns, here in NL, we can actually get in trouble with the government for paying them more than 500 euro. It sounds to me like your management team isn't giving them the resources they need to survive in the city, but know that they are there. We have taken on four interns over the past two years, and after their internships placed them at large companies like Trivago and Elsevier, hired one on fulltime, and are working with the last to land a job in his preffered location. With the proper mentorship, it can be a great deal for students! If you are looking for a company where you are expected to mentor the junior devs and interns, send me a DM and we can see if you would be a good fit :)

dep_b4• 8 years ago

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!"

jacquesm4• 8 years ago

Cup of tea or coffee?

lonnv• 8 years ago

What kind of dev job are you looking for? The company I work for is hiring.

dalbasal4• 8 years ago

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 them to get fired, or embarrassed.

Anyway, the person taking up most mentoring time (including:'leave this part, I'll fix it) is also producing the least of the least important stuff. The best juniors can be left to their devices and everything is ok, but basically the time and effort allocation becomes very inefficient.

Mentoring is important, but I disagree with you somewhat. Software is just an ADD industry. Everything is fast. You hire for needs in the next 12 months. Junior devs (all devs, some places) average short stints.

Anyway, mentiring, training and such are long term investments. Makes less sense in industry segments that think in shorter horizons and treat everything from office space to employees or even products as 1-2 year solutions. Entire companies are built around 3-6 year horizons from cenception to exit.

I see this as a byproduct of product development time. MVP and its associated stuff... It's all about short horizons, clean slates and short term planning. Nothing is free and the cost of this is anything that's part of long term strategy, like hiring and training for long term benefit.

virgilp12• 8 years ago

You hire for needs in the next 12 months.

That's like, your opinion, man. Why can't you hire long-term? If all you plan for is short-term, it will only work short-term, and it should be no surprise if on the longer term you fail or you find yourself in a world of pain.

I see this as a byproduct of product development time. MVP and its associated stuff... It's all about short horizons,

I think you severely misunderstand MVP... it's not at all about short horizons, on the contrary. It's about doing the right thing in the longer term. To put "MVP" in a hiring context - the right "MVP" attitude is to hire temporarily to see whether the person is right for the job - and once you determine you've got a good fit, invest massively in that person to make sure you've got a long-term employee (don't just skim him/her for short-term profit, but invest to build a long-lasting relationship).

Entire companies are built around 3-6 year horizons from cenception to exit.

I've yet to see that work (and not in the sense that "lottery works" - nobody seriously suggests buying lots of lottery tickets if you want to get rich.

ticviking• 8 years ago

If 1/3 of you developers are eating all of your mentoring time I would think that either you've made a hiring mistake, or lack appropriate teaching tools.

In one case you've hired someone who isn't ready to do the tasks you need without excessive scaffolding. In the other you're not providing enough structure and scaffolding for the intern to succeed with help.

Mentoring, particularly in the legal context of what makes an intern, an intern and not a Jr. Developer ought to be a short run project, and frankly if you can't commit time to providing an educational experience you shouldn't be filling your staffing needs with an intern at all.

petagonoral• 8 years ago

In my opinion, attitudes similar to yours are toxic to this industry.

I've been working >10 years as a software engineer. If I'd never worked on a (necessarily) complicated system(s), I could maybe understand your viewpoint. Churning out the same CRUD app with minor differences would probably be safe enough to expect a junior dev to 'have at it'.

Everything is fast

Unfortunately, this is the current 'thinking' on how some un-enlightened people think the industry should work. Ultimately, I think this is a load of nonsense. Software engineering is engineering. Some people may have snuck in & survived as they never had to do something non trivial & deal with the resulting consequences.

taurath3• 8 years ago

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.

friendzis• 8 years ago

Actually, the cost of mentoring is not necessarily only cost of lost productivity. Sometimes (I hope, more likely mostly) there are pieces of old, arcane, barely and wrongly documented pieces of codebase that there is exactly one senior in the company who knows how it works. Assigning said senior from coding literally means pushing deadlines. So it is kind of tragedy of the commons.

swiley• 8 years ago

One of the good reasons to have junior devs around is that (if they're motivated) they'll find holes in the documentation and help prevent this. I usually write many pages of text to document problems and unwritten ideas at my internships.

tixocloud2• 8 years ago

This is probably the biggest difference between companies who excel and those who don't. Some companies get that employees are assets and training them is worth it even if they might leave.

virgilp12• 8 years ago

That's like, a great motivation to assign said senior AWAY from coding! "Single points of failures" are your greatest enemy, your senior my get a better offer. Or might get sick. Or might get in a car accident. Why would you want to bet your entire company on a single person? I mean... sometimes you have to do it because there's no other way, but it's a big warning sign, and you should diligently work to get out of that situation ASAP. "Pushing deadlines" might very well be a price worth paying in a situation like that.

g05105120• 8 years ago

good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!

Pfft. I'm about as "senior" as it gets and I'm generally the fastest developer in any team I'm on. I've never met a junior dev that could hold a candle to me, and most senior devs I know are the same...we're coding monsters.

darkerside• 8 years ago

I'm about as "senior" as it gets

Senior developers make sure to question their assumptions on a regular basis, FYI

moreless2• 8 years ago

True. But the team as a whole would probably still achieve much more if you were mostly guiding other (less experienced) devs.

purerandomness3• 8 years ago

Dunning-Kruger called, they want their overblown ego steamroller back.

ataturk• 8 years ago

Welp, get back to me when you're 50 Mr. Senior and we'll see how you fared over the long haul. Because "coding monster" or not, when you hit 40, companies will be less enthusiastic about hiring you, and by the time you're 50, you'll be out, so I hope you're making bank right now and saving as much of it as you possibly can because there are no do-overs.

corpMaverick• 8 years ago

Sr Dev with 26 years of experience. I get my edge not by coding fast. I maximize the amount of work that we don't have to do.

- Better (usually simpler) designs.

- Breaking the problem and choosing the order in which things are implemented.

- Setting up usefull feedback loops.

- etc, etc.

It is a lot about judgment.

xigency3• 8 years ago

What about cross-discipline? What if a problem comes up that would be better solved with technology Y instead of X and you are an X master but random intern happens to know Y. Are you still the fastest? What if the intern is better at making slides for code reviews that show important trends? Or they can write fantastic documentation? Or tools?

I'm sure you're a quick learner but at least in scenarios I've worked in there are often many, many possible solutions and no specific "right answer."

After all, it's hard for anyone to be right all of the time.

nkrisc• 8 years ago

As a non-developer who works directly with devs, I've always thought this:

I've heard that being a dev is 90% thinking about code and 10% writing it.

