Who Killed the Junior Developer?
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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).
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.
I learned to not get upset by it but still help/share, trying to inspire others and always learning more in this process.
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.
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 :-)
On further note, before i started the contract i was asked to bring my own laptop as work computer, i didn’t necessarily agree (for all the obvious reasons as security and business/personal risk) but he was being pushy about i said i could take my laptop (at least to get started) and i was expecting to get a working computer. I never did. Management recently purchased brand new macbook pros and iphonex for themselves (which they are in their full right to do).
So i didn’t even dare to criticize them regarding the interns. I already got myself in boiling water by criticizing management in that the way projects and tasks were being managed was highly unprofessional and my only wish is if i could leave a warning sign for interns (and devs) to keep clear of this company (or think really hard on how much they need the job)
Edit: which is unfortunate given that the projects there are interesting in my opinion
They seem to be scamming the shareholders diverting money from productive investment into their self worth. It's not your problem, but it's not in their full right to do either.
It is also almost certainly not the employees (unless it's a cooperative).
I told them they could pay me a compensation (for using/bringing my own tools) but that is quite expensive since most deductions don't count for this. Even more expensive than buying a proper laptop. Quite quickly I got a proper company laptop after finances improved to resolve the issue.
On another note:
In my experience the term 'middle management' is a synonym for corrupt, useless idiots so getting rid of them saves huge amounts of money since they add no value to any product or to the company as a whole. Unfortunately there is no way to even moderately grow within most companies around here except for a management track which is idiotic since specialists are way more valuable to the gross product of the company.
and: Never underestimate the value of skilled workers and how to keep them or train them. In software they are your main business. Everything else is easily replaceable.
In the US at least, any work you do for an employer and get paid for is covered under what are called work-for-hire laws which assign the copyright to the company, unless you have a written contract stating otherwise. This is true regardless of what equipment you use, and there’s absolutely zero legal barrier to a company asking you to use your own equipment in the course of a job without any compensation. The fact that your ultimatum wasn’t met with a “lol no” from Legal is pure luck.
That's the norm in some professions. Welders and mechanics often have their own tools, which can cost a lot more than a laptop.
I already got myself in boiling water by criticizing
management in that the way projects and tasks were being
managed was highly unprofessional...
I'm not making any comments on your personal situation, but as a general rule it's important to talk in terms of solutions and not problems. So don't say, "we have a problem and here is my recommendation to solve it". Say instead, "I think we can improve our productivity by...", or "I think we can save some money by...".
Do some calculations to help sell your case. You want to spend time optimising the build process? Record how long it takes to build the code currently. Maybe it takes 5 minutes. Maybe you build the software no fewer than 12 times a day. That's an hour of productivity wasted per developer. Do the maths, convert it into dollars. Then say, "we can save X dollars a week by optimising the build process. We spend a week working on this, we will have made our money back within a month (or whatever it is)."
Your manager will be quite happy to go to the board to tell them that he's improved efficiency by a factor of X.
Highlighting existing problems, even whilst providing solutions can put a manager on the defensive when you really need him to be your ally.
Obviously I'm not saying never highlight problems. Sometimes you have to highlight problems, but it requires delicacy and if you don't need to, then don't. You probably don't need to a lot more than you think. We developers tend to put the problem first and the solution afterwards and it's quite hard to put aside that mindset when talking to stakeholders. Even Elon Musk finds this hard to do when talking to the press. It's quite funny to hear him talking about all of a Tesla's inefficiencies while trying to sell it!
Also be patient. Your manager actually needs to be convinced of what you're saying; he can't just take your word for it. So if you see an example of how your solution would have prevented a problem that just had to be dealt with, point it out. Take him on a journey, to use an old cliché.
I'm not suggesting you shouldn't do anything without getting permission first, but for the things you do need permission for, the above advice might help.
You have to watch out that a "go getter" attitude doesn't result in you just getting overburdened.
Good, I was just going to suggest that!
Internships in the Netherlands are akin to modern slavery imo. You work full time and with luck you get a compensation of 500 euros a month,though often no compensation is more likely to be the case. You will get a maximum loan of 1100 euros a month from the government, so a lot of students have to take on a second job if they don't get any compensation at all at their internship.
National institute of neuroscience provides no compensation whatsoever, and for applied mathematics students the average compensation is around 200 euros.
Obviously not wholly related to your comment but the internship situation in the Netherlands really grinds my gears.
Your employer has no obligation to compensate for your internship, but is not prohibited either. There is no minimum or maximum amount set for this compensation.
The focus for internship should be on training, not work. If the Inspectie SZW (employment auditor) finds that the internship consisted of mostly paid work, the employer will be ordered to salary the intern according to normal wages [effectively, minimum wage].
However, there is a practical limit to compensation: students earning more than E20,000 a year are no longer eligible for the student loans you mention.
Student visas?
Hmm...I don't think you are correct, or possibly you are misconstruing a limited, special case to generally apply.
From my own experience I earned more than 600eur as an intern in the NL, and I had classmates who earned full minimum wage as interns too (~1200eur).
"Devs can't be cheap enough! We can't find decent devs!"
If you want to get paid a lot more and you have the right skills the City or Silicon Valley are good options (assuming you are allowed to move there).
It doesn’t need to be a huge tech hub at all. Luckily English resembles Dutch so most Dutch speak it well enough to survive a job abroad.
I know very well paid developers in NL and very poorly paid ones, it is mostly a matter of knowing what you are worth and refusing to charge less than that. You might find 'your spot' taken by a skilled immigrant but that's a relatively small chance.
I'd hate to have to find a developer job in Spain or Portugal judging by the number of people from there that have moved to either NL or DE. Anything East of the German-Polish border is going to pay a lot worse unless you are willing to move to Finland where there are pockets of start-ups with reasonable compensation.
Dutch developers moving abroad to increase their salary is not a trend as far as I can see.
I know well paid developers as well, some niches pay pretty well. SAP for example. Or simply people that have domain knowledge that's irreplaceable and know how to negotiate. But something average like C#, RoR or Node development doesn't really pay well in The Netherlands. It's a decent salary but nothing to brag about.
My take on this: it's so easy for Polish developers to move to and find a job in Western Europe, that local companies have to pay salary that provides at least a roughly comparable living standard (vs the West)- as otherwise talented people would just leave. For "suits", on the other hand, there's far less opportunities abroad, so their wages don't need to track Western standards so much.
This effect is even stronger in Ukraine, where a teacher will be paid $300 (per month) while a dev will make $3000.
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.
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.
My point exactly, only in reverse. In industries (eg, merchant banking, corporate law, industrial engineering) where the plans are longer term, the thinking is longer term. Here you see highly involved onboarding programs with mentorship, in depth training and such.
Uber, FB, snapchat, netflix or whatnot never had plans that really looked past 2-3 years into the future. Ambitions, possibly. That's different to plans. These are on the young/ADD end of the spectrum, but they have cultural influence industry-wide.
I disagree about MVP. First, I don't think short horizon is bad, it's choice with advantages and disadvantages. Second, I do think MVP is part of a wider, shorter horizon planning mentality. That has certainly been my experience. The idea (IMO) is that instead of planning, you evolve. Evolution and planning are at odds with eachother, to an extent. You can make decisions early, and you get a longer term plan to work with. You can make decisions just-in-time (eg after launching an MVP), this gets you more informed decisions. That's not necessarily related to HR. You're hiring and onboarding could be unrelated to your product and engineering plans (or lack thereof). But (again, in practice), I think that mentality is influenced by these things.
^That's like, your opinion, man. ...always ;)
"I've yet to see that work" ... Uber. Netflix' streaming service.... for large, famous examples. Call those lotteries if you want. They're definitely risky. You may not like high risk strategies but they are a big part of the software industry, especially on the culturally influential wing.
I really don't think that Uber and Netflix hired for the short term. Especially Netflix. How did you get that? Netflix in particular seems to have been playing the long game for quite a while.
I work in banking at the moment, and the thinking is anything but longer term. Management is so desperate to hire enough qualified developers that it fills a lot of the vacancies with contractors, which are, by company's definition, temporary. So, in other words, the company is already planning to let go of people who will build its vital systems. That's myopic thinking at its finest.
What's interesting is that big part of enterprise market in, for example, London seems to operate like that - management pretends that people are replaceable cogs that hold no company-specific knowledge and require no ramp-up time. The stupidity of it is mind-boggling.
You can, but I have never been offered a multi-year employment contract. Employers seem to prefer the flexibility of being able to terminate employment sooner than that.
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.
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.
Anyway ,it's not about how people think the industry should work it's about how it does work. This is a fast industry, irl. People change jobs more frequently. Companies grow faster. Products go from conception to release faster. Financial horizons are shorter.
A big chunk of the 2018 industry did not exist in 2008. Mobile, for example. Not the companies, not the specializations. It's not philosophy. It's reality. I'm talking about side effects of this reality.
No one at Snapchat thinks "we'll hire this kid, he'll make a great engineering manager in 15 years." They do in some industries. We're on the other end of the spectrum.
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.
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.
Senior developers make sure to question their assumptions on a regular basis, FYI
> can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!
is pure BS.
