5 ms·

One thing I noticed in my most recent job search was that I don't see nearly as many postings for junior and entry level positions as I seem to remember in the

One thing I noticed in my most recent job search was that I don't see nearly as many postings for junior and entry level positions as I seem to remember in the past. Seems like everyone is looking for a rockstar or a genius or a code ninja miracle-worker. I'm curious if anyone else sees that trend, or if I'm just making it up. One of the reasons is that several friends of mine have been bugging me for a while to help get them started with code. These are people around my age. Professional musicians from back in the time of my life when that was what I did for a living. There five of them now who have been asking, so I'm finally putting together a structured curriculum and working with them on a regular basis. When we get done in six months or so, they will have some abilities with Linux server administration, databases, Python, C#, web application frameworks, javascript,front end work, version control, and testing. I'll work in some CS theory as we hit appropriate points. Obviously, they will be very green. But they are all incredibly bright, professional, adults. One of them has a master's in Math she got after her Doctorate in music just because she was curious, and another has most of a PhD in Physics. I don't think any of them expect to waltz into a high-powered job after 6 months of me spewing at them. But I think any of them would thrive in a junior position with people around them who had the time and the inclination to do some mentoring. Are those kinds of jobs disappearing? Am I being unrealistic hoping that this could be an option for some of them? What do you think?