In my experience you hire senior devs to do the thinking part and junior devs to do the writing part while learning how to do the thinking part.

kbwt• 8 years ago

The communication ends up being such a bottleneck that your senior devs might as well do the 10% writing. Incidentally also the reason why outsourcing software doesn't work if you're trying to do anything innovative.

mywittyname4• 8 years ago

Hiring devs to just think is part of what creates these convoluted mess of systems. It's impossible to convey and idea well enough that another person could implement it in the same fashion. Look at language specifications: they are written by top-tier developers, but when implemented by other equally top-tier developers, there is an inevitable difference of opinion.

Senior developers should be writing code for important systems, and juniors should be writing the less important bits. That way, they get the opportunity to experiment without the company being stuck with a critical system written by a person who reinvented Yet Another Elliptical Wheel.

Mentoring is important and all, but at some point, you just have to start working.

tboyd472• 8 years ago

good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!

For at least 2 companies I've worked at, this is false. Junior devs cannot complete their work at all without help.

This may be the real problem: there is no way to learn the skills to do the job without actually getting a job first and learning the skills as you go.

DontGiveTwoFlux• 8 years ago

But the ‘learning the skills as you go’ part is where the seniors come in. I’ve benefited immensely from the code reviews which took things that technically worked but we’re convoluted and transformed them into code that could be maintained and read easily.

Now that I’ve had some mentorship I can be productive on my own, but yeah, it took some work.

The senior devs get pulled into meetings, customer escalations, bug reviews, etc. all the time. The juniors, now trained and competent are free to code all day and get the work done because they have fewer responsibilities.

Yes, it takes work to get there, but it’s worth the effort.

virgilp12• 8 years ago

Good junior devs are fairly rare, too - I wasn't claiming you find them everywhere.

alistairSH4• 8 years ago

This is where a high quality on-boarding program comes into play. Yes, a dev fresh out of college or code boot camp, with little or no real world experience, is going to be unproductive individually.

As the employer/manager, you need to work to minimize the period of time this is the case and ensure those junior devs quickly get to a point where they can work individually.

I mentioned it elsewhere in this discussion - we have a 1 month on-boarding program for new devs. They all arrive at the same time (summer after graduation), stay near HQ, and work through all the common training together (some tech, some culture, some "how to be an adult", etc). They also work through a simple, but in-depth (UI, API, build pipeline, etc), group project. And wrap up with a two day hackathon for fun (done in common with the summer interns).

snarf21• 8 years ago

I agree with you and this is the thing that gets lost on both sides. How fast you type and how many lines of code you write and test per day aren't the right metrics. It is about adding value, it isn't an assembly line. There is a major problem with middle/upper management understanding this. However, there is also a large group of people who view themselves as top developers who talk about having too many distractions and wanting a private office so they can lay down a lot of code each day. I'm not saying that isn't how some might be able to add the most value but code/day doesn't guarantee that maximum. Mentoring team members, documenting architecture, building automated tests, talking to customers, etc. will very likely yield more value in everything but the very near term.

All this to say that we need to be careful that we don't point the finger too hard at management and miss our own failings. Software done well is incredibly hard and increasingly complex. Focusing on adding value and not on code/day can help us all stay focused on the real goal and what is best for us and the company and the customers. </r>

commandlinefan6• 8 years ago

You hire senior devs to guide you WHAT and HOW to code.

Every organization I've worked at (for the past 25 years) has relegated that rule to the much lower prestige, much lower paying, zero career path role of either "business analyst" or "project manager". If you can produce code, you'll be producing code - and by and large, that's the only way to have anything resembling a future unless you're on an upper management track.

Kalium• 8 years ago

A lot of shops view senior devs as the people who write more, better, faster code. Not the people who think about what and how. That's for architectural councils, which meet in misty glades in dark robes at midnight or something.

0027• 8 years ago

You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!

I think this is a stereotype that will lead to more harm than good. What if a junior dev doesn't code just as fast or faster? Does that mean we hired the wrong junior dev? I agree we can should be open to junior developers, just implanting this stereotype is harmful

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what juniors you talk about, but most juniors I've met can code "barely enough", get stuck often and code pretty bad so the pull request will stay there for quite a while before all corrections are applied

dglass• 8 years ago

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If you’re interested you can subscribe at https://exponentialbackoff.substack.com

PokeTheCiTy• 8 years ago

300 $ / hour ? 300 * 8 * 5 * 20 -> 240K$ per month ? It seems far too much. This might be why they can't afford junior developer.

avaika• 8 years ago

What's the "5" in your equation? :)

However it's still way too much. 300 * 8 * 22 * 12 = 0.63M per year. In my opinion you must be at least Linus Torvalds's deputy to pretend on that.

duykhoa12t• 8 years ago

Did she mean daily rate? I wonder if a junior ask for this rate, of course the company has no chance to afford a senior dev.

Will_Do• 8 years ago

$300 an hour is about 600k/year. In many cases, this is actually probably a good estimate for developer opportunity cost for the company.

My working career is only a couple years old at this point so I'm more junior but in both of those years I can point to contributions that were worth more than 600k to the company. That being said, I personally don't even make a third of that $300/hour. But that's the whole reason a company decides to hire you -- they think you'll make them more money than you'll cost.

jmurinello• 8 years ago

Here's a plausible answer: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

z3t4• 8 years ago

Companies want to hire junior developers because they can pay them half of what they pay senior developers. But they also want the junior developers to have the same experience ...

TeeWEE• 8 years ago

What is a junior developer? Is a junior developer somebody without experience but with a good technical background. We hire those for sure.

But we dont hire people who dont have a solid basis, and just know a little bit of javascript programming.

For computer programming in a serious field, you need to know the basis to be good one, to solve real problems.

We actually dont use the name "Junior" developer. You're a software engineer or you're not. Junior developers are often names for people who can't program. We don't hire them.

z92• 8 years ago

You don't hire junior devs then.

skookumchuck• 8 years ago

Seems like one week I read that firms only want to hire freshly minted engineers because they are cheap and easy to exploit, then next week I read they only hire senior developers because they're more productive.

meerita• 8 years ago

Is out there any data or evidence that support her article? to me it sounds the typical bubble problem: you think it's generalized problem but the data shows another thing.

jlebrech• 8 years ago

companies need to follow the 80/20 rule. 80% non-junior developers and 20% junior. Juniors should do 80% of the work and seniors should have 80% of the knowledge. if the juniors are busy doing things then the seniors that focus on hard tasks.

jlengrand• 8 years ago

It's funny, my experience is completely different. I've always loved to hire juniors because you can mentor and they usually come with less preconceptions. That makes discussions much more fruitful. And they usually make you think about your decisions much more, because they can challenge things that any engineer with experience with just take for granted or accepted.