Good junior devs will be more skilled in some areas than you are. Maybe it's stuff you're not interested in; or just stuff they're really interested in. The only way a good junior dev doesn't "out-code" you, ever - is if you're only skilled in a very narrow niche (bonus points if only few people are interested in it, at all).
Junior devs absolutely can, and often do, build "wrong things" faster than senior devs. The measure of seniority is in my mind about knowing what to NOT build, in the first place.
Who uses LOC? I'm talking about completed, tested, accepted features, as defined by our project teams.
> Good junior devs will be more skilled in some areas than you are.
Well, yeah...of course. I'm not comparing myself to someone who works in an entirely different field. A junior front-end dev will be better than me at front-end stuff. I'm talking about a junior in my area, who I'd be in a team with or would mentor.
> The measure of seniority is in my mind about knowing what to NOT build, in the first place.
I agree with that statement.
Still rather strange metrics for productivity in a senior engineer. This is more what I'm taking about: https://zef.me/the-100x-engineer-6d50a690a866
If you're really senior, you shouldn't be working on the kind of features that get delivered at a rate of "5 per sprint". More like on stuff that gets delivered once every year. The junior SHOULD outperform you in "code produced" - they just shouldn't outperform you in dollars produced (or saved).
When I look at code written by junior devs I often think 'dear god, how is there so much code that does nothing, and how did it all get witten since I last had a chance to look'.
Makes me wonder if there are parallels in writing. My understanding is that the most prolific authors can only write 8 publishable pages a day. I'd bet that amateur writers can produce more pages than that, but no page could be published without at least as much time spent by an editor.
This, 100 times over! It is simply incredible how much code and how complex systems a junior dev (junior by knowledge, not by years of coding) can produce in a short time while you were looking the other way... :-D
PS: Most people have never worked closely with someone with 25+ years of experience, but the difference is staggering.
Good junior devs are... well, by definition, good. They're just younger, and less experienced - but every bit as smart as you are, and pretty skilled in the art of coding. If anything, they have more time than I do and are a lot more eager to "prove themselves".
I don't view the value I add as "can code features faster"...
I do, at least partly. I can code so much faster that my cost per feature is lower than a junior dev.
It was staggering how they had managed to survive for 25+ years. Every person is different.
Having not worked with the same person for 25 years I can only speak of the average case.
I pointed out how you decided to pick out a totally irrelevant, rhetorical sentence out of all points that OP made, and then decided to refute that, by claiming how much experience you have, and setting up yourself center stage, instead of adding value to the actual discussion topic at hand, which is the coaching gap.
> You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!
> "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do
What other "points" did OP make?
The topic is about a lack of mentoring for junior devs. You being a certified 100x rockstar developer is totally fine but irrelevant, because you don't scale.
What would scale is if you were to start coaching junior devs, because if you don't, all the juniors will keep reinventing 'left-pad' in this week's ES201x iteration, while your retirement keeps getting closer.
Instead of adding to the discussion on how to solve the coaching gap, you decided to defend your coding efficiency and how you deliver features faster than a Junior Dev. You missed the point completely. You're part of the problem the article addresses, don't you realize?
That is exactly what the post I was responding to said, and I've quoted it several times. Here it is a gain, since you keep glossing over it:
> You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!
> "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do
So, yes, the person I responded to said "senior developers shouldn't be coding'".
> You being a certified 100x rockstar developer is totally fine but irrelevant, because you don't scale.
How so? I'm a mentor as well as a developer. In addition to doing my part to train the next wave of devs, I also code my ass off. What part of that doesn't scale?
> You missed the point completely.
No. That's what you did though. And are increasingly insulting about it as well.
> You're part of the problem the article addresses, don't you realize?
Who's talking about the article? I was talking about the bogus "point" in the post I responded to.
I’m surprised you mentor, given all the hubris you have displyed on this thread.
If that's what he was saying, I'd be much more in agreement. Instead he said, effectively, that senior devs shouldn't be coding because they can't do it any better than junior devs.
A. GOOD junior devs can (and often do) outperform good senior devs at the metric of "quantity of code produced" (I later added that IMO in fact they should, not just can)
B. (the central point of my argument, really) If you're working on the premise "we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor juniors" , you're misusing the senior devs. It's not just cost-ineffective (you're paying a senior do to a junior's work), but you also run into other risks as well (juniors that ask questions force seniors to explain stuff, which in turn forces them to think clearly about it; you may have experienced the phenomenon where you understand something much better after explaining it to somebody else)
> If you're working on the premise "we can’t afford to have our senior developers mentor juniors" , you're misusing the senior devs.
Actually, no argument there. Mentoring is indeed a critical function of senior devs.
> It's not just cost-ineffective (you're paying a senior do to a junior's work)
And you lost me there. I'm so much more effective that it's always cheaper to have me do it, assuming I don't have a higher priority task (in which case it's a non-issue, since I'm working on that one). I.E. I'm a 10x (or 100x) developer, but I don't get paid 10x (or 100x).
Could you do an MSc at a top-level US university (in your primary domain of expertise) in a week? Because plenty of people (juniors by definition, almost all of them) can do it in 2 years, so if you're "100x" in the sense that you say you are, you should be able to do all that work in 1 week. At least that much should be plainly obvious to you, that you can't possibly be "100x" in the sense that you claim to be. Or well, if you are... you're rather unique, I definitely haven't seen anybody that can even come close to you, and I know some top-notch engineers. So you're definitely the exception, not the rule.
No, but I probably think better...i.e. how to approach a problem, sift out the relevant details, formulate a plan, execute it, understand the trade-offs, etc. As a result, I can deliver more correct code faster than a junior dev.
> you can't possibly be "100x" in the sense that you claim to be.
I never claimed to be 100x. I was just mentioning the reason why I'm cheaper than a junior dev (that I'm not paid in line with my "effectiveness multiplier"). You were the one that mentioned a 100x engineer thing in a link, so I included the number.
You actually did - look 2 posts up, "i.e. I'm a 10x (100x) dev". But I suspect you didn't actually read that link, just the URL - not fair to chide me for mentioning the number if you didn't read what that meant.
> how to approach a problem, sift out the relevant details, formulate a plan, understand the trade-offs
That's exactly my claim, that you add more value with this sort of activity than the "execute it" part; doing that plus teaching others to do it, you add exponentially more value to the company, than just coding stuff in a corner .
You cling on the fact that a junior dev can't possibly code faster than you - even though it's a completely irrelevant detail. And yes they can, if you remove qualifications like "correct code" or "maintainable" or whatever (I never claimed junior devs will do the right thing all by themselves, that'd make them seniors, right? But - I participated in coding competitions in high-school, got a silver medal at IOI - I know very well that my younger self could code circles around my older self when it comes to raw speed. And I've seen other people like that later; experience can't fight youth when it comes to speed and enthusiasm... it just can't. It's more likely that you just never worked with a good junior dev before, than it is that you can always code everything faster).
> I'm so much more effective that it's always cheaper to have me do it, assuming I don't have a higher priority task (in which case it's a non-issue, since I'm working on that one). I.E. I'm a 10x (or 100x) developer, but I don't get paid 10x (or 100x).
The numbers were merely to indicate that my multiplier is sufficient that I'm cheaper than a dev.
> I suspect you didn't actually read that link, just the URL - not fair to chide me for mentioning the number if you didn't read what that meant.
No need to suspect, I confirm I didn't read it. I saw the number in the URL and just dismissed it as puffery.
> That's exactly my claim, that you add more value with this sort of activity than the "execute it" part; doing that plus teaching others to do it, you add exponentially more value to the company, than just coding stuff in a corner .
That was in no way you're claim, at least, not the claim I disputed. Your claim(s) were:
> You don't hire senior devs to code - good junior devs can code not only "just as fast", but probably faster too!
> "Mentoring" is basically the job you hire a senior dev to do
No way. Maybe mentoring is a part of the job, but it's by no means the main job in many organizations.
> if you remove qualifications like "correct code" or "maintainable" or whatever
??? This is a pretty ludicrous statement. Why would you ever count incorrect code? And yes, I probably can code incorrectly faster than a junior dev, too. After decades of experience, I'm a faster typist than most junior devs.
> I know very well that my younger self could code circles around my older self when it comes to raw speed. And I've seen other people like that later; experience can't fight youth when it comes to speed and enthusiasm... it just can't.
Rose colored glasses, to say the least. You seem to be switching back and forth on whether raw LOC throughput is meaningful...first you were "flabbergasted" that it might be a measure of productivity, now you're bragging about raw speed, and even suggesting that creating "correct code" or "maintainable" code is irrelevant, which is insane.
> It's more likely that you just never worked with a good junior dev before, than it is that you can always code everything faster).
I've worked with (and mentored) some really great junior devs, who grew into great senior devs. But they didn't walk into the building as my equals in coding.
This whole debate is nutty. I personally would welcome as much strategic and intellectual diversity as possible onto teams I'm running. I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket, either.
Me too. I just think the blanket assertion that a junior dev is the coding equal to a senior dev is what's nutty.
- 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.
that’s the worst kind of data - gives a meaningless feeling of objectivity.
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.
A better point is that this drought of new talent is just the other side of the pendulum. In the odd years, the problem is layoffs and difficulty finding work without being a new-grad or knowing the latest tech fad. You've seen some of those summers, too?