ch4s3 11y ago
I seem(anecdotally to be seeing the same).
tayo42 11y ago
I've been passively looking to get out of my troubleshoot Linux job to development. It seems like there is only internships or senior jobs. I guess an anecdote but managers at my company don't hire entry level developers because they don't want to pay what they can ask for and don't want to wait for them to get up to speed.
stouset 11y ago
Regardless of what organizations claim to be looking for, virtually everywhere I've been besides my current position has been staffed to the brim with junior developers, and been in dire need of at least a few people with seniority. The irony is when a senior person does come in, all their recommendations are ignored because they will slow down the pace of development. Which it will, but in exchange for setting a sustainable pace of development. A senior developer might (making numbers up here) crank out 100 lines of code per day, but a junior will crank out 1,000 while solving twice as many business problems. Unfortunately, bug counts seem to scale linearly with code size, so most of the problems you're solving are actually just a direct consequence of the ten-fold increase in bugs in the larger code base. Eventually progress grinds to a complete halt as it becomes too difficult to add business value, and the company enters zombie mode where its death is virtually inevitable, but can still operate for years through additional funding. Sorry, I may have gotten a little off point there.
- crdb 11y ago
  Don't forget that bug count is actually a KPI. More specifically, you end up with JIRA ticket inflation: you get exponentially more tickets generated with time, but the value of each ticket decreases in proportion. The CEO of the business will basically hear two messages: 1. "Look at how well my tech organisation is doing, we solved 150 tickets this week, a 40% increase over the last 3 months! And yet our headcount only increased 10%." 2. what your comment said. It's down to him to act accordingly. I've seen many trust 1, he's "data-driven". There's variations of the JIRA ticket inflation, such as requesting regular update meetings and the tech organisation adapting by finding days-long tasks and pushing off the hard weeks-long ones (since they do not result in neat weekly progress updates). "I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress." - George Smiley (in Smiley's People) making the point that this is not a new problem.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  Sweet Jesus, so true. Every time someone suggests we have proper requirements or decent testing or put some thought into design or rewrite something that's causing endless trouble, we're told there's no time for it. Which is how we're now up to "release candidate" FORTY, four months behind the original release date. Because tests get done six months after the code was written, whatever doesn't fail has a fifty-fifty chance of not actually doing what's needed (so it's a bug), and testers and coders have long conversations about "what's it even meant to do, anyway?" that are unanswerable because there is no requirement or design reference. The cost of running four months over schedule thus far is, well, four man-months multiplied by the number of employees, basically. So yeah, excellent savings compared to having spent a couple of days thinking about what we're trying to build and having testers involved throughout rather than just dumping six months' worth of untested development on them (and expecting them not only to be able to test it in a week, but expecting everything to pass). Wouldn't mind if this was the first time, but EVERY DAMN CYCLE is the same. We can't possible start doing things properly, look how far behind we are! It's like there's a mental gap, some kind of inability to see the cause and effect right in front of their faces. ( Morale is low :p )
  - 11y ago
jacalata 11y ago
Why did you choose to try and put together a curriculum yourself instead of working through one of the existing ones on the web? Do you plan to make yours available online for others?
- eru 11y ago
  Seconded. That sounds like a really useful resource, and could be an awesome recruitment tool for ianamartin. (Just like Matasano's crypto-challenge already is.)
- ianamartin 11y ago
  I've looked around at a lot of things online over the course of the 10 years or so that I've been teaching myself this stuff. When people started asking for my help, I couldn't think of one particular resource to point them at that would give them a wholistic idea of the things I've experienced to be important in my career. I don't mean this as a critique to any of the fine programs out there. Many are very good and have been valuable to me. I do plan to make my course of study available online. I'll be getting feedback from my friends as we do this, and that will adjust some of my choices.
dikaiosune 11y ago
My anecdotal experience from a recent job search suggests that many employers ask for senior devs but will quickly settle for someone when their requirements and pay expectations are out of kilter with the rest of the market. I applied to a couple dozen positions (mostly asking for more experience than I have), had interviews with a decent number of them, and was eventually hired for a position that had asked for a lot more experience than I had. Turned out they hadn't managed to interview anyone at the seniority level they wanted and decided to go with their best interviewee rather than go through another search (at a big place where HR mandates searches as a waterfall process to use a SDLC analogy). I would wager than in these situations fortune favors the bold, regardless of what the job ad says.
eitally 11y ago
I think one big problem is that job postings these days are either for 1) super-specific skills, which necessitate years of industry experience (or academic research, in a few cases), or 2) experienced all-purpose programmers (to save money over hiring several niche experts). To use a personal illustration, at my old job I had a group composed of about 85 programmers, 15 QA, 5 devops and 5 DBAs, with a few miscellaneous non-tech people (PMs, analysts, etc). In that situation I was perfectly satisfied hiring junior folks with only 0-3 years of experience but a good head on their shoulders and a desire to learn, because there was enough slack in the larger org to make up for temporary slowdowns resulting from training & general learnings. In my current role, I have a team of a half dozen, 4 of whom are skilled analyst/PM types. If I want to build something, I either have to outsource or hire one of two of the very best "full stack" developers that I can trust to throw anything from front end design to web + mobile dev + data structures & reporting/analysis on the backend. As a result, I'm almost always searching for people with 10 years of industry experience who have spent all that time learning & practicing a diverse set of skills. I think one thing that'll cause disappearance of low end jobs is the upcoming/increasing automation of business processes using click & drag workflow platforms (and better leaner ERPs & CRMs). My previous employer has about 200 IT people just keeping Oracle running, and another 150 or so working on manufacturing software. I think the majority of those kinds of jobs in big enterprise are going to disappear in the next 10 years... and that's A LOT of jobs. Fortunately, one of the triggers will be retirement of boomers, so it'll be a more natural progression than massive layoffs would be.
sciurus 11y ago
Some companies only list "senior" positions with the expectation that more "junior" developers will apply anyway and they can hire people into the appropriate level.
analog31 11y ago
If it's a larger company, then the hiring manager is negotiating with the HR department to come up with a list of keywords and other criteria that HR can use for filtering. This can be a nauseating process, and it may take a couple of tries at crafting the position before any appropriate candidates get through the filter.
wpietri 11y ago
If my experience is any guide, the difference is that there are a lot of very junior people on the market now. For every qualified applicant I got, I got at least one applicant fresh out of one code school or another. The posting was very clear that I wanted somebody with minimum 3 years experience and who could mentor junior developers, but they applied anyhow. So if there is a smaller number of positions advertised, I think it's just because they don't have to advertise to find junior people. But personally I'd encourage you to teach your friends, as my hiring strategy in the future is to build teams that are really good at taking junior people and leveling them up.
lsc 11y ago
My impression is that "rockstar ninja" keywords indicate that they are paying entry-level wages, and really want someone who is willing to try really hard - and, of course, talk big about how awesome they are. I suspect that most "rockstar ninja" positions actually end up being filled by people like what I was when I was 17, by which I mean, smart kids who aren't afraid to bite off more than they can chew, who don't necessarily know nearly as much as they think they know. So yes, if I'm right, entry level positions are still there... you just have to convince them that you think you are a "rockstar ninja" (I like to think I'd be embarrassed by that, even at 17... but realistically? 17 year old me would probably eat that shit up.)