The learning curve can be an issue though. You want to be constantly be welcoming newcomers to have a rolling scheme of new 'seniors'.

alkonaut2• 8 years ago

Is this because people stay for just short timespans? We hire junior devs but we don’t expect much for the first years. I’m 15 years in and in a team of 30, the average is probably 10 years.

It takes a year to just “onboard” someone until they don’t need a lot of mentoring, but until a junior dev isn’t just a dangerous mess-creating junior dev, takes at least a couple of years more.

Learning the domain takes many years too, and without knowing the domain you need to be micromanaged and have everything specced up front or need constant interrupting feedback from product owners (should this be default on? What order should this be sorted? How many frobs will the typical user enter here? etc).

Obviously you can’t stop people from leaving but I wouldn’t even hire someone unless I genuinely believed they are going to stay 5 years.

(For context, this is heavy technical desktop software in a very mechanical engineering-heavy domain)

dandare• 8 years ago

Part of the problem is head count, at least in the company I work for. We had a hiring freeze and now we are allowed to hire two heads. I would love to hire one senior and two juniors but I can't.

scarface74• 8 years ago

I feel really badly for junior developers today. I was both fortunately and unfortunately never a "Jr. Developer" as a professional.

By the time I got my first programming job right out of college in 1996, I had already been a hobby programmer for 10 years, had been very deep into assembly and C, and had been reading books like "Code Complete". My first job was writing a data entry system from scratch in C.

It was also unfortunate because I spent the first 12 years of my career working at 2 companies where I was either the only developer or one of only two or three and the other two had been at the same company from the beginning of their careers. So yeah, I was a good "developer" (I had the chance to look at some of my old code and it would have passed one of my modern code reviews), but I didn't start learning modern, proper "software engineering" until 2008 when I started job hopping and choosing companies where the goal was more to gain experience than make money. Although the money wasn't bad either.

Even back in 1993 while in college, I got my first programming side gig because another college saw a HyperCard stack I posted on AOL.

If I wanted to break the cycle of no experience <-> no job today, I would do a side project and post on github and link my resume to it. I have experience and a good resume but I'm thinking about posting side projects to GitHub just to get experience in technologies I don't get a chance to use at work.

cimmanom2• 8 years ago

Companies have woken up to the fact that for the most part people no longer stay in one job for more than a few years.

Training junior people makes sense economically only if they get up to speed and positive productivity within a small fraction of the time they'll be with your company.

Since a bad developer creates enormous negative productivity, it can be years before a new programmer's contributions are productive at all, let alone greater than the ongoing opportunity cost of the time spent mentoring them, let alone the sunk cost of months to years of mentorship.

This time makes sense only to invest if you expect the developer you trained to stay with you for many years. That expectation has become less and less rational over the past couple decades.

Nowadays if you take on and train a junior, you're taking the loss on that training - not to train someone who's going to be a good mid-level developer in your own company, but who's going to jump ship for somewhere else well before you can make back the senior developer time spent on them.

mratzloff• 8 years ago

You shouldn't have this problem if you 1) hire for intelligence, drive, cooperation, and passion about the mission or opportunity, 2) give them continual opportunities to grow and take on increasing responsibility, and 3) compensate them appropriately (as a manager, privately reevalute title and comp every three months for the first year).

Of course, these are the same things (among others) that are true for every engineer.

There's an endless supply of juniors to choose from, so there's no excuse for a bad hire. If they leave for more money that you could have paid them, that's on you, too.

Do those things and you'll win their loyalty.

marcus_holmes• 8 years ago

I recently put together a dev team from scratch. I specced it out as: One Senior Dev, one Project Manager, one Team Leader (an existing employee experienced in the company politics and able to manage), one Ops/Infrastructure role, and one Designer.

Needless to say it didn't quite work out like that. We ended up with two junior devs, one developer, one project manager, the ops guy, and the team leader. One of the people we interviewed for a Junior Dev role was actually pretty experienced (not enough for the Senior role though). Two of the devs could design well enough to be able to do the UI work. We're still looking for a Senior Developer. The team will need to learn as they go, but I'm able to cover for them enough so they can make mistakes (ahhh, the pleasure of being a CEO with a techie background).

I hope to continue bringing on new Junior Devs as the team grows and learns. Creating a pipeline of talent is essential to finding the best people. Because the best people aren't found randomly, they're trained and coached, built up to be the people that the team needs.

It's all about long-term planning rather than short-term thinking. I'm pretty sure that in about six months this team will be doing all the things we need it to, and in about 18 months we'll have lost (at most) one of them and the team will be exceptional.

lmilcin• 8 years ago

The demand for developers is such that no company can ignore hiring and training junior developers.

IMO companies have relabeled them to developer and even to senior developers, presumably to make hires feel better that they joined exclusive group of people.

This may also be a result of some tension in HR departments where they are expected to provide some number of headcounts on different levels but they can't. So there may be natural inclination to prop up the hires to meet plans.

The body leasing companies are also inclined to prop up their candidates to offer them for higher rates.

Some regions of the world (my experience is with India) don't seem to have any junior developers. As soon as they are done with their training they have gained enough experience to be marketed as developers.

I work for one of very large companies in financial sector and people who barely can write a loop in Java are still named senior developers.

All this depreciates value of the official recognition of seniority and forces people to discover this on their own.

mukundmr• 8 years ago

The investment an organization makes in helping junior developers get up to speed pays off in the longer run if the workplace isn't toxic. Ideas flow better when there is a difference in experience level in the team. Mentoring also helps experience people learn more as opposed to settling down in a comfort zone.

ThomPete• 8 years ago

The economy killed the Junior developer. If we ever are in a situation where there are more applicants than jobs and the economy isn't doing well you can be sure the junior developer will be back.

CSMastermind• 8 years ago

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.

burlesona3• 8 years ago

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.

anovikov2• 8 years ago

This is of course because of outsourcing. Junior devs usually do repeatable tasks guided by a manager closely, which is exactly what outsourced heads can do, definitely cheaper than the junior devs in the U.S. would. This is normal.

akerro• 8 years ago

Guess who won't have senior devs in 10-15 years.

anovikov2• 8 years ago

Outsourcing destinations, because there is little demand for senior outsourcing heads. They become harder to manage, and their jobs are high impact enough to justify the expense of hiring them in the Valley directly.

People who outgrow junior level will just make their own startups, or move to U.S. from the locations: outsourcing shops won't need them; more: they will take conscious effort to prevent them from ever growing, because growing, they become threats to these body shops.