If we both had to read the manual? Yeah, I'd still be faster. It's just as easy to cherry-pick for one side or another.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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>
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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"
Pay and promotion is about making yourself valuable. If you mentor engineers and gain a reputation for doing so, you're effectively shaping the culture of the organization, not to mention gives you a ton of leverage with the productive employees you taught to be productive.
It makes you far less disposable. When mixed with even amateur negotiating skills, that leads to promotion and better pay.
But the 'den mother' comment comes out of a real issue, of womens roles being sidelined. One pragmatic response is to avoid roles that feed into the stereotype.
In a better world, this would not be a thing. But here we are.
You make a good point, and I agree with the pragmatism of the choice, but I also believe mentorship can be a means of advancement.
The point of my original comment was to advocate for another choice - one that will both advance the mentor and their proteges. Hopefully, this will give us that better world we're looking for.
No one believes you can keep up the development sprints, or new technologies.
39 never noticed anything. Where do you work?
“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.
This is essentially a synonym of the sentence you quoted
> careerwise respect of developers in the org often is not as important as respect of management
You're missing the point. By mentoring developers you become de facto management; it's willful, benevolent career advancement.
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."
2) There are several parts to the exam but none of them involve an evaluation of how you write code, its all multiple choice.
3) The cert itself and studying for it doesn't prepare you for actually building a Magento site in any way. The Magento certification program is really just a way for businesses to get access to "leads" and get free advertising from Magento. Having more certs just helps a company look good.
4) If your buddy is experiencing a lot turnover my experience of the eCommerce industry and Magento shops specifically is that they are more inclined to put a heavy emphasis on "culture fit" and be high stress environments. They say, "If you see assholes everywhere, maybe you should look in mirror..." but it might just be your friend is experiencing the reality that eCommerce development is NOT the same environment as the Wordpress chop shops he may have started in.
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.
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).
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.
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.
If the only way to effectively perform the job (in the broader, department sense) is with political cover.
And if political cover is only apportioned in a zero-sum game of high level positions.
And if there are legacy industries in which those positions are, and have been for decades, apportioned to predefined departments (notably standardized before the information revolution).
Then those legacy industries are going to have insufficient political cover over IT/development. And therefore terrible performance.
My current employer recently had a security epiphany, and they definitely empowered a reorganized security department to make necessary changes. But I'm sure there were many points where "VP of X" could have squashed a necessary security change, had security not been of equal seniority.
Most companies attempt to tackle this problem in house, but without proper expertise, there is massive waste in hiring and poor execution. As a consultant, I’ve seen teams waste _years_ fumbling in this cycle, only for me to ship a product that immediately increases revenue in a fraction of the time. It generally only takes a few basic UI improvements and timing strategic automatic email tiggers.
Find a consultant that will make more from what you already have, and move on to your business problems. You don’t need to pivot into an internet company to be successful.
Do you still do consulting?
Please reach me at brandon {at} brandonreiss {dot} com to explore an opportunity with a small e-commerce retailer/wholesaler.
A client one time told me in the past. At the time, I wanted to ask, "so, how badly are you treating them?"
This problem isn't unique to in house teams. It's hard to find and motivate competent people whether salaried or consulting.
My impression was that we'd squeezed all the blood we could out of the stone, yet the CEO wasn't going to accept "focus on other business problems" as an answer.
Eventually my pleas were heard and they consulted out a new platform. They didn't pick a platform that I wanted to administer, so I moved on. The fourth manager they hired after I left did not appear to have made any purchase on the problem the last time I talked to her.
I naively thought the problem was technology, but the real problem was the expectations of the CEO. There was nothing I could do about it, of course, so it worked out for the best.
Second, I hear this extremely often: Rockstar devs don't like to mentor, Rockstar devs don't like to write documentation, Rockstar devs don't like to write tests.
At what point do you need to reevaluate your definition of a rockstar dev?
The hiring filter is a powerful thing. It allows you to find very special people if you know how to look. It's also a feedback loop. Getting momentum with a program like this is the hardest part. Once it's going it practically self sustains. The biggest part of your role becomes quickly firing any mistakes.
Are you looking for someone who can parachute in with expertise on a specific tech and churn out working code themselves?
Or are you willing to accept more lag time and less initial code productivity in exchange for a deeper bench and sustainable team?
There are times and places for both of these developer types...
One aspect of teaching is explaining your inventions to your peers.
But another aspect is telling a new graduate what a version control system is and why you need one. Then doing the same for your build system, continuous integration system, staging environment, code review, bug tracker, style guide, and so on.
Seems to me those are quite different skills - I can easily imagine a person who is good at / enjoys one might not be good at / enjoy the other.
The idea of a "rockstar" you seem to be referring to has, in my experience, been a dev who can go into a corner and pump out high volumes of code with little supervision or collaboration. That's great, except no one else can make sense of the code they pump out, so when it comes time for the next guy to add a feature to the rockstar's mess it takes 2 to 3 times as long as it should.
I've also had to clean up messes by rockstars who made unilateral decisions about incorporating new technologies into a product. Like building out a single part of the product in React with out asking anyone else. You see, the rockstar didn't like meetings and didn't want to make the case to the rest of the team for why we should all learn React and gradually switch over. Instead, he just stuck it into the code. So now, you have a couple of views built as React components, and the rest of the thing is in Backbone. No one else knows React or has time to learn it, cause we're blazing ahead really fast. They just get very confused when they have to change something in those components and it takes them forever. But the rockstar got to have his fun and play with new tech.
This conception of a "rockstar" isn't a great developer... it's a selfish, cocky developer. When you hear "rockstar" dev, you shouldn't hear great performer. You should think of Keith Moon trashing his hotel room and driving his car into the hotel pool.
A great dev knows the value of documenting their code and writing testable code. A great dev knows the value of taking the extra time to make code easily understood and easily modified -- that sweet spot between spaghetti and over engineering. A great dev loves to mentor junior devs, enjoys walking other devs through their code, is happy to discuss design decisions with the team, and willing to admit when maybe their idea isn't the best one.
A great dev doesn't think they are god's gift to code, they are humble enough to understand they are one part of a team. They put the team first and work hard to teach others what they know, while always remembering they don't know everything.
I have worked with a Musician with Phd in music who taught him self coding after an accident broke all the bones in his feet (drink had been taken)
It was fun in the pub when some hit tracks came on he would say ah I think that's one of mine :-)
Eventually in the 90s, some developers really took the rock star bit to heart and started plastering their own names all over their output (cf. "John Romero's Daikatana", "American McGee's Whatever-American-McGee-Is-Working-On-Now"), but for the most part, developers at the time hated the rock star characterization.
I don't disagree with your "great dev" qualities but there is more needed to make a "great dev". Otherwise all the documentation, code ease, mentoring, being a part of the team, etc. is not going to make the code useful to anyone.
This is not a great example. In academia, that's because they are fundamentally different jobs in most cases.
Most of the professor roles are not teaching their research, and where they are, i would bet your best professors are the inventors. But most are researching x and teaching y.
By contrast, in software development, the devs should be teaching, because what they are teaching is what they are doing on a daily basis, and the knowledge they've learned in how to do that well.
The notion that people who refuse to mentor or attend meetings (assuming these are symptoms of the same "not team player" phenomenon, and not something else) are rockstars is, imho, pretty misguided.
Even if you assume the 10x people silliness is true, each person mentoring 2-3 new people and building them will make the organization more productive than your 10x person fairly quickly.
(Again, situation may be reasonably different if you only will have a team of one or two, etc)
I don't agree, senior tasks are often much more high-level and related to figuring out requirements/stories, or their tasks are hard enough that explaining them to juniors is not the most productive.
"hard enough that explaining them to juniors is not the most productive" I strongly doubt this. Most of the differences i've seen over the years are in approach to complexity, and not level of complexity themselves.
Rockstars are lone wolves, write unmaintainable code that works quickly for demos but gives the company pain for years to come as nobody can figure out how to make it stable or maintain it. A rockstar's reputation is self reinforcing because it's easy to get a lot of shit done when one doesn't have to worry about maintainability, communication with the rest of the team members or the company at large, and service.
Senior devs balance development work and "service", a term I'll borrow from academia - hiring, mentoring, speaking, writing docs, etc. They either find fun in these tasks as well (I legit enjoy interviewing and mentoring), or understand this is a necessary part of being a well functioning team player at a senior level.
Then you can hire some boring reliable folks from the khaki-and-polo brigade to help upgrade version 2 to version 3. This is when you have an opportunity to hire juniors and mentor them on what good software actually looks like, and how to make good-enough software better. The ninjas will probably leave at this point, and if they have done their job, the company will never need that level of expertise again in a permanent employee. The gurus will stay on to be an expert in your specific system, and teach the new people how to preserve its grandest traditions.
The problem is that a lot of companies never get to what I call "version 3". They might slap higher release numbers on it every so often, but if they never did a clean re-implementation of the quick-and-dirty prototype, that's still "version 1.X", no matter how high the numbers go. You put a junior in that environment, and they're not going to become a stable maintenance developer, and that's where the majority of the jobs will be for the foreseeable future, especially for inexperienced people.
To sum up: rockstars live fast and die young; ninjas quietly demonstrate incredible skills, and vanish; and gurus are the high priests for your established project, who will eventually pay off all your tech debt, if you let them.