ch4s3 11y ago

I seem(anecdotally to be seeing the same).

tayo42 11y ago

I've been passively looking to get out of my troubleshoot Linux job to development. It seems like there is only internships or senior jobs. I guess an anecdote but managers at my company don't hire entry level developers because they don't want to pay what they can ask for and don't want to wait for them to get up to speed.

stouset 11y ago

Regardless of what organizations claim to be looking for, virtually everywhere I've been besides my current position has been staffed to the brim with junior developers, and been in dire need of at least a few people with seniority. The irony is when a senior person does come in, all their recommendations are ignored because they will slow down the pace of development. Which it will, but in exchange for setting a sustainable pace of development. A senior developer might (making numbers up here) crank out 100 lines of code per day, but a junior will crank out 1,000 while solving twice as many business problems. Unfortunately, bug counts seem to scale linearly with code size, so most of the problems you're solving are actually just a direct consequence of the ten-fold increase in bugs in the larger code base. Eventually progress grinds to a complete halt as it becomes too difficult to add business value, and the company enters zombie mode where its death is virtually inevitable, but can still operate for years through additional funding. Sorry, I may have gotten a little off point there.

crdb 11y ago
Don't forget that bug count is actually a KPI. More specifically, you end up with JIRA ticket inflation: you get exponentially more tickets generated with time, but the value of each ticket decreases in proportion. The CEO of the business will basically hear two messages: 1. "Look at how well my tech organisation is doing, we solved 150 tickets this week, a 40% increase over the last 3 months! And yet our headcount only increased 10%." 2. what your comment said. It's down to him to act accordingly. I've seen many trust 1, he's "data-driven". There's variations of the JIRA ticket inflation, such as requesting regular update meetings and the tech organisation adapting by finding days-long tasks and pushing off the hard weeks-long ones (since they do not result in neat weekly progress updates). "I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress." - George Smiley (in Smiley's People) making the point that this is not a new problem.
EliRivers 11y ago
Sweet Jesus, so true. Every time someone suggests we have proper requirements or decent testing or put some thought into design or rewrite something that's causing endless trouble, we're told there's no time for it. Which is how we're now up to "release candidate" FORTY, four months behind the original release date. Because tests get done six months after the code was written, whatever doesn't fail has a fifty-fifty chance of not actually doing what's needed (so it's a bug), and testers and coders have long conversations about "what's it even meant to do, anyway?" that are unanswerable because there is no requirement or design reference. The cost of running four months over schedule thus far is, well, four man-months multiplied by the number of employees, basically. So yeah, excellent savings compared to having spent a couple of days thinking about what we're trying to build and having testers involved throughout rather than just dumping six months' worth of untested development on them (and expecting them not only to be able to test it in a week, but expecting everything to pass). Wouldn't mind if this was the first time, but EVERY DAMN CYCLE is the same. We can't possible start doing things properly, look how far behind we are! It's like there's a mental gap, some kind of inability to see the cause and effect right in front of their faces. ( Morale is low :p )
- 11y ago

jacalata 11y ago

Why did you choose to try and put together a curriculum yourself instead of working through one of the existing ones on the web? Do you plan to make yours available online for others?