_pmf_• 8 years ago

Who Killed the Junior Developer?

Those who thought it a good idea to promote people to senior level after 6 months or a year.

vinceguidry9• 8 years ago

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 say accounting, but the difference is that accountants leave school fully capable of employment. HR understands how to hire and manage accountants.

But programming is this black box in the corporate world that no one knows how to understand, value, or hire for. This is why every company wants rockstars, they're hoping that someone whose at least confident to present themselves as a rockstar won't be a net negative to the company.

Eventually they'll figure it out, took them a decade to figure out how to manage IT. Then companies will learn that they can't skimp on middle management for software developers. Some companies will need to give software a legit seat at the table and hire upper management. The political cover will allow shops to stabilize and with stabilization, you'll finally start seeing small and midsize organizations open up positions for juniors.

But it'll never happen so long as companies don't take software development seriously by giving them political cover. If you are a software developer nearing the middle or end of your career, you're pulling the ladder up behind you if you don't seriously consider moving into management. It's too important a job to ignore to go chase your dreams.

hacker_9• 8 years ago

Depends on the business of course. Try getting interviewed by competent developers, they'll quickly find the holes.

vinceguidry9• 8 years ago

I used to believe this, now I'm skeptical. Even if they find holes in the developer's competence, interviewing is not a task, it's a business process orchestrated and controlled by middle management. Say the competent developer finds holes in the interviewee's knowledge and skills, his findings become a line item in the report passed up to said middle management.

The middle manager, hopefully not in HR, has to weigh all the items in the report, and as a result the actual skill level of the developer gets buried deep, under cultural factors and attitude. There's also the human aspect, does Jimmy Mid-Level know how to raise issues with an interviewee's competence convincingly? If he doesn't, his concerns are likely to get written off.

This all ties back to the lack of political cover that software development shops in non-technically oriented organizations usually exhibit. Developers need to be in those middle management positions if they want their concerns to be taken seriously.

padobson5• 8 years ago

I love that you pointed out the need for political strength within organizations. I agree, and I think it directly conflicts with this line from the post:

Yeah, I’m gonna bring gender into it, because I’m a woman and when women take on roles like this they often get pigeonholed into “den mother” stereotypes. That means less prestige and less prestige usually means less pay.

Having the admiration and respect of the next generation of developers at your company offers far more leverage than the nebulous prestige. If you mentor three engineers, that's three warm bodies at your company who will have good things to say when asked about you. If you do a good job, you now have a team of four capable engineers who can get things done.

What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help?

JoeAltmaier2• 8 years ago

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 hand. But lets talk leadership - Bob has got everybody afraid of him! Lets promote Bob"

MollyR• 8 years ago

Wait until you get old (past 35), I'm a woman (ex web deck "ninja/rockstar/etc") and I can safely say the ageist comments are far worse.

No one believes you can keep up the development sprints, or new technologies.

dragonwriter• 8 years ago

Having the admiration and respect of the next generation of developers at your company offers far more leverage than the nebulous prestige

“Prestige” and “respect” are essentially synonyms, and careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management.

What could provide more organizational political power than building a hierarchy of capable engineers that consistently come to you when they need help?

Being perceived by management as delivering results rather than being the one behind the scenes enabling others to be perceived that way.

yetanotheruser• 8 years ago

Depends if the leaders even care what 3 junior devs think.

tboyd472• 8 years ago

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 building software does not mean it is a low-cost, low-risk endeavor, nor do they understand how to extract value from a completed software project. They go straight from "Bob the executive has a cool idea," to, "Let's hire 3 full-time devs."

vinceguidry9• 8 years ago

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.

Raphmedia3• 8 years ago

You can get through a Magento certification by memorizing the answers that are all over the internet, http://magecert.com ect.

risotto_groupon2• 8 years ago

The Magento Certification tests are so divorced from the skills and reality of developing a Magento site and the study materials are so, so, so bad that most organizations just send a couple of canaries to take the cert expecting them to fail, then based on the questions they saw the org will put together their own memorization based study materials and train other devs using their own internal docs.

THIS IS INTENTIONAL on the part of Magento. They want a high fail rate. It ensures that only orgs with lots of money (who can afford a couple failures) will get a large number of certs and become official Magento partners, and since you pay for each test more failures means more money.

They have carefully structured the cert so that about 1/2 the questions are actual general skills and useful knowledge for working with the framework and about 1/2 are rote memorization such as, "What is the EXACT class name and Method Name that does X?" where options are

My_Basic_Class_Car::doThing() My_Basics_For_Class_Car::doThings() My_Class_For_Car::doThing() My_Class_for_Cars::doThings()

You need like 75% to pass... so if you're really lucky you can guess your way through the memorization portion but 90% won't pass on their first try.

If I were a hiring manager looking at a candidate with a Magento cert I could glean 1 of 2 things:

1) This person took the cert independently and cared enough to cheat or pay a lot of money to get it.

2) This person worked at an org with enough institutional knowledge of Magento and their payola process that they probably learned SOMETHING while they were there.

scardine• 8 years ago

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).

jmvoodoo4• 8 years ago

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 knowledge. Identifying the person who is passionate about learning, has dedication to the craft and pride in their work, and has a natural talent for software is hard. Figure it out though and you have a competitive advantage for life as a manager.

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.

vinceguidry9• 8 years ago

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 cycled through 3 managers in 2 1/2 years at that job, 2 in the "Director of E-Commerce" role, and one in the "VP of E-Commerce" role. All three left for more sane roles.

It's hard to fix management problems at your company when leadership is so confused.

binarycheese• 8 years ago

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.

jnovek2• 8 years ago

I am philosophically similar, although I generally hire at a 2 to 1 ratio, senior to junior.

I've found that I'm (as in, the boss guy) the most common blockade to ensuring that mentorship is productive and not disruptive. A 2 to 1 hiring ratio is playing the same game you are but on "Easy" instead of "Normal". So :thumbsup: on maintaining a 1 to 1 ratio.

Regarding how this relates to hiring women -- it's not just women. It has been a general diversity boon to teams where I've employed this practice, increasing diversity not just in the "affirmative action" groups (not to diminish the importance of that) but also in programmer background. I've had junior engineers bring insights far outside my sphere simply because they were previously (e.g.) a copywriter.

steveeq1• 8 years ago

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?

shabangcohen• 8 years ago

As a woman currently applying/interviewing for a new grad role, I think you're definitely right about most companies caring only about current knowledge/skill.