There are different breeds of senior developer, and you really want the gurus teaching juniors when they start to run short of other useful things to do. If you don't have the kind of company that is mature enough to evolve a developer into a guru, you won't be able to handle juniors. And there aren't enough companies that can handle juniors. It may be because they aren't honoring the full software lifecycle that includes the long, long tail of maintenance mode.
I think the never getting there often happens because management isn't aware of the current quality of their software vs hypothetical quality of a rewrite.
And I get it: I imagine every one of them has been burned by an overly optimistic developer. "It'll be rewritten in 3 months and run 2x as fast" types.
As a discipline, inculcating "respect that the years of person-work in the current version weren't done by idiots solving unimportant niche use cases" would be very healthy.
When a person takes on for themselves labels like rockstar, guru, ninja, etc. I don't doubt that they can write code, but I certainly doubt that they can write code that fulfils the needs of those who will be using it.
Labels likes these are a detriment to the profession. If we want businesses to take note and consider those in the IT profession to be anything more than ignored, we need to lift our game a long way.
What is IT known for (in the general sense), games, social media, search engines and lots of crappy software that users have to fight to get anything done.
Yet we have people and companies that produce great software that fulfils the needs of those who use it in a way that is not detrimental to those users.
It's coming up to forty years that I have been involved with the industry and I hear complaints every day from users who are frustrated by the inconsistencies in the software they are using, whether it be social media, business software, games, etc.
In general, as an industry, we are far too arrogant about our own self-importance and what we develop. Whether it be the likes of Apple, Oracle, IBM, Google, etc, the industry has forgotten that they only exist as long as people will tolerate the bull dust that is thrown at them by these companies. We are always looking for the "next big thing", yet many of the actual needs that we could be filling are not being done. We like flashy and not substance.
The frustrating ones are those who talk a good talk about "doing things right" (and, generally, talk a lot...), but then work on something for an age and come back with a solution that's objectively worse than the "RIGHT NOW" solution we've been using in the interim.
The others can be "foundation developer", "transition developer", and "maintenance developer". It's still meaningless as long as different companies won't standardize on those titles.
We likely all know which category we belong to now, and which one we want to be. We also know that any company that asks directly for a "rockstar", "ninja", or "guru" is probably one to be avoided.
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.
You're giving preferential treatment to your recruits on the basis of their gender?
Just ball-parking numbers, but that's what I got from his post.
In the case of gender, female developers have been shut out of the industry for long enough that corrective action has to be taken to balance the scales. Until such time as that happens, "sex discrimination against men" is impossible.
Only the pool has to be created in the lower levels (education etc) not imposed at the company level with less good candidates favored just because of their sex.
>Until such time as that happens, "sex discrimination against men" is impossible.
It's very possible, if meritocracy is sidestepped, and the person who gets sidestepped is a man in favor of e.g. 50-50 parity with a woman.
Unless the pool entering the workforce is 50-50 already, then 50-50 hiring requires discrimination.
"Meritocracy" is almost always a flawed idea, because it relies on the principle of those in positions of authority choosing the best candidate for a given role; the key word here is "best." That's a subjective term, and usually favors a small set of criteria over a more holistic view. People, with some exceptions, are bad at seeing the big picture.
With very few exceptions, I will always favor candidates with broader experience over those with narrow strengths.
That's the whole idea. When you need a surgeon you don't need a specifically sexed, or colored, or whatever surgeon. You just need a person good at the "small set of criteria" of performing a surgery.
Eg. Imagine if I was at the top of a burning building and my family needed rescued. I would want 5 men to try to save us, not 5 women. Does that make be sexist or normal minded?
EDIT: and off course vice versa for tasks that women are best suited.
"Discrimination: the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually" - Merriam Webster Dictionary
Please don't bend what the word means just because others do. If we have our own meanings for every word, than the words mean nothing.
But it's discrimination with a higher purpose.
I would urge you to reconsider the notion that affirmative action is a sustainable solution for anything. It's hack. You only need to look at the current state of India's government, which over the course of more than 50 years of affirmative action (and other varying factors) has managed to convert the government sector into a cesspool of corruption and bad management.
I'm going to step away and do some more reading on the subject before responding. Since this thread will likely be stale by then, I'll put up a blog post or similar with my updated thoughts.
This seems to imply that India's government fifty years ago was NOT full of corruption and bad management. The Raj was definitely corrupt but I know little about the two decades after India got its independence - were things really that good fifty years ago? Or was it just that it was less obvious?
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.
https://rands-leadership.slack.com/?redir=%2Fmessages%2Fgene...
This thread can also help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372997
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.
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.
Can you define "real work"?
Something built for a need--whether profitable business, or personal need--tends to provide more meaningful experience than a "write this contrived program to learn how [specific programming functionality] works" project.
Then I got on a new project as a dev. Within months I was down to 3-4 hours for similar assignments. My last class at school was the first time we had a shortage of hardware (good school). I would sit at home and remote into one of the machines, get my code to compile and show up to the lab the afternoon before it was due to debug. And everybody looked at me like I looked at my old coworkers.
It’s been a while since I’ve talked to undergrads but I always tell them to beg borrow or steal an internship or a job on campus. You have no idea how far a little concrete experience takes you.
Finish with the boring programming, and you get to do fun programming.
I'm not an accountant but I did do a business minor and I don't see this being much different for new accountant hires vs. new developer hires.
Isn't that the definition of entry-level or junior?
FWIW, the four recent graduates I hired this summer are all capable of completing well-defined programming tasks with minimal assistance. Does that mean I spend more time with my PO ensuring those tasks are well-defined and consumable by the new developers? Yeah (but that's our job). Do the senior team members spend part of their day mentoring? Yeah (but that's their job).
As for some of them not hacking it. Yeah that's true. But, I've also interviewed plenty of "senior devs" who were terrible. I've even hired one or two who didn't work out. I just do my best to avoid hiring them.
A year?!
You're either scraping the bottom of the barrel for new hires, have a terrible on-boarding process, over-estimating the difference between the code someone fresh out of college writes or have absolutely terrible documentation or some combination thereof.
I'm leaning toward on-boarding and/or documentation. Junior devs are the ones who most need documentation because they're not gonna be able to infer the existence of policy and best practices from existing code and procedures as well as a senior dev will.
Either you and your HR is doing a terrible job giving new hires a lead on what to be asking and where to find information or that information just doesn't exist outside of the heads of existing employees.
I work at a CDN. We have plenty of issues with legacy code, cumbersome interactions between business units, outdated policies/docs, lack of documentation on stuff and all the other BigCo problems.
A huge chunk of new hires at any time are fresh out of school. It takes ~3-4mo before they're dealing with stuff on their own with perfectly fine results.
People aren't idiots but they don't know what they don't know. People with more experience are better at knowing when there's something that they don't know. Fix your process and you'll be able to get good value for junior devs.
If you don't fix your process don't whine when someone who has business practices that let them deliver the same results at lower cost by utilizing cheaper labor comes along and undercuts you.
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.
Oh, God no. I've never been asked a question in a job interview that was in any way relevant to the work I actually ended up doing.
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.
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.. ;)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If not, over what time span are you considering?
It seems like it's just getting worse though.
Morality/ethics used to be more noticed, and rewarded. I don't know who to blame. I sometimes think it's the lack of listening to a sermon on Sundays?
I do know this, I can usually spot the selfish bastards around us, and try to steer clear from them. If I can financially harm them, I try. If they happen to be family, they are emotionally cut off.
I have a very financially successful sister.
She is now over fifty, and misserable. She lived the American dream, but did it ugly, and now just has a 25 year old husband that doesn't care about her. Yes--she got a pre-nup.
She still emails me with some new spiritual thing she discovered. It's always the same email. Why don't my brothers, and mother call me? My kids only call when they need money. What did I do?
She knows what she did early on. It's no mystery. At one time she had it all. Her good looks got her so much. The looks are fading, along with that power. I knew in my twenties she would have a wake up call later in life, but I didn't know she would burn down so many bridges clawing her way up. And no--if she was a man, she wouldn't have it easier.
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.
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.
Therefore, it's possible, that there are relatively more short-term projects than long-term projects these days (comparing to, let's say a decade ago).
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.
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.
Learning how to discern relevant info from random and how to ask useful questions in new areas are skills that take time (and a ton of context) to acquire, but are utterly essential to doing anything beyond what other people tell you to do.
I don't get this attitude at all, but perhaps that is because I transitioned into software dev from the trades. In the trades you want your apprentices to ask questions, I don't see why Senior Devs would be assholes. In my experience, when I asked my Senior Devs questions, and this was after initial research efforts on my part, they were all receptive and helpful. It is much better to ask the question as a Junior than commit to prod and create even more work for the Seniors.
Also, they got only and exclusively negative feedback. Instead of being told in advance how to do things where we are opinionated or being encouraged to ask questions or just being led/given hints, they were expected to do it alone. Then they were told they done it badly and were effectively dictated how to rewrite it.
Tech is not different from anything else - teaching people should involve more then just telling them they suck. It should involve telling them what they are expected to do in advance.
> They started humble and ended afraid to do anything except simplest tasks.
