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I actually hate the attitude of the author, maybe because I'm almost 40? I would NEVER hire someone so clueless and demanding. You get to be demanding when you

I actually hate the attitude of the author, maybe because I'm almost 40? I would NEVER hire someone so clueless and demanding. You get to be demanding when you have exceptionally valuable skills princess. It is not 20 startups that are (mainly) the problem, it is YOU who expect other people to train and baby you. You don't have formal training from a university degree, neither are you willing to self learn your way to becoming a master coder. Why would a high stakes startup engage a liability like you? This is what I would tell the author.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
The qualities in this post are not demanding at all. It sounds like things that should be standard between two adults.
sgift 9y ago
> neither are you willing to self learn your way to becoming a master coder. How did you reach that conclusion?
- mythrwy 9y ago
  In depth learning usually entails a period of significant sacrifice. In university, at an apprenticeship, alone late at night drilling concepts into your head and getting a bit funny upstairs from so much screen time. This post sounds a bit like she wants to be pampered and well paid while being handed knowledge. That being said I'm glad it worked out for her. I wish the best for every good person. Just hoping we don't see a follow up "Why I left toxic company X" post in a couple of months.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
brandall10 9y ago
I'm 41 w/ a degree in CS from UCSD (what was at the time a top 10 CS school), spent about 15 years primarily in enterprise healthcare doing C++/C#, then the last 6 years as a Rails/React/Angular dev. I also helped advise a friend on her path to becoming a dev by way of a coding bootcamp, career advice, etc. I think the author is on point. A high-functioning team should embrace a mentor-mentee approach between their sr. and jr. staff. That doesn't preclude self-learning, it accelerates it. Otherwise you're leaving productivity on the floor, and quite frankly, if your sr. staff isn't adept at doing it they probably are not all that sr (being a sr. dev is alot more than simply being a good coder).
- arghIdontwantto 9y ago
  Mind sharing your recommendations for your friend? I have a friend in a similar position that asked me for help but I'm a bit at lost on what to recommend her. I've been a professional developer for over 20 years. I honestly don't remember what it is not to know what a for loop is and can't find any decent paths from 'non-developer' to 'junior developer' in an easy to follow manner.
  - brandall10 9y ago
    The route taken was: - Do some pro-bono work as an intern of sorts on side of current job for at least a few months - in this case you could help her out with any friends of yours who perhaps have a web consulting business, otherwise go to local meetups and offer her services (just moderate HTML/CSS is fine). Live lean during this time and pocket savings if she doesn't have at least 6 months of cushion + any expenses for a bootcamp. This way she'll have some real-world experience coming out of the bootcamp and some cushion while trying to land her first job. - Find a good bootcamp known to have a decent conversion rate and block out everything else from her life... it can be intense. - Try to find a decent job ASAP after graduation, the initial salary isn't important and (IMO) it's still not a bad idea to do any pro-bono or below market contract work if the experience itself would be esp. good. My friend's first year or so ended up being a mixture of moderately paid and poorly paid contract work. - In the end though, she ended up making $70k w/ great benefits, fully remote in San Diego (roughly equiv to ~$100k in SV) in less than two years from graduation, nearly double what she made at her previous job. With her first year and some 4-5 projects under her belt interviews were considerably easier to get.
    - arghIdontwantto 9y ago
      Thanks. I run a consultancy business and she can intern/learn with me. That isn't the problem. Is actually finding resources for her to start from zero. Where we live there aren't really any bootcamps. Was looking more for information on books or online courses that really do assume zero knowledge from the student. I can try and do it myself (and of course, I'll help when I can) but it is hard to even think of where to start. Should she learn Javascript on an online editor? Install node and try typescript locally? Just install a full version of Visual studio and let her click the buttons until she can understand what is going on? I remember learning how to program by reading the QBasic manual that came with my computer at the time and try to modify some source code (probably Gorila.BAS) but not sure if that is the most efficient way to do it nowadays (and I was young, had all the time in the world, so if it took me 2 months to get a square moving onscreen wasn't a problem).
thex10 9y ago
She, as a junior dev without a degree, would rather not throw away her crucial first few years of her career to a startup that won't even bother to think about helping cultivate her. You may think that's heinous, but I'm OK with that.
rdiddly 9y ago
I'm almost 50 and I don't share your opinion, so that's probably not it... She's not falsely advertising herself; she clearly states "junior" developer. And she's looking for a place with some idea of what mentorship means - a concept and practice that, I might add, is commonplace in traditional engineering fields. It has even been formalized into the licensing process in those that require licensing (subsets of civil engineering mostly). Yet in software it's surprisingly common to refuse to acknowledge that mentoring has any place or role. Is this wishful thinking on the part of introverted devs who would rather not do it? Then we wonder where all these cowboy coders came from. Well, they taught themselves, like you wanted! The truth is though, you're right - mentorship is not a startup kind of thing. The author would find it easier to get what she needs by working a few years for a BigCorp. They can offer more mentoring because they can afford it, they take a longer-term view, and the people hiring might even be more than just one or two years more experienced than the candidate. Whereas a startup is likely to be young, fast, and ainobodygot time fadat. Edit to add: Author didn't major in CS yet somehow learned JS, so it seems like she can indeed teach herself.
- thex10 9y ago
  Co-signed. This is essentially what I did - I worked in startups a few years but realized I wanted more mentoring, so I went to a BigCorp and got it! If she finds a startup that could give her that, more power to her.
stale2002 9y ago
"Why would a high stakes startup engage a liability like you?" Thats fair. But if that is the company's opinion, then they shouldn't waste anyone's time by reaching out to her and interviewing her. Sometimes things are not a good fit, and that is ok. But it is disrespectful to waste people's time when you are clearly so not interested in them. This is not about "She deserves a job". This is about "she deserves respect as a candidate". Basic stuff like not sending follow up emails for weeks to a candidate, no matter who the candidate is, tells me that a company cares very little about respecting anyone and should be avoided.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Rubbish. Coding-at-all can be self-learned. Computer science requires formal teaching. Good, industrial-quality coding requires mentoring. When I graduated from university, my code was crap and I barely even knew the words "version control". When I had some internships and finished my MSc, I kinda knew what version control was. After I was a year into my first Real Job, then I could actually do testing, code formatting, and commit messaging properly, then I could produce code that would pass review and get merged without problem, and mostly wouldn't create regression problems. This is learned on the job, every time, for every person.
- dozzie 9y ago
  > Good, industrial-quality coding requires mentoring. For some value of "good", "industrial-quality", "requires", and "mentoring". I belive, for instance, that it's perfectly attainable to learn how to write robust production code without getting somebody to learn that from. I've seen it happen.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    It's possible, but it's a lot more painful. "Learning the hard way," is called that for a reason. When building enterprise class software, learning the hard way involves a lot of production downtime and scalability issues that could be avoided by someone who has done it before.
    - dozzie 9y ago
      Funny choice of words, you know. "Enterprise class software" I've seen up to now is mostly overcomplicated, slow, resource-hungry garbage beyond repair. I don't think people writing "enterprise class software" for living have much to teach anybody with regard to scalability or operations.
      - Clubber 9y ago
        They can be. Maybe you need to work in better shops. It is, by definition all of that: Although there is no single, widely accepted list of enterprise software characteristics,[4] they generally include performance, scalability, and robustness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
I'm the far side of 50, and I was expecting this to be a clueless and demanding me me me piece. It wasn't. At all. I think she stated some perfectly reasonable adult expectations, to the point where if I was hiring and her code was good I'd certainly consider her - precisely because she has reasonable adult expectations, and that's a transferrable skill that's rarer than it should be in developers at all levels.
rainbowmverse 9y ago
That's okay. No one wants to work for someone who thinks it's okay to call an adult they don't know and have consent from princess.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago

The qualities in this post are not demanding at all. It sounds like things that should be standard between two adults.

sgift 9y ago

> neither are you willing to self learn your way to becoming a master coder. How did you reach that conclusion?

mythrwy 9y ago
In depth learning usually entails a period of significant sacrifice. In university, at an apprenticeship, alone late at night drilling concepts into your head and getting a bit funny upstairs from so much screen time. This post sounds a bit like she wants to be pampered and well paid while being handed knowledge. That being said I'm glad it worked out for her. I wish the best for every good person. Just hoping we don't see a follow up "Why I left toxic company X" post in a couple of months.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

brandall10 9y ago

I'm 41 w/ a degree in CS from UCSD (what was at the time a top 10 CS school), spent about 15 years primarily in enterprise healthcare doing C++/C#, then the last 6 years as a Rails/React/Angular dev. I also helped advise a friend on her path to becoming a dev by way of a coding bootcamp, career advice, etc. I think the author is on point. A high-functioning team should embrace a mentor-mentee approach between their sr. and jr. staff. That doesn't preclude self-learning, it accelerates it. Otherwise you're leaving productivity on the floor, and quite frankly, if your sr. staff isn't adept at doing it they probably are not all that sr (being a sr. dev is alot more than simply being a good coder).

arghIdontwantto 9y ago
Mind sharing your recommendations for your friend? I have a friend in a similar position that asked me for help but I'm a bit at lost on what to recommend her. I've been a professional developer for over 20 years. I honestly don't remember what it is not to know what a for loop is and can't find any decent paths from 'non-developer' to 'junior developer' in an easy to follow manner.
- brandall10 9y ago
  The route taken was: - Do some pro-bono work as an intern of sorts on side of current job for at least a few months - in this case you could help her out with any friends of yours who perhaps have a web consulting business, otherwise go to local meetups and offer her services (just moderate HTML/CSS is fine). Live lean during this time and pocket savings if she doesn't have at least 6 months of cushion + any expenses for a bootcamp. This way she'll have some real-world experience coming out of the bootcamp and some cushion while trying to land her first job. - Find a good bootcamp known to have a decent conversion rate