Romanulus• 8 years ago

How many women hired would be enough to satisfy those roles you mention?

tomxor• 8 years ago

Hiring Jrs btw is its own skill as you are filtering for potential not skill or knowledge. Identifying the person who is passionate about learning, has dedication to the craft and pride in their work

I think this is so true of software development roles, but doesn't it actually apply to every hire? unless you have a _very_ specific role with explicit skill set, senior roles need to be just as flexible and able to learn new things quickly.

runedog2• 8 years ago

What do you suggest for those of us who believe we would be terrible at management? Add to that, I also think I would be miserable doing it.

WalterSear5• 8 years ago

That the system is stacked against us.

vinceguidry9• 8 years ago

Subscribe to Rands' blog, read through his archives, and get on his Slack.

http://randsinrepose.com/

https://rands-leadership.slack.com/?redir=%2Fmessages%2Fgene...

rapfaria• 8 years ago

I've come to terms that I want to be a developer for as long as possible.

This thread can also help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372997

alistairSH4• 8 years ago

Find an employer that values career programmers? We have a "Technical Fellow" career path for devs/engineers/architects who want to remain in a technical role beyond the typical "tech lead" or "principle whatever" roles.

adventured2• 8 years ago

Open your own consulting firm. The people you contract with, generally will not care if you're a 55 year old programmer so long as you can get the job done on time and on budget. Further, as you grow the business, you create your own security, as you can eventually turn yourself into more of a business owner/operator/manager, than only a programmer. This is one of the better ways to beat ageism in tech.

ams61102• 8 years ago

accountants leave school fully capable of employment

Well, fully capable of entry-level employment. Anyone who graduates from a reputable school with a Comp. Sci. or InfoSys type of major is also fully capable of entry-level employment.

Accountants aren't really capable of anything but grunt work until they pass the CPA which normally is after several years of grunt work and additional learning and study.

Programmers aren't much good in a business until after several years of actually programming business systems.

It doesn't seem to hard to understand to me, in fact they seem quite similar.

megaman223• 8 years ago

Anyone who graduates from a reputable school with a Comp. Sci. or InfoSys type of major is also fully capable of entry-level employment.

No, they're really not, for at least a year. It takes at least that long for most new graduates to get over the hump and learn enough of the practical skills and industry practices that their university left them woefully ignorant of, so that they can start being marginally useful. Once in a while you find somebody who has been doing real work on the side for years during or before college, and thus has a clue how things work, but that's a diamond in the rough, usually.

And unfortunately, many of them just can't hack being a professional programmer, and they never get to the point where they become a net positive, in which case you just hope they leave of their own volition or you can silo them off in some area of little importance that won't cause you problems down the road.

commandlinefan6• 8 years ago

always had to lie, cheat, and steal your way into the field

Back in the 90's, when I wanted to move up to working with C++ (the hip, new, "in" thing at the time), I bought a book about C++, read through it, worked the examples, and then started interviewing. The interviewers asked all sorts of arcane questions that I hadn't come across in my few months of study, so I was tanking the interviews. The trick I figured out back then, though, was that the interviewers all tended to ask the same sorts of questions - so after getting my rejection, I'd go look up what the answers to all their questions were so that the next time I was asked the same question, I'd know the answer. I did eventually get a job doing C++ (and did well at it), but... yeah, looking back it was maybe a little bit dishonest.

shoover• 8 years ago

Eh, sounds like smart preparation to play the game on its terms. Did those questions end up being seriously relevant to the work? If so, then you prepared yourself better for the job by learning the answers. If not, well, then maybe it's the interviewers who weren't so honest.

delecti2• 8 years ago

Your story reminds me of the joke/anecdote of the way to cheat on tests. You religiously look over your notes and the textbook in the weeks leading up to the test, so that when you take the test it's like you have a comprehensive cheat sheet with you, but in your head.

If the hiring process wasn't able to distinguish between you or who they thought they were looking for, then it wasn't your responsibility to inform them of it.

ghostbrainalpha• 8 years ago

It's only dishonest if you send in a fake interviewee before you in order to get the questions.

pvelagal• 8 years ago

What you talk about indicates there is a gap between what industry wants/expects and what you learn either from books or in college.

laythea5• 8 years ago

I would argue that the kind of person with the skill to navigate into a position, is more likely than the person not, to be able to pick up things faster. So the fact that you may not hit the ground running does not matter so much as your attitude and ability to learn quick. Well done.

blablabla123• 8 years ago

So true! My first (student) job..10 years ago... I landed because of personal recommendation through a friend and yeah, for the rest I built on that. Confirming what you say about politics, all following jobs there was a lot of of it involved rendering the jobs eventually mechanic/boring.

Especially the non-technical people at the places had really unrealistic understandings of IT and DEV in particular to a degree that tech colleagues thought everybody in MGMT must be completely stupid or insane. After having left these places after some time it's just funny.

And yes, for many non-tech people hiring Junior devs is no option in my experience. No idea what these people think, but maybe this is then changing as tech becomes more relevant.. ;)

ChicagoDave2• 8 years ago

Nah this is not true. I started out as a junior dev and remained a junior dev for many years. I've progressed through the ranks over time by continuing to learn new concepts and tools, to observe my mentors and managers, and to adapt.

There may be environments like Silicon Valley where companies lean towards experience, but I can tell you in the Chicago areas University of Illinois and other comp-sci graduates get hired consistently.

It's too complex of an issue to throw a blanket over it. The market matters, the person matters, and the hiring team matters.

I don't believe there's any inherent bias against hiring junior developers. It all depends on a company's needs.

closeparen• 8 years ago

This might be a tech company vs. IT cost center in a traditional business thing. What major tech companies don’t have internship and new grad recruiting operations? Netflix is the only one I can think of.

fouc• 8 years ago

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.

drdeadringer• 8 years ago

You have always had to lie, cheat, and steal your way into the field.

This terrifies me in terms of my rewriting my resume for my next job cycle. Is any minuscule semblance of honesty on a resume completely dead as a zombie shot through the brain?

I'm serious here. If I have never used XYZ tech, should I list that as a matter of course now should the position require it, and then fudge the results with a few searches and try-out "tests"?

In "current year": "I know what color it is" truly makes me an expert if I can snake-oil my way into it?

alchemism• 8 years ago

"Fake it 'till you make it," is a statement of pure wisdom, at least with regards to success in America. Especially in IT.

bobthechef• 8 years ago

Really? The "killing" of the junior developer seems like an anecdotal claim. Hasn't ageism been a concern here on HN? Doesn't that tend to suggest that older, and thus more senior developers are "discriminated against" in favor of younger, CHEAPER labor? The reasons being that either:

- you don't need a senior developer for your needs

- you can't fork out for a senior developer

- you could really use a senior developer, but won't fork out for a senior developer because your penny wise and pound foolish

- you don't understand the difference between a junior and a senior developer

- there is a labor shortage in software development and all you can hire are junior developers

madamelic3• 8 years ago

- you don't understand the difference between a junior and a senior developer

I think it is this. The title Sr Engineer is handed out constantly to people with little to no experience. You are basically Junior for a year then you get the title change. It is a bit absurd.

