When Should You Hire a Junior Developer?
blog.airbrake.io
blog.airbrake.io
Someone has to budge, unless the market is to die completely. I can't mention how many times I've seen companies posting for the same position for upwards of a year instead of simply taking a chance on someone. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but that's business. Don't run one if you can't take the risks.
Disagree strongly. In fact, I'm moving to Baltimore (from NYC) for a few years (probably) and really looking forward to it. There are a lot of smart people there-- a lot of different kinds of smart people, unlike in, say, the Valley where there's one kind of smart people and that's programmers-- and DC is only an hour away. I might end up in California eventually, but I'm seeing a lot of interest in the most talented people in getting away from the legacy-laden "star cities". It's not quite an "exodus", but I hear more conversations about Austin than San Francisco around NYC. Six or seven years ago, Austin was barely on the map; even New York was the hinterlands except for Wall Street. Now, the general sense is that the Bay Area is for older people who were able to get in and buy a place at a reasonable price, before it got all fucked up.
Makers like new places and open opportunity, as well as freedom from established hierarchies. That means they'll always be moving around from one generation to the next. To tell the truth, though, macrolocation (California vs. Texas; Northeast vs. South) seems to matter a lot less over time, and microlocation (cities vs. suburbs, proximity of cafes and bike paths) matters more. I think that trend's continuing, thanks to the Internet. 20 years ago, or even 10, being an unusual person (3-sigma intelligence; gay; artistic inclination; minority religion or, in many communities, no religion) in a B city meant social isolation. In 2013, it really doesn't; you can find your tribe even if you are, say, an atheist in the South.
Someone has to budge
I think that the next 15 years of talented young people are going to be more dispersed than the last 15. That means there will be fewer superhubs and that's a good thing. It does, however, fragment the labor market, which means that the volatile culture-- the two-sided itchy trigger finger dynamic-- of promiscuous job hopping and fast firing will have to go. Companies will also be more willing to invest in talent. They'll have to be that way; the extremely liquid talent market of the Bay Area now won't exist (anywhere) in 10 years.
I'd also love to hear why you think there will be fewer superhubs (and why that's good). A lot of my reading lately has suggested the opposite - growing superhubs, and why that is a good thing.
Its one of many frustrations driving me back towards electrical engineering, though EE employers are even worse about this one particular point.
Self taught developers may also underestimate what a cs degree confers. They may not know specific frameworks, but they probably know more than you about compilers, formal grammars, machine learning and stuff like that.
Will I go with the usual rationed slice of wonderbread or go gourmet with a can of tuna?
There's a terrifying rule-of-thumb called the $20,000 rule (it gets adjusted for inflation periodically; it used to be $10,000) that says that your job hunts will take 1 month per $20,000 in salary. That seems to be accurate for non-techs. In technology, it's about 1 month per $50,000-- if you're already in the game. It's still inconvenient, but not the nightmare it'd be if that number were 1 month per $20,000.
Getting your first dev job-- without connections or a CS degree-- is hard as hell. What seems to work for a lot of people is to take a job that involves programming and use that as a launchpad. If you know how to write Excel macros, automate all the office shit work. Then learn VBA. Then learn Python because VBA sucks. Now learn some front-end stuff (HTML, CSS, Javascript). This'll take over a year, but good things don't happen overnight. Soon, you'll be a fully-fledged programmer. If you work your ass off, you'll pass the people who started coasting at 24 and be running circles around them in 5 years.
Got an entry level job at a bank in ATM support in Pittsburgh and spent the time in-between calls writing excel macros and command line programs to make the job even simpler while also working on my own rails projects at night. This led to a junior dev job at a php shop after a year and a half, which after another year and a half and launching a startup of my own, I finally made it to New York City as the second engineering hire at a startup.
Then again, I guess it's good for us that this is happening because it will drive up the value of high-end programming talent. I've heard that "teaching programming is the new teaching English abroad" and that could be good for us as a group; we'll get better pay and more autonomy in the long run.
I think the best developers are generally educated in cs.
The four-year university education may be a dinosaur, but that system had sound reasons (one can debate whether those are "good") for limiting admissions.
I think you'd be surprised by the wide variation in both the CS graduate and self-taught pools. Lots of overlap on that matter.
There are a lot programmers who understand CS quite well but studied other topics in school. There are also plenty of CS programs that don't seem to be turning out a lot of competent engineers. Hell, there are PhDs who can't even code.
Knowing the fundamentals is important-- often, it's extremely valuable, because you need that stuff to hit the high notes-- but if it doesn't come with practical abilities pertaining to how to write code, learn new libraries, and pick up technologies, then it's just book-learning that's already probably 10 years old.
Now please correct me if I'm wrong but basically it comes down to this: if I were the hiring manager I wouldn't focus so much on the number of years the dev has but rather if that dev "still has it" (if they're older/more experienced). By "still has it" I mean a genuine passion for writing solid code and being humble enough to know when they're wrong and changing their behavior. If it's a younger dev maybe it's best to focus on trying to determine if they have a genuine interest in becoming a better programmer and a real thirst for knowledge/love to learn (in-line with the article). My only gripe with the latter point are how some of these companies are filtering but that's entirely their choice.
You want to have a balanced team of experienced people and junior people. This creates a team that is willing to try new "risky" ideas and at the same time allow for insight from experience. Age should not be a factor in seniority.
He also noted that, unfortunately, we usually hire in our own image.
better to hire a junior who is willing to learn than a burnt out senior who can't adjust to change.
to be honest though in my 10 year experience in the field i've seen a lot of junior developers who believe that finishing university was the last time they ever had to learn something new.
ageism much?
I think it depends on the background of each candidate, and age is irrelevant. Job history, on the other hand, isn't irrelevant.
Less than 3 years? 5? Less than X jobs?
Another: Someone who both needs hand-holding when starting a task, and lacks confidence in their final output.
>> When you hire a junior developer, you’re going to have to invest resources in her training.
If so, I'm willing to bet a large amount of money that if I were to record you speaking, it'd be less than an hour before you used 'their', 'they', or 'them' with an unambiguously singular antecedent.
Singular 'they' is pervasive in English, and has a long and storied history.
No, while "their" is grammatically plural which affects verb conjugation (e.g., "he goes" vs. "they go"), its use for cases which where the antecedent is singular in number and indefinite in gender is well-established English usage which long predates the Latin-inspired prescriptivist attempt to erase such usage and was never seriously diminished in use despite that prescriptivist effort.
In English as it is, rather than English as some lovers of Latin wished it would be, "they" is perfectly correct for this use.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abbc.co.uk+"has+their"
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+"has+thei...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aguardian.co.uk+"has+t...
The gender-neutral pronoun "they" ("them"/"their") is by
far the most common way that English-language speakers and
writers today refer back to singular antecedents such as
"whoever," "anyone," "somebody," "a person," "no one," and
the like. Even in Evangelical sermons and books, where the
generic "he," "him" and "his" are preserved more
frequently than in other forms of communication, instances
of what grammarians are increasingly calling the "singular
they" ("them" or "their") appear three times more
frequently than generic masculine forms."
But the author is "Justin", and his photo looks pretty masculine -- very interesting, I've never seen a guy default to "her" before in text.
Very intimidating for a "she."