eru 11y ago
Seconded. That sounds like a really useful resource, and could be an awesome recruitment tool for ianamartin. (Just like Matasano's crypto-challenge already is.)
ianamartin 11y ago
I've looked around at a lot of things online over the course of the 10 years or so that I've been teaching myself this stuff. When people started asking for my help, I couldn't think of one particular resource to point them at that would give them a wholistic idea of the things I've experienced to be important in my career. I don't mean this as a critique to any of the fine programs out there. Many are very good and have been valuable to me. I do plan to make my course of study available online. I'll be getting feedback from my friends as we do this, and that will adjust some of my choices.

dikaiosune 11y ago

My anecdotal experience from a recent job search suggests that many employers ask for senior devs but will quickly settle for someone when their requirements and pay expectations are out of kilter with the rest of the market. I applied to a couple dozen positions (mostly asking for more experience than I have), had interviews with a decent number of them, and was eventually hired for a position that had asked for a lot more experience than I had. Turned out they hadn't managed to interview anyone at the seniority level they wanted and decided to go with their best interviewee rather than go through another search (at a big place where HR mandates searches as a waterfall process to use a SDLC analogy). I would wager than in these situations fortune favors the bold, regardless of what the job ad says.

eitally 11y ago

I think one big problem is that job postings these days are either for 1) super-specific skills, which necessitate years of industry experience (or academic research, in a few cases), or 2) experienced all-purpose programmers (to save money over hiring several niche experts). To use a personal illustration, at my old job I had a group composed of about 85 programmers, 15 QA, 5 devops and 5 DBAs, with a few miscellaneous non-tech people (PMs, analysts, etc). In that situation I was perfectly satisfied hiring junior folks with only 0-3 years of experience but a good head on their shoulders and a desire to learn, because there was enough slack in the larger org to make up for temporary slowdowns resulting from training & general learnings. In my current role, I have a team of a half dozen, 4 of whom are skilled analyst/PM types. If I want to build something, I either have to outsource or hire one of two of the very best "full stack" developers that I can trust to throw anything from front end design to web + mobile dev + data structures & reporting/analysis on the backend. As a result, I'm almost always searching for people with 10 years of industry experience who have spent all that time learning & practicing a diverse set of skills. I think one thing that'll cause disappearance of low end jobs is the upcoming/increasing automation of business processes using click & drag workflow platforms (and better leaner ERPs & CRMs). My previous employer has about 200 IT people just keeping Oracle running, and another 150 or so working on manufacturing software. I think the majority of those kinds of jobs in big enterprise are going to disappear in the next 10 years... and that's A LOT of jobs. Fortunately, one of the triggers will be retirement of boomers, so it'll be a more natural progression than massive layoffs would be.

sciurus 11y ago

Some companies only list "senior" positions with the expectation that more "junior" developers will apply anyway and they can hire people into the appropriate level.

analog31 11y ago

If it's a larger company, then the hiring manager is negotiating with the HR department to come up with a list of keywords and other criteria that HR can use for filtering. This can be a nauseating process, and it may take a couple of tries at crafting the position before any appropriate candidates get through the filter.

wpietri 11y ago

If my experience is any guide, the difference is that there are a lot of very junior people on the market now. For every qualified applicant I got, I got at least one applicant fresh out of one code school or another. The posting was very clear that I wanted somebody with minimum 3 years experience and who could mentor junior developers, but they applied anyhow. So if there is a smaller number of positions advertised, I think it's just because they don't have to advertise to find junior people. But personally I'd encourage you to teach your friends, as my hiring strategy in the future is to build teams that are really good at taking junior people and leveling them up.

lsc 11y ago

My impression is that "rockstar ninja" keywords indicate that they are paying entry-level wages, and really want someone who is willing to try really hard - and, of course, talk big about how awesome they are. I suspect that most "rockstar ninja" positions actually end up being filled by people like what I was when I was 17, by which I mean, smart kids who aren't afraid to bite off more than they can chew, who don't necessarily know nearly as much as they think they know. So yes, if I'm right, entry level positions are still there... you just have to convince them that you think you are a "rockstar ninja" (I like to think I'd be embarrassed by that, even at 17... but realistically? 17 year old me would probably eat that shit up.)