So yes, there is a shortage of Jr engineers... but there are plenty of not very good Sr Engineers who should be Jr Engineers.

Caveman_Coder10• 8 years ago

You're absolutely correct on this point. My first job after obtaining my CS degree was "Senior Developer" even though I had never developed software professionally before. I got the Senior title because the company had their pay buckets tied to titles so in order for the company to bring me on at the rate I requested, they gave me the Senior title. Titles apparently are nonsense, at least from what I've seen.

aidos• 8 years ago

Probably a good time to say that we're trying to hire a Junior Developer in London, and I'll be providing as much mentoring as they want.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16285477

eliben• 8 years ago

Stack Overflow pops up plenty of "new grad" level jobs all the time, for example https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/155829/google-software-engine...

Beltiras3• 8 years ago

I trained a junior dev so well I was laid off because he was cheaper than me. One of the proudest moments of my professional life to be honest.

wccrawford4• 8 years ago

I've got a junior dev under me that has gotten so good that that the thought of that scenario has occurred to me.

I decided to come to terms with it by accepting that if that happened, it'd be the push I needed to spread my wings a bit.

Beltiras3• 8 years ago

Isn't this the goal of every programmer? Programming their way out of a job?

eddd• 8 years ago

First of all, absolutely no employer (at least the sane ones) cares if you are junior/senior/old/ninja or superman. The goal is, to hire people that generate a cash turnover. If you cannot deliver a value that the company can capture as a profit - you are denied. It is that simple.

Maybe these "Junior" people just don't know enough to be productive? How can I hire someone who will waste my time on explaining something that is so basic, one can learn by being involved in open source?

And here is the conclusion. Stuck in Junior limbo (what ever that means)? Commit to some open source project, show me value you can create. I guarantee you, you'll be hired.

whalesalad• 8 years ago

1 or 2 "senior-level" folks (imho, people with at least a decade of experience within a multitude of environments) are going to outperform a half-dozen junior engineers.

When you're building a monolith Rails application, anything goes. But now that the industry is trending towards (for better or worse) service oriented architecture, stateless cloud deployments, walled gardens tossing data back and forth over RPC, data science teams, etc... you need people who have been to war a dozen times and have already made all the mistakes. That is what you get with a senior engineer: someone who knows what NOT to do.

I have spent most of the last 2-3 years of my career playing bad cop and telling people no. Shutting down wild and exciting ideas. Stopping over-engineering in its tracks. Preventing an investment in a bad technology. Preventing fragmented infrastructure with data in a handful of different databases.

I think that is why the junior engineer has disappeared. Most of us were never trained/educated/encouraged to be good teachers and we spend most of our time putting out fires and trying to keep our hands on the pulse of technology while simultaneously hanging on for dear life within our organizations. Pivots, layoffs, blockchains, shiny new business objectives are all mortars flying at the eng team left and right.

I wish I had junior engineers to mentor and teach and foster into folks who have good critical thinking skills and I can trust 100% to make the right decisions – but there is a tremendous cost involved to the business that I think most are unable to afford. Some of my most rewarding career experiences involved working side-by-side with folks fresh out of a bootcamp or university who were wide-eyed and bushy tailed. It was a lot of fun watching them run off and do a bunch of work then having a discussion on the choices and using each moment as a stepping stone towards a bigger understanding of all the moving parts in modern infrastructure.

jerf• 8 years ago

A hypothesis for part of the problem that I've scrolled through most of this conversation and still not seen: Junior developers are having a hard time finding a job because the tasks have gotten harder. As easy as people may claim "cloud" is, if a junior developer has to learn the three Javascript libraries, two backend languages, a devops cloud deployment system, and three monitoring technologies just to be able to break even on productivity, it's going to be hard to justify hiring a "junior dev".

When I got into web dev in 1997, we didn't even have source control to speak of. We barely used Javascript. All I needed was a template language and same basic HTML, and we put out a project that, at the time, was considered amazingly cutting edge by most people who used it.

If I were to try to hire me of 1997 now, I'd have a lot harder time finding something for him to do, because I'd have half-a-dozen technologies to train him on before he could even produce the equivalent of "hello world" that integrates correctly into a modern environment. All of these techs have reasons to exist. We found out about the server going down when people got frustrated about it being down and called us after hours of outage. We found out that something was eating 100% of the CPU the same way. Our "analytics" were mostly "Hmmm, nobody seems to be complaining, everything must be OK!" Automated testing? Literally never heard of it. And so on and so on. But people are not magically infused with this knowledge in college; in fact the curricula have barely changed since then (which I consider mostly a good thing), so it means that the bar to being a productive junior dev has definitely risen.

Fortunately, my team lately has been able to diversify and we've got some more projects that are independent from the legacy code base I maintain, so as we've been looking at headcount this year I've been able to say that we've got some positions for juniors now, who can work in a space that is more lake-like than sea-like, and be productive, and learn things, and develop. But last year I had to say that I've got nothing that wouldn't take at least a medium-skill dev to get anywhere in any reasonable period of time.

(And let me both open and close on the word part. I don't think this is the entire problem, and I agree with a lot of what other people said about other parts. But I believe it may be a quite non-trivial part of it.)

lolsal• 8 years ago

I find this observation really interesting! I've found that 10 years ago I was a more 'mature' full stack developer - I did front end, backend and ops type stuff. As complexity has grown I've absolutely shied away from keeping up with anything on the frontend and I avoid ops things as much as possible. It's probably not very wise on my part. These days I would absolutely not be able to call myself a full stack dev.

lr4444lr2• 8 years ago

I've been saying this for a while, and I think it will lead to the demise of the bootcamps, and is already causing a cascade of unemployment in low-skill indian IT from what I read. The bar is simply getting higher. I think this is a good thing overall. It's also why I care almost exclusively about CS fundamentals in technical interviews, unless we have a very specific need.

elliotec• 8 years ago

How does exclusively interviewing on CS fundamentals get you people who are good at the job?

mywittyname4• 8 years ago

I've noticed this as well. The personal project that netted me my first job was really just a LAMP CRUD site for torrents. Not a single person would be impressed by that today.

expertentipp2• 8 years ago

LAMP CRUD site for torrents

Impressed? Today that would result in an early morning police raid on your apartment.

alistairSH4• 8 years ago

Is this a small company vs large company thing?

