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Comment by Jemmeh | Hacker News Reader

If I am a business owner, and I need someone to create a website for me to do something, the first thing I will reach for is someone who has already done similar projects and has a track record of getting it done. Teaching people is expensive, takes time (my website could be making me money -right now-) and doesn't always pay off. Whenever possible, it's often preferred to grab someone who can just hit the ground running.

I'm not saying this is perfect, just that's why experience is sought after. We have an annoying problem of way too many job ads being for seniors and very few for entry level. People have to get their foot in the door to ever become senior.

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> If I am a business owner, and I need someone to create a website for me to do something, the first thing I will reach for is someone who has already done similar projects and has a track record of getting it done.

If that is the case, what you need is a contractor, not an employee, and you should hire accordingly.

I disagree. Aside from an entry level position, you want someone with previous experience.

Google wouldn't hire someone to manage their datacenter with no previous experience managing anything like it.

Voted down for being about as wrong as possible about Google's hiring practices.

> Google wouldn't hire someone to manage their datacenter with no previous experience managing anything like it.

That's exactly what they do. The interviews test for basic skills — an understanding of TCP/IP, unix, programming ability and intelligence — and all the rest is on-the-job training.

Your challenge there would be finding anything remotely like Google's datacenter.

I get what you're saying, but in this case the end result is still that the overall field is has high demands for people who already know how to do what they need done.

Trust me, if you have a passionate non-web developer he can do the job just fine. And he/she applied for the job so they are interested to learn something new, maybe already started doing so but there is nothing to put down in a CV. They will read the tutorials, the documentation and they will deliver. I feel that nobody wants to give a chance to anybody.

The business owner's response is that the experienced person won't take time reading tutorials or asking questions and thus get it done faster.

FWIW I agree most companies should train.

I totally agree that they -can- do the job. The most important thing for a software developer is the ability to learn. We need to give people chances so that they even even enter the field to one day become senior level.

But I also understand how a lot of business owners feel about it. It takes time to learn these things vs someone who has basically already done this project before in this stack before. A business in a hurry (most of them) would rather have someone who already knows how to do it.

Look at Stack Overflow Careers. Look how many more ads there are asking for senior devs.

I think what you're getting at taps into the heart of the issue- it's not just that the software industry is fast-paced in terms of innovation, it's fast-paced in terms of business requirements, in getting products out of market to scramble for users, which translates to higher valuation, and more VC dumb money. So in SV we kinda have a HFT-type situation where companies have to continuously get more and more speedy and optimize greater, even if it comes at a human cost- i.e., everyone's hiring only for senior engineers and there's not enough openings for junior developers, much less the resources to train juniors.

As an aside, it's paradoxical that the industry simultaneously desires 10x seniors, while prizes youth (who they don't have to pay at senior salaries). So the true profile of a unicorn coder is basically a 10x dev with 10+ years of experience who is also a new grad that requires no training. Keeps down the cost, all around.

Right. It's that dream candidate who started programming at 9 and has no other hobbies besides coding.

Even jobs that don't really need developers of that caliber will hire like they do. I need someone to yet another billing app? Let me just hire one rockstar genius and squeeze the life out of them instead of two regular developers because it's cheaper.

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