It's the job of the team leads to create an environment where people (especially new people) shouldn't be afraid to try something out and learn from it. I've had plenty of CRs which went for some huge number of iterations when I first started, generally this was solved by spending some time thinking about designs on my own and then having a meeting with senior devs to discuss pros/cons and any suggestions before writing any code.
> Also, they got only and exclusively negative feedback.
This sounds really shitty, and this seems like a problem with the people on the team. I always try to put at least one positive thing in a CR after lots of criticism, and if there isn't that much criticism even better!
All in all it sounds like with or without CR, the team you're describing probably wouldn't be a pleasant place to work.
It is not that CR is has no place in the process. It is that it should not be primary tool for teaching, mentoring and leading. Nor talked about that way. Every forum and blog posts talks about CR as teaching tool and every discussion about juniors puts a lot of emphasis on CR and none on other tools. A lot of people think and act that way.
Also, there is level of knowledge to be acquired about teaching and working with people. A culture that does not conflate code review with teaching nor talk about it as a primary means of how to deal with less experienced developers have better chance to develop that knowledge.
As in, admitting that those are different tasks is first step.
The person you're describing shouldn't be mentoring. The problem isn't the methodology, but their personality being poorly suited to the task at hand.
This industry frequently conflates effective producers of lines of code, with an ability to function in a senior role. If you look at other lines of work, seniority often implies things beyond "does the basic job quickly".
So yes, this person will do code review. And code review has more functions then mentoring.
2.) Mentoring starts on task selection. Latest when junior start working on it - with senior occasionally checking the junior out while the task is in progress. Code reviewer might be someone completely else who might have noticed that junior is working on code only after it is done.
Sane mentoring should not start when junior finished the work.
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.
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.
Sounds like there should be a thread to match mentors and mentees here on hackernews. Maybe a bunch of mentors post some open source projects that they want mentees for?
Every time I try to 'contribute to open source projects' online I get overwelmed by the size and complexity of most codebases, I have tried numerous times, and have never been able to fix a bug.
This type of thread is something I'm sure I and others would take serious advantage of.
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.
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.
Nurturing employees, and indeed software quality, is the product of company and team culture.
The development process is concrete (and “SMART”), so that’s what many managers focus on. The cultural aspects are more nebulous, so they are ignored.
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...
This is core issue. This has nothing to do with startup team vs team in corporation. Neither can have beginner in a critical difficult role. Both can make use of junior, assuming they dont put him to critical role.
(The original agile process called Extreme Programming actually mandated pairs.)
Indeed, a task not budgeted in time is not done. That pertains to tests, static quality analysis, performance optimizations and use case analysis. None of these are explicitly budgeted in agile processes, though they say "write tests" or "definition of done", these are taken as suggestions.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
With people you talk with honestly outside of work YMMV but I've never seen that as a legitimate thing except with naive people who ended up regretting it. I've only seen people being happy with it when they were already underpaid, unhappy with the culture, or forced to work absurd hours to keep their jobs.
You mean a salary or title increase? Yeah, that's in the GP's comment.
Boredom and wanting to work on something new is probably the biggest driver
- Promise of a higher income
- Low perceived stability at the current job (employees want to secure a new job before they're layoffs)
- Toxic work environment
It's no longer scary or stressful. I now choose to switch jobs regularly because I get better incentives to join somewhere else and I get more bargaining power with each transition.
C-levels and shareholders made it this way - if they kept with market rates and the organisation put more value in employees and their IT I'd stay around. But I've been seeing more and more of a shift to outcome-based budgeting, maintenance and refactoring isn't even part of BAU budgeting - it's strapped on to project work. This is likely exclusive to non-tech companies (even though most companies are shifting towards tech as their basis ala "Software is Eating The World").
Managers can only do so much within an org, I haven't worked for a manager I didn't like (I've turned down jobs based on my interview process though). Not US based.
I've literally worked at _one_ place that scored well on those three items. Most places are racing to the bottom in one or two of those. Usually it is pay unless you are somewhere competitive like the Bay Area.
> Boredom and wanting to work on something new is probably the biggest driver
That is much like the "exciting new opportunity" story people tell about why they changed jobs. It is not _real_ in the literal sense.
If it was real, they would shop around internally to change projects and succeed. There would be no real need to change jobs.
Idk where you have worked but I've literally never worked on the same project for longer than 1-2 years. Even if I was at the same employer for 6+. If you have people with realistic expectations who aren't piling on technical debt, maintenance work _should_ be negligible even if you are lightly attached to old projects.
Junior devs should look for jobs once they reach the 2 years mark any more, for their own good as well. They now know better what they want to do, more focused, more experienced, and most importantly, more valuable on the market.
There isn't much of a "raw mercenary economics" argument for training (which the MBA types prefer), you've got to talk about intangibles like loyalty, goodwill, social connections, etc.
Let's say you train someone whose salary is [x]. After training, their market salary would be 30% higher; [1.3x].
Are you suggesting that if they end up with a hypothetical 10% raise, to [1.1x] because [.2x] was spent on training?
That's absurd. You can't just walk out on the street and hire a person who is already trained for [1.3x]. You have to devote resources to the hiring process, which are probably nearly as expensive as training up a junior dev, all things considered.
I honestly think the difference in the second example is that the expenses in the second example are paying the kinds of people who make stupid personnel decisions like this.
I'm obviously cynical about the whole thing, but it seems that MBA-style thinking is almost deliberately evil. I have friends who have gotten MBAs from top schools, and friends who work in management consulting for the Big 4, and I've talked at length with them about their feelings about business practices that they implement and support. I literally have never gotten an answer that justifies philosophical objections to their work, beyond perhaps "well, it's just the way it's done."
I think it's a myth that organizations have to behave in a deliberately sociopathic manner in order to be successful. I mean, to a certain extent being a sociopath is an advantage, but I really don't think that's really a necessity.
On the flip side, I acknowledge that I am not very good at divorcing who I am from what I do. It's why I've made a career helping non-profits and social enterprises. I'd probably be a healthier person if I were able to get less invested in what I do.
Either that, or the company makes cuts somewhere else which -- all else being equal -- puts it at a competitive disadvantage. Budgets are generally zero-sum at a particular moment in time.
> You have to devote resources to the hiring process, which are probably nearly as expensive as training up a junior dev, all things considered.
If you can prove that to the bean-counters, by all means spread the good word.
However even if true you must consider a third potential outcome: You train up the junior employee, and then they don't stay with your market-rate offer for whatever reason, and you have to incur the hiring-process costs anyway for the empty senior position.
That scenario is always be more expensive than the other two, and it can only strike junior-trainer companies. Senior-poacher companies don't have to even worry about the odds of it occurring.
Consider the costs associated with recruiting for a single role. You have to either advertise a role/filter out candidates or engage a recruiter (which costs time or money). You have to interview a number of people, taking time (money).
You then have to onboard that person, and choose a salary based on your limited knowledge about them. And even then you could still hire a lemon (although admittedly it could go the other way and you hire someone better than expeceted). You then have to wait for them to become productive in the new organisation.
You also have much better information about someone who has worked at your organisation for a longer period of time and can therefore tailor their salary better to their skills than for someone who you know nothing about.
Spending money on training is a predictable cost vs. an unknown future cost of hiring. And yes, people will also appreciate it as an intangible, which if you are 'mercenary' you can enumerate as a supplement to a certain amount of salary.
1) they're dissatisfied with their pay and you're not listening
2) they're dissatisfied with their working conditions (bullpens or open offices anyone?)
so they'll never keep their best people and they'll never learn.
Is there a counterfactual? A company with a strong culture of promoting from within that outperforms as a likely result of this attribute?
Then a couple years later they were giving me basically no raise. When I told them I thought I was worth more, they asked me if I could "wait a year".
I got a new job and a huge raise compared to the last one. (Again, 30-40%.)
So while it's possible, it's not always even reliable at the same company that has done it in the past.
I got moved from a desk in in a dead end office with to a desk in a bullpen so that I could be "closer to the people who I work with." My performance fell off a cliff. People would stop by all the time to check up on things, there was always a conversation going on. It was incredibly stressful and I slowly burned out trying to maintain my level of productivity.
My boss (the director of the org.) started asking me why I was making mistakes and forgetting deadlines. I told him that it was entirely because of my new desk, and he said he would do what he could to help.
A couple of months go by, and we have another meeting. I say the same thing.
A few more months go by, we have another meeting. I say the same thing. He said he asked people to keep their conversations quieter.
A few more months go by, and we have a meeting, and I tell my boss I'm leaving because I'm burned out, and my desk is the #1 culprit. He and HR were like "you should have let us know before it got to this point."
I don't think there was a chance for them to understand the issue, regardless of how I articulated my concerns. To them, my new desk was an upgrade from the old desk. It was bigger, had lots of drawers, was closer to the "desirable" part of the building.
To me, it meant that everyone had to walk by my desk, and would use the time to chat, and ask questions that would be better handled via email. It was nice being closer to the team, but I had a way different workflow from everyone else. My boss probably thought it was great that everyone could turn around and ask me a question the second they thought of it, but it meant I was getting interrupted 3-4 times an hour, when I used to be able to work for 3 hours straight without seeing anyone.