We hire interns and recent graduates most years. I've had 2 interns/summer for as long as I've been in a leadership role. The majority of my team was hired straight out of college. My employer is a well-established software company (35+ years, 400+ employees, R&D offices in 4+ countries).

We also have a robust on-boarding program for college graduates. So, we can deliver all that early training once with willing SMEs instead of many times. Yes, it costs money (travel/housing for remote new hires, travel/expenses for remote L&D staff, catering, extra-curricular events, etc). That doesn't completely alleviate the mentoring load, but it seems to work well. Plus, the new hires make friends quickly and rely on each other more than they might otherwise.

soneca• 8 years ago

I am a junior developer on my first job as a developer at a startup with around 50 developers.

The company, luckily, has a very opposite approach to hiring jr devs than what is described in the article. There are usually one or two jr developers per squad of 4 or 5 people (which is actually a maximum, the company is aiming only at more mid-level or senior devs right now).

There is a very collaborative environment, a lot of help from all senior developers - not only the ones in my squad.

What I think is missing in the economics there is that I (and all other jr developers) do provide measurable value to the company after 2 or 3 months. I am able to create simple, but necessary and demanded by the business, features by myself, just with senior developers reviewing my PRs.

This idea that junior developers are a drag to senior developers is fake in my (limited) experience. I make the senior developer in my team more productive most of the time, and after around 8 months in the job, we are actually hiring another junior developer because I think I am ready to take some of the responsibility of mentoring him/her on a basic level.

I am pretty sure that I am a net positive to the company on a $ invested per value delivered ratio.

jdc0589• 8 years ago

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.

runedog2• 8 years ago

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make myself available for mentoring over the internet? I'm sure there's many possibilities, but has anyone had actual success with any?

Preferably I could get paid doing it, but if that's not really feasible then I wouldn't mind pro bono.

Raphmedia3• 8 years ago

Find a Slack or IRC channel and hang out there. Example: I spend a lot of time in #FoundationSites, #Symfony, #Aurelia and answers questions there.

jnovek2• 8 years ago

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 setup a framework for mentorship, you can hire junior devs with more promise than your average senior dev.

Anecdotally, one of my junior hires from a few years ago earned his way through positions quickly and became a senior software engineer in just three years. I actually invited him to be my co-founder on my next venture and he turned me down :-P.

JAFTEM2• 8 years ago

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 of USC, UCLA, Cal Tech, UCI, UCSB, UCSD, Harvey Mudd, Cal Poly, etc.

[0] https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/#counties_most_degrees

[1] https://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/24/is-southern-california...

kenhwang5• 8 years ago

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.

mixmastamyk4• 8 years ago

This piece reminded me of my days in the restaurant business as a teenager. Was common for everyone to do a tour there, but now the jobs are mostly done by the “undocumented.” Don’t care to discuss the politics of that but it feels similar.

49531• 8 years ago

I'm lucky to work where I do. We have the best system I've seen for growing junior developers. Our team is about 60 engineers and I'd say close to 20 of them are from non-traditional backgrounds (coding bootcamps or self taught). It's not that we're doing anything revolutionary, we merely accept that we can handle them, assign them a mentor, and let them learn.

commandlinefan6• 8 years ago

When they didn’t understand there would be a lag as I taught these people.

In a world run by MBAs who figure that any programming task, regardless of complexity, ought to take an hour (MAYBE two) and if it takes longer that means the programmer is incapable, this is hardly surprising.

logfromblammo9• 8 years ago

It was the Middle Manager, in the Small Conference Room, with the PowerPoint.

Did I win? <opponent reveals a card> Nope.~

"Junior" implies training, and American companies don't do training. If you're lucky, they have an internship program, which is apparently enough experience to get you a 6-month contract-to-hire as a "regular" developer.

It's a name game. "Developer" is actually "Junior Developer", "Senior Developer" is actually "Developer", and "Lead Developer" or "Principal Developer" is really "Senior Developer".

k__• 8 years ago

In Germany at least we have apprenticeships and working students.

There is a apprenticeship program for developers (Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung -> Qualified IT Specialist for Application development) which gets rather much practical knowledge, since they only go, I think, 2 days a week to school and 3 days a week to work. This takes 3 years, so they have much time to transition from a newbie to a junior to a senior.

The main problem is, most "professional school" are quite shitty. So if your company doesn't have good apprenticeship programs, you're basically stuck with learning outdated stuff at school and nothing of value at your company.

I studied computer science and worked as a web developer on the side, so I wouldn't finish my studies without practical knowledge.

Caveman_Coder10• 8 years ago

So I've read through most of the complaints listed here and it seems like having a Software Developer Union would be one way to go. You could then have your jr devs undergo an apprenticeship similar to how we did it in the trades (5 years to become a Journeyman).

Caveman_Coder10• 8 years ago

Personal story time...

I was a journeyman electrician for nearly a decade before obtaining my CS degree. The company that hired me, in order to pay me what I was making as a topped-out journeyman, brought me in as a Senior Developer (and its corresponding pay "bucket"). This was my first job actually developing software and I was, in title, a "Senior Developer," even though I knew next to nothing other than what was covered in my college curriculum.

TLDR: Titles don't mean much...

gnachman• 8 years ago

My experience at Google and Facebook is that junior devs are hires in great numbers. Intern season means you can’t find a parking spot because there are so many of them. This article doesn’t ring true to me, but my view of the world is narrow since I’ve only been at big companies. Is he talking about startups? I thought those skewed young too.

bpicolo2• 8 years ago

I suspect this is referring the world of software at large, outside the SV sphere of influence.

pascalxus• 8 years ago

I had a similar experience. 15 years ago, with less than 1 year of experience I couldn't get a job to save my life. I had to work for companies for free! 5-10 years later, I was getting up to 5 offers for a job while interviewing.

And yet, it's not like junior developers suck. I've seen plenty of junior developers who can build up an application, no problem. There might be some mistakes along the way, but they're able to get the job done.

bpyne2• 8 years ago

My title for my first programming job, circa 1992-3, was Junior Programmer. I was sent for two weeks of Oracle training on my first day. We didn't have a formal mentoring program, but the team was small and everyone was open to helping me anytime I needed it.

My recollection is that "Junior" positions phased out along with training programs as companies demanded pre-trained people. It seems like companies have basically shifted all the cost of training to the individual. This is having an effect on college computer science programs as students and their parents demand programs more catered to industrial needs. (The paradox is that industrial needs change before a student can actually graduate.)

Personally, I would love to work with Juniors and mentor them. In the absence of Juniors, I suggested that I do "lunch and learns" with our Help Desk people so they can be more than just ticket routers: maybe act as analysts before tickets get to senior people like me. As of yet, my manager and the Help Desk manager haven't approved. So, we keep riding the carousel of status quo.

treve• 8 years ago

Some data that's not anecdotal would be nice. I work for a fairly large SF company which hires mostly newgrads every year.

maximexx• 8 years ago

Who Killed the Junior Developer?

The educational system.

I've seen horrible things happening to production code due to junior developers. In the end the senior/lead needs to spend way more time fixing all bad code/ideas than if he'd write it himself in the first place. I know a company that has a medior dev that is now already more than 2 months working on a feature I can write in just 2 weeks. Besides that, my code will likely still be better because I code with experience, using proven strategies, making it more scalable, preventing pitfalls, potential bugs, etc..

I don't think the companies are to blame. A junior dev should not write rubbish if he/she is a software developer graduate. Current IT education is very limited. Most of the things you learn in 5 years can be interesting and a good foundation, but not really relevant for most developer jobs out there. You actually have to start learning to code once done with your study. And learning to code is not a short journey, I guess at least some 3 years of full time study before you'll get the hang of it. And I didn't even touch the idea that you definitely need some talent or feel for it. You can study arts, but that alone won't make you an artist.

jxramos• 8 years ago

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.

msluyter• 8 years ago

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.)

hbnyc• 8 years ago

It's a symptom of normalized salary ranges for entry level positions, a saturated market, and massive range in the skillset of entry level developers.

There are two sets of juniors that I've come across. The first critically assesses a problem and it's edge cases, how to integrate the solution into the greater body of work, and considers performance. They might not know the stack of the company but they can be brought up to speed quickly by more experienced team members. The second is one that is incredibly proficient at the most cutting edge tools. They are hired because they are up to speed with what the company considers valuable at that moment. There is a much greater emphasis on getting shit done quickly rather than considering how it fits in later, how performant it is, or assessing how to integrate the solution in larger contexts.

I've found the first type to be much stronger teammates over an extended amount of time. They are also the ones that are able to command higher salaries when starting out because of the approach. The second type sees the salary numbers being set by the first and has an expectation that it is what they too are worth. Now you have two drastically different candidates competing for the same entry level positions, at the same rate. The first won't have an issue getting a job and the second will struggle.

Both can flourish in the right situations. We need to do a better job at distinguishing the two.

myth_buster• 8 years ago

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!

songzme• 8 years ago

The ideal hiring process imo is actually a training process that is less focused on 'finding the best' but rather focused on helping their local community become good engineers. Companies fund their own bootcamps and pay students $15/hr (with no engineering experience). Students learn and help each other how to code (following a structured curriculum) with mentorship by engineers from the company. When students have finished the basics, they work on open source projects or internal projects following proper engineering process / tools that the company use. When a student has proved that he/she learned how to work well with other engineers and has built a few features, they get hired by the company as an engineer and this engineer would be immediately productive.

This might seem like a crazy idea, but its actually not. The previous companies that I have worked for all offer paid volunteer hours which could go directly to this initiative. The cost of hiring is around 30k per engineer (conservatively), which could help train someone living paycheck to paycheck for an entire year.

This non-profit does this: https://garagescript.org

rossdavidh• 8 years ago

I've seen junior devs hired and trained/mentored in pretty much every shop I've worked in (could be an Austin, Texas thing). But, if this is a problem generally, would it not just be a consequence of not expecting to be able to keep junior developers long enough to benefit from them? Or, if the hiring managers intend to flip the company in a year or two, not really caring about the long term pool of senior developers?

ranci5• 8 years ago

For my own part, I’m happy to mentor folks

Oh joy, I can't wait to be mentored by someone who held a bunch of random front end positions for about 8 months, has 2 endorsements for javascript, nothing for backend, no degree in this field, considers themselves an author now and uses their gender as a weapon/excuse in their public musings.

ranci5• 8 years ago

The great irony of this article is that the author has degrees in forestry and agriculture and a very weak development skillset based on their LinkedIn profile and they still got a junior developer job.

grappler• 8 years ago

I've found myself in a "mid-level" limbo. I have lots of knowledge and a fair amount of skill from a lifetime of programming, but I have trouble keeping what feels like an insane pace some others around me seem to manage. I was flat-out told that my output isn't what they expect from a "senior" developer.

Thing is, I never claimed that I was a "senior" developer, whatever that means. I just seem to have been slotted into that category based on years of experience. I didn't want to mislead an employer into thinking I was more capable than I actually was.

I went job searching and specifically said to recruiters and hiring managers that I was "mid-level" and would set my salary requests accordingly. If that meant I'm held to expectations somewhere between junior and senior, and get paid somewhere between junior and senior, that would be just fine.

I found that pretty much everyone was looking for senior devs, a few places advertised junior openings, and interest in mid-level seemed rarest of all.

It's like they think everyone is either a junior who needs to be mentored, or a senior who can deliver a story every day or two. I feel perfectly capable of doing the work, but need some time to think my way through it. I don't quite understand why I'm finding that to be such a hard sell in a job market where it's supposedly so hard to find developers.

mbrodersen• 8 years ago

The existential angst experienced by Hacker News developers is amazing. One moment I am reading articles proclaiming that "nobody hires Senior Developers" (which is nonsense). And people freak out. Followed shortly by "nobody hires Junior Developers" (which is also nonsense). With an equal amount of freaking out. So should we conclude, based on the "wisdom" of Hacker News, that nobody hires any Junior or Senior or any other Developers of any age/sex/...? Of course not. Because developers get hired every day, all the time.

yasinaydin• 8 years ago

I am so pissed of that "Only members of Medium may see responses to this story."

I thought I was a member but I learnt that it is 5$/mo.

chuckmcknight• 8 years ago

When I got started, Junior developers were assigned to senior developers doing maintenance programming. It was important work but it also gave you time to come up to speed on the system without the crush of new feature development deadlines. Sadly, it seems that not only do companies not do that these days but the new breed of developers seem to think they are too good to do maintenance programming. I learned a great deal about how systems really work and how to write robust software from some great mentors who had been moved to maintenance work as they neared retirement but companies these days are quick to lose older developers in favor of less experienced and less expensive younger developers. Lots of tribal knowledge is lost in that fashion every year.

TylerJewell• 8 years ago

Hi - Melissa's blog post and the ensuing thread encouraged us at WSO2 to share our views on this topic in a response essay that talks about the importance of junior software engineers in a company.

https://medium.com/@tylerjewell/bringing-life-to-new-softwar...

Who Killed the Junior Developer?

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