I've honestly been thinking of calling up my old boss and asking him if he wants to grab a drink to see if he ever wrapped his head around why I left. To this day I'm baffled by the entire situation.
TL;DR: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Most CEOs and VPs are idiots, handing money around to each other in a circle jerk of old white guys club, backslapping each other for hiring each other and keeping the hegemony going.
These idiots do not know what they are doing, they have just been conditioned to ooze confidence and ignore critics.
The story is simple: we have a prefab building with 3 stories, a beautiful interior, 52 desks on each floor. All open, but for 2 closed meeting rooms per floor. And the toilet. The desks are arranged close to the window. The centre of the floor holds a couple meeting spaces, and the coffee machine. It was, unsurprisingly, very noisy.
I talked about the issue during a sprint's retrospective, and was told to lay out my proposals to HR. I had plenty, most of which didn't involve actually chopping up the "lovely" open space into actual desks. It was mostly about putting dividing half walls and generally muffling the whole thing, while mostly preserving that "open" look that is so dear to whoever doesn't actually work there (funny how most people who condoned the open plan end up spending most of their time in meetings).
I had indirect feedback later (through my team's product owner). Turned out the head HR was surprised to see me raise the subject—I was the first to do so. So she asked around. The feedback she got was mostly "well, yeah, it's an open plan, but it's okay", which she translated by "there is no problem, it's just a single contractor being difficult". I guess she was oblivious to the biases introduced by her being in a position of power. That nobody will say to her face that the noise is not okay, lest she thinks they can't fit in. (I no longer have that fear, for better or worse.)
I have later learned that a "Life in the Open Plan" group formed because of the noise issue.
It also looks good from the outside.
Having their desk in the open plan, they're more be inclined to think they are as affected as everyone else. Except they're not, because they spend way more time in meetings, and live on the manager's schedule.
As far as I can tell, the higher ups actually do mean well. I'm not sure what drew them to the open plan, but I think cold blooded cynicism explains only a fraction of their error.
They are never going to hire you. The contract is, in a way, a more airtight way of paying you under the table. Depending on the size of the business, labeling everyone as 1099 can reduce taxes for the business quite a bit. Thing is, though, is that it's illegal. But it's usually up to the worker to report it, so it is extremely under-enforced.
Bottom line is that you're being abused. I encourage you to file Form SS-8 as soon as possible with the IRS and check into your state's labor office to see what they can do.
https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-ss8
Source: I left a contractor role in October after realizing that I was a victim of misclassification.
Fourth, my contractor status is actually secondary to me. More important is being allowed to work part time (4 days a week), which I'm currently negotiating.
Re point #1, I simply don't understand how, long term, it is more cost efficient to hire and train someone entirely new than it is to build a culture of valuing current staff. Maybe I'm naive? Maybe it is difficult in ways I don't perceive?
Some managers also seem to only respond to crises. Being down an employee is a crisis. Making sure that your employee gets an appropriate raise isn't, especially since most people aren't going to leave their boss know that they are looking for another job
Why is this so common? What kind of brain dead morons are becoming managers?
Why do they even become managers if they don't want to manage. At my firm, it was the same. Some people were automatic fits and managed to do fine. The others were left to fend for themselves. No mentorship, no management, nothing.
I guess it's complimentary in a way, but I can articulate exactly what I did in a way that my mom, who is an artist and barely uses a computer, can understand.
I think a lot of the problem is that some managers are really inflexible. They only know one way of management, and if that doesn't work they don't know what to do. They are a lot like teachers in that regard. We've all had teachers who could only explain things one way, and they constantly confused students who didn't grasp that explanation.
I even got my boss and HR to admit that I was really self-aware, and was able to articulate what I needed to succeed. It was like that meme where you break a logical explanation down into atomic parts and get them to agree with every step along the way, but they just said "no" to the conclusion.
I guess it's maybe an example of the Peter Principle in action.
Maybe by creating a workplace where developers want to stay you could keep them around at slightly under market rate? Not everyone is looking to job hop every 6 months. But the amount below market rate that you seem to end up by staying in one job feels like it's unreasonably large.
For whatever reason, letting them walk and paying that same 1.5x salary to a new mid-level hire is easier for everyone to swallow.
And from the employee's perspective, saying "yes" to a recruiter who expects to pay market rate sounds like a lot less hassle and stress than preparing a presentation on why your current company should change or make an exception to its HR polices for you.
It's great you love my work but it's not enough of a reason that I shouldn't walk across the street to your competitor and get paid 20% more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is the equation in my mind:
cost of junior dev added slowness + senior dev lost training time > recruiting cost for senior devs + lost institutional knowledge + ramp up time for new senior devs
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
Because they're vastly underpaid compared to the value they produce.
>At that point it would be easier to open office overseas even for smaller shops.
Which means you're getting junior devs, at best. The entire concept of outsourcing hangs on the idea that the people being outsourced to will behave exactly the opposite of those doing the outsourcing, i.e. not really caring about money. Well they do care: when they get senior they leave and go somewhere they can earn western money.
It seems like the offshore contracting companies have a better grasp on how to maintain tech workers than the companies that hired them do. I've noticed my contracting counterparts get regular performance reviews, decent raises, and title changes actually open up doors for them.
I get my regular 2% a annual bump and any title change has no impact on my actual work.
And your second statement is not true. You simply get cheaper workforce in other countries. Even on senior levels.
The labor market isn't the greatest place to talk about market forces. Companies do everything they legally (and illegally to an extent) can to ensure that it's not an efficient market. Further, companies have all the power in the relationship: most of us must have work but a company doesn't absolutely have to hire someone. I saw a 4-person startup on this site say they'd been looking for a "rockstar" for 2 years to expand their company. They were willing and able to wait 2 years for a highly skilled person willing to take a low enough salary. Not many people can wait 2 years to get a job.
To see what a real labor market would look like, you need to address the power balance. So I think sports teams are a better representation because they have unions to address this issue. And they do capture more of the value they produce (not all of it, obviously).
>And your second statement is not true. You simply get cheaper workforce in other countries. Even on senior levels.
Oh, I had assumed you meant the typical outsourcing locations. If you mean places like Europe, yes you can get good senior people for lower rates there. But it's a percentage lower, not X times lower, you can't get a truly senior level person on e.g. 7k/yr. I'm sure there's someone somewhere that has, but they'd have done better to buy a lottery ticket with that luck.
The counterpoint is that you get what you pay for. If you wait 2 years for a rockstar to take a shit salary (and let's be real, someone numerate enough to be a rockstar won't take a bad deal) you also are pricing into your organization that it's not worth it to acquire a rockstar for anything less.
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.
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.
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…).
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.
Alternatively, we could look into reducing cost of living. US is dealing with a legacy system in the form of suburban sprawl that makes housing far more expensive than it has to be because the demand by the biggest generation far outstrips supply (simply due to area constraints and ridiculous zoning policies).
A small dilapidated house built in the 1950s with lead paint and asbestos should not cost $400,000.
Unfortunately, that is politically untenable right out of the gate.
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.
There has never been a point in time where corporations were willing to hire on the inexperienced cart blanche to train them. It has always been a problem that nobody wants to foot the proverbial bill of Jimmys first real dev team. It is only getting worse now as more and more people enter the industry but major giants are slowing down their rampant horizontal department growth that gave a large chunk of juniors a path to classical employment in the nulls.
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.
If you work for a company and produce a million in value every year and they pay you 100k for it, you are basically accepting that the company was 90% of the reason you made any value at all. For almost every single developer that is not true. On average you could probably make the exact same amount on contract / as a consultant. The fact the business is making fortunes off your work is just exploitative.
This also applies to way more industries than just software, its just most apparent in software because of how many ludicrous buckets of money big tech players are taking home each year while still paying their dev teams only 6 figures.
Your worth to a corporation is the amount of revenue you produce for their bottom line (or how much loss you offset). If you are making them way more money than they are paying you you are being taken advantage of, whether that be at 30k a year or 300k a year.
Having profit-sharing schemes when you run your own business are also helpful. Another alternative would be reserving a sizeable proportion (like 20%) of your company's shares strictly for employee ownership.
You cannot be greedy in salary negotiations. A company will not keep you on staff if you demand to be paid more than you are worth. If someone can get paid more by fighting for that raise you should be there supporting them 110% and fighting your own battles to be paid justly for your productiveness.
And you cannot feel guilty about the millions who struggle on substantially lower incomes. It is a problem way larger than an individual that only a small fraction of the working class produces trillions in revenue while the rest make close to parity with their productive yields at fractions of what the top end make. That being said, its not something to ignore, but at that scale its social and political. You have to fight the fights in the arenas they are suited for. Avoiding your own right to the fruit of your labor because your labor produces substantially more revenue than someone elses contributes to holding everyone back when competing for just wages.
And don't forget that a lot of interns make twice that...
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.
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.
I don't see any problem with that though; I'm still learning a lot, and work towards switching projects/companies when that's no longer the case.
If it means you're still learning something a little extra, that's great! If not, that's okay too.
It's completely okay to "just" do your job professionally. However, skill development, transfer of skills to junior developers and mentoring is a different issue - if you want to learn from me, you have to want to learn; if you're just here for the paycheck, then I'm not going to go out of my way to educate you even if (which is the case for many junior developers) you're unable to actually do your tasks properly on your own without this help.
People with the desire and capacity to learn go over the "junior" phase very quickly (over a short internship or already during college) and become able to do decent work on their own; but those who don't and really need an actual prolonged "junior developer" role on the team... there's no incentive for the employer to do that, and there's no incentive for the colleagues to spend their effort if it seems wasted on someone who's not into it.
If you let juniors figure it out the hard way, they will learn better, or they will fail. If they fail to learn by themselves, they will never become senior.*
*Shitty code bases should be given a lot of leeway on the learning curve.
That's one (totally fine) way of mentoring, but it's by no means the only one.
A lot depends on the work environment and the relationship. I work with a couple junior engineers that are also friends, and in addition to "pointing people in a direction", code reviews, etc.:
* We frequently tackle harder issues together, pair-programming style (using a shared tmux session)
* In addition to code-reviewing their work, I have them code-review mine, and I walk them through my code and thought process
* Talks/meetings once a week or more about architecture/up-front design for projects, in which the junior devs are often included or free to attend
* We have a non-work-related Hackerspace that we attend every 2 weeks where we work on side projects / fun creative projects
Certainly this situation is not possible on many development teams, but I just wanted to point out that mentoring is a wide-open thing that has many approaches and options.
I'll probably spend 15-30 minutes every day outside of work reading about new things, or tinkering around with something, even if it's just reading Hacker News, often these things I learn end up being used at work, so I gain new skills at work. It sounds like you're in the same boat.
My father is a network engineer, and he'll spend time in the evening doing things related to his field, he has a very impressive home networking setup. My friends that are electrical engineers play around with electronics in their spare time.
I think that for any professional, to be successful and have a good career you need to have at least some outside interest in your field. Obviously we all have hobbies, I don't sacrifice those because of work, but if you're working in a job where you have no interest you'll never get far.
It's not a binary thing. The fact that you were/are interested enough in technology in the past is different than someone who only did the bare minimum. I consider it more of a mindset thing.
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.
The product is finished now, so I'm leaving, and frankly the only reason I stuck around was because finishing products looks good on a resume.
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.
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.
I see a lot of anti-conference comments here on HN, and I don't get it. Every week I've spent at a conference has been highly illuminating and motivating, and recharged my fascination. This is all followed by presentations to the larger team of what I learned so that the benefits of the experience were broadly dispersed.
3-5 days in a new city seems like a huge win with the professional benefits. What am I missing?
I think that's the key. Conferences are only fun if you can actually have a meaningful connection with the people, if they are genuine peers with similar interests instead of just a bunch of people there for their own self-aggrandizement, sneaking around the corners trying to catch someone saying "dongle". Or the ones mainly frequented by socially inept nerds, like Fosdem.
So conferences can often be pretty hit-and-miss.
I'm the tech presence at many of my companies industry conferences. The city the conference is in makes no difference because I'm there to meet people and schedule accordingly. Current customers, potential customers, tech people from partners and even competitors are all very valuable interactions.
For me, conferences have turned into a cost effective place to meet in person all of the people I deal with remotely.
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.
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.
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.
That seems like you're looking for someone who lives and breathes programming. Do you have something against developers who work 40 hours a week and instead of programming as a hobby as well, they do other, non-tech, things for their hobby?
I didn't do a single internship either when I was doing my undergraduate either. I wouldn't recommend doing that to young people in a million years now.
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.
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.
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.
It takes about a year for a junior+senior combo to be more productive than a senior alone. And another year before they're not a noticeable cost on the senior. 2x senior to a junior definitely brings the junior up to speed faster, but I think it's less efficient use of the seniors cause it also introduces a synchronization cost between the seniors.
I like to stagger the juniors so they're not at the same level; the +1 junior can take some part of the workload of mentoring the fresh junior. Plus it starts them on practicing mentoring early in their career. The fresh junior still has two mentors, and there's a clear pecking order.
I love hiring and mentoring junior developers, but the barrier to entry is quite high. Employers love junior developers with aptitude and enthusiasm.
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?
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.
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.
So, I don't think it's a common misunderstanding. I think it's common sense that you're supposed to speak to the recruiters and build your network.
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.)
Impressed? Today that would result in an early morning police raid on your apartment.
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.
I'm biased though because I got my first two jobs this way.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
Not me, "OOP class hierarchys" still incomprehensible gibberish here.
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.
These are candidates that we liked their resume enough to give them a shot, not just anyone who applied.
People got it working, showing they can code just fine, and you fail them because they got some details wrong?
And we find them. It's so much easier to work with them.
Why do you refuse to mentor a few of them? /s
* 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.
Unlike your other points, this one seems unlikely to cause any trouble in practice. From a polynomial-order perspective, a factor of log N is literally infinitesimal, essentially free.
Big O should be an afterthought - the MO of any developer ought to be to get it right and then refactor - and worry about speed after profiling. Premature optimization is an antipattern you should be selecting against, not for.
Somehow i got into Tech Industry without a fitting degree and found myself in a smallish (30 people) company as the only SysAdmin. Exploring, setting, and controlling all technical parts this office needs: Multiple Linux VMs with different services like smb, confluence, ...; AD- and Terminal Windows Server; Device-Managment of all used MacBooks; and so on.
I always also liked to code stuff, and always found a way to archive what i tried to solve. But of course i never build something big or even though about things like super efficient ways to archive what i did. I always though that when i keep going and try to build my small personal projects, one day i can maybe start as a junior dev. Even without the degree. But your post somehow states that a junior dev has to think about edge cases even before they occur. As a Sysadmin i also have to do this. But i always imagined that the job as developer is no one man show, and that these edge cases will be found together. Code will be reworked when a more experienced team member found a pithole.
My company doesn't really do small projects anymore, so we take a lot of care to make sure we hire people with the discipline and ability to handle large systems. There's certainly a lot of organizations that don't have that requirement, though, so some of this assessment may be a little harsh.
As for code review catching errors, that sounds great in theory, but in practice it's just rarer than you'd think. Think about it, your reviewer is always going to spend less time on your code than you did, and they're always going to have less context. I find that unless the error is egregious, it's almost never the code reviewer that catches it. You're not really a one man show, but you're pretty close.
Unit testing is by far a better approach. I catch easily ten times as many bugs in my code by unit testing it as by manual inspection and code review combined.
You're expecting a junior dev to know and apply details of edge cases, complex character sets, runtime and space complexity, parallel processing and behavior of caching.
This is not junior level knowledge. You're looking for a mid-level to senior developer with zero experience. Yes it's possible to find, but that's not junior level knowledge. But most of them all things that are easily learn-able on the job. You're expecting a junior dev to be familiar with and easily able to apply all aspects of software development but just not have done it. This is absurd.
A junior dev should be able to handle bug fixes, well scoped and defined features, and have a small area of ownership. Guess what, they're working for you, they need to find the 5 largest elements in an array. The sort the entire thing and then take the top 5. They send their code for code review. You have a 5 min conversation with them on how you don't need to sort the full thing. They say "ah that's cool, hadn't seen that trick before". They now implement it and know it for life.
This absurd idea that you wouldn't hire this person instead of investing in a 5 min conversation with them is a large part of the problem with the industry.
My time, and the time of everyone on my team, is far too valuable to be spent on teaching new hires things they should have learned on their own in junior year of college. Onboarding people means bringing them up to speed on the complexities and specifics of our own systems. We're not in the business of hiring people and holding their hand for a year until they know enough CS to be useful.
Also:
> This is not junior level knowledge. You're looking for a mid-level to senior developer with zero experience.
Zero professional experience, maybe. Zero experience period, no. This stuff is offered in almost all undergrad CS programs. If you didn't go to college or have a degree in a different field you can find tons of lists of topics for self-study. If you've ever done any project on the side, you're bound to have encountered or at least imagined a couple of these issues. Something as basic as finding the largest N elements in a array isn't a trick, it's something that should be painfully obvious to anyone who's coded for more than a month.
Not a trick? Of course it's a trick.
The efficient way to do it is to heapsort the array, but just stop after you've popped N elements from the heap.
You can do much worse and still stay in pure linear time (though as I noted in another response to you, the difference in polynomial order between O(n) and the O(n log n) that would be required to finish your heapsort is ε, where ε is larger than zero but smaller than any real number): just scan the array N times, looking for the largest element that's smaller than your shrinking upper bound. I'd rather see a solution that sorted than one that took N passes to pull N elements -- sorting will be faster -- but the N passes approach is pure linear time.
Then again, naive N passes will fail when the array contains duplicates. To avoid that, you'll need to allocate a data structure to hold your N answers, and implement a way of adding values in and having it appropriately discard the lowest value when you add to it while it's full. That's starting to look like a trick. It also cuts you down to one pass.
Is the "not a trick" answer you're looking for implementing an N-running-maxes data structure, or remembering how to heapsort? Do you really care about getting your results in slow linear time instead of fast "so close to linear you can't even tell the difference" time?
For my startup (and I'd say at least a non-negligible number of companies), half of what you ask is just not important.
Background to read what follows: small 5-year old startup with 2 developers, which don't do anything "complicated" like ML, computation or things like (mostly apps, with a CRUD back-end).
I'll try to rephrase as what I'd expect instead:
* Big-O is not important there. What you need to know is to have some knowledge to how to leverage your DB to do things instead of looping yourself over data just queried from your DB. And that's not number one.
* Edge cases is actually a valid concern for every programmer, no matter the field
* it might be useful to have a rough idea of what you expect to offer a proper solution, but it's generally pretty obvious
* justifying a solution is also a valid concern for every programmer, no matter the field
* manually doing operations already handled by your framework/library is a red herring, barring very specific situations that require an explanation. Be it sorting, filtering or whatever.
Bonus point
* bringing manual parallel processing reeks of premature optimization (as an environment where performance isn't generally a problem, remember). It has to have a real explanation, and other obvious optimizations have to be done already. So far, I've never reached that point in my professional career (but tools I use DO use parallel processing, I just don't roll it out myself, that would be NIH syndrome)
* don't forget caching! If the cache performs badly, it's time to start investigating why, but you don't need to worry about cache performance if you don't do crazy things, for the most part.
* Testing is also important wherever you go, but I also let this one slide because entry-level candidate aren't teached that in school, unfortunately.
Sooner or later, though, that approach will come back to bite you. Milliseconds matter to the user because the longer they wait for an action to complete, the more likely they are to stop caring. They matter in settings where you're performing multiple RPCs because a millisecond of delay here and there adds up over multiple calls. Not to mention the fact that memory, CPU, and disk all cost money. And when those factors come up, you'll suddenly find yourself surrounded by people who are (at worst) incapable of addressing the situation or (at best) will need to be ramped up on the issue.
And that's just constant factor improvements. Can you imagine choosing an O(NlogN) solution over an O(N) one? Everyone thinks that's trivial, but in real terms it means a 10x speedup per thousand inputs and 20x per million inputs. That's huge.
More importantly: in interviews, a lack of care for performance suggest to me that a candidate is willing to cut corners. Once they have any old solution they pat themselves on the back and move on. We're a very self-driven organization, and in my experience if a new hire is struggling to meet expectations 6-12 months after joining, it's usually because they don't constantly ask themselves how they can improve their work and our codebase and instead expect to be told what to do.
Minor pet peeve: parallel processing is not premature optimization! If you think it is then I suggest you exercise it more. It's not as hard as people make it out to be, and at a certain point it becomes second nature. Then all of a sudden terabyte datasets start looking trivial...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess what I'm trying to say titles are fairly arbitrary - and yes, the system is in need of a little shake up! Enjoy the perks the title brings, and stay humble :)
I actually apply this logic in reverse. After seeing how lacking many "senior" developers are - given that we now call you "senior" after just 5 measly years - I've come to realize I shouldn't put much weight in the skills of lawyers (and other professionals) who only have 5 years of experience. Since we're not lawyers (for example), it's easy for us to give them more credit than they deserve, because we don't know enough about the domain to criticize them.
After just a couple of years experience, developers can still write pathetic spaghetti code. If you're gonna high a lawyer with a couple of years under their belt, imagine them bungling your case like it's the codebase!
If other companies are willing to pay those salaries, why would you say they don't deserve them?
Why would you equate availability with appropriateness?
Or does your comment apply to fresh grads? Because then your comment would make more sense to me.
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.
It's pretty easy to get someone to understand doing stuff more than you have to is bad aka (no data calls in loops, sort at the DB not on the server, etc), but it's another type of developer to say "hey, this works good for now, but if this client has over X# of widgets we're going to run into performance problems, why don't we see if we can build a caching layer to share data across widgets".
Just that type of person in a room bringing up those issues saves close to 100 man hours by the time that bug gets found by a client, escalated through client support, pointed, moved into a sprint, retested, etc. That's saving the company a lot of money in a very concrete way and delivering a better product.
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.
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?
But I noticed hiring practices here in Europe are much better anyways than in the US.
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.
[0] https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/#counties_most_degrees
[1] https://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/24/is-southern-california...
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.
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).
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.
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.
I would say a good 10-20% do have some kind of contact in the industry though and get a job that way.
But yes look at placement rates at any bootcamp before joining. If people are getting jobs then it's well worth it.
But yes some people have plenty of self motivation and can do it themselves. The career networking is really all they need then.
Not to say this would or wouldn't justify various tuition rates - but it's definitely part of the equation.
Most of my friends have the job they have because of a combination of Twitter and attending conferences on discounted student tickets.
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.
That's probably a mistake on your part, especially when tools like LinkedIn make it so easy.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I’m only mostly joking.
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.
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.
How good (or bad) companies are at actually training their employees is another matter.
edit: typo
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.
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.
An aside, would you mind sharing what he shared with you, if you can recall?
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.
Such posts warrant a WARNING otherwise I may get permanent damage due to severe involuntary eye-roll.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There have been plenty of trained or semi-trained labour shortages in the history of the world, with similar results.
This will always happen as long as the profits are there to sustain it. But I agree with your general sentiment, having said that, its just part of the human condition. When I attend a bitcoin/ethereum meetup most of the people there are only there for the lure of the quick buck. Not the long term technical implications/learn about the projects.
I also think the article needs some copy editing. A few paragraphs were rough to get through.
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.)
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.
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
"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.
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!There's just a hell of a lot of title inflation in general, I think.
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.
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.
This isn't law...even the cheap universities offer CS degrees.
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.
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!
I mean, yeah, it'd be good for employers. Not so much for employees. Likely an illegal or unenforceable contract, too.
Developers fresh out of college with a BA in computer science have no problem getting a job.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
That really is how it works though. You need to start doing before you can learn.
Those who thought it a good idea to promote people to senior level after 6 months or a year.
The learning curve can be an issue though. You want to be constantly be welcoming newcomers to have a rolling scheme of new 'seniors'.
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.
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...
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.
On my resume, the "at-will" terminations outnumber the number of times I jumped ship for a better situation, 5 to 1. This last year's raise was just a cost of living increase, and they crappified the health benefits, so I may have to even those numbers up a bit soon. The only thing stopping me is the horrid, nauseating, bile-raising gauntlet of developer interviews.
'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
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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Improved compensation, benefits, bonuses, stock options, paid conferences, training, etc...
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.
I don't think a U.S. union would try to loosen immigration restrictions...they'd care about protecting the rights of U.S. workers...also, why would a union representing U.S. workers want to increase the labor supply?
The companies are multinational, so the unions have to be multinational, too. If the company tries to skirt around the union by doing the work in India instead of the US, the union should anticipate the move and surprise the company by already being there, still demanding a better deal for our people.
I anticipate the demand for people with technical skills will continue to rise in the future. There is no need to artificially limit the labor supply anywhere, even worldwide, because the world's universities already can't crank out enough people with official credentials. (And when they do, the new graduates still can't get jobs, because that degree apparently still isn't good enough to meet business expectations.) The union could still eat up much of the bootcamp and intern business with its own apprenticeships. That's when it might try throttling the supply, after gaining some control over it, by operating at the optimal point for monopolistic competition. Restrict it just enough to squeeze more money out of the market, but not enough to allow a new competitor to enter.
And it benefits all of us to be able to shop around to different jurisdictions as easily as those who employ us. The countries and companies that provide the most attractive environments will get more of us, and therefore prosper, while those who are hostile will get less of us, and therefore rapidly descend into a new dark age of wretchedness and despair, where nothing works properly and half the kiosks and infoscreens either show BSoD or a console screen with no attached keyboard. Then they will rue the day they snubbed the nerds, and weep into their low-tech cloth pillows.
(WARNING: This post may contain hyperbole.~)
I don't want to be mandated to strike and pout over not getting enough money. As long as I am treated fairly (I am) and paid fairly (I am), I am not paying any percentage to some company to tell me to screw over my employer.
If some company wants to unionize, have fun but I am not joining that party.
> "...pout over not getting enough money"
You're trying to make striking sound childish but there are plenty of legitimate reasons why unions go on strike.
No. There is a reason I went into software development and not blue-collar work. ;)
(Nothing wrong with it, just not the stuff I want to deal with. Unions included. I lose enough money already to the gov't.)
I have been in a union before (nearly a decade of industrial electrician/power plant operator work before I obtained my CS degree). You bet there is corruption in some unions, but perhaps it is different in the "skilled trades" though, at least it seems that way from my personal experience.
Avoiding blue collar work is a primary motivation for my transition to full time software dev...we'll see how it turns out though because the office culture/work environment is very foreign to me in many ways.
I'm not sure how it would work to have a union that can essentially fork itself whenever the leadership goes bad, or even one that has no leadership to begin with, and manages everything with a consensus/compromise algorithm.
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.
If you’re interested you can subscribe at https://exponentialbackoff.substack.com
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.
https://medium.com/@tylerjewell/bringing-life-to-new-softwar...
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.
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.
Preferably I could get paid doing it, but if that's not really feasible then I wouldn't mind pro bono.
Discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13933550
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.
/s
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.
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 $300/hour. But that's the whole reason a company decides to hire you -- they think you'll make them more money than you'll cost.
I thought I was a member but I learnt that it is 5$/mo.
Put junior devs to work on the new stuff, not what you started on yourself.
Ultimately, this industry now has enough people to spare, impact is what everyone is fighting for, this applies for junior dev as well.
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.
edit: this is from the Amazon leadership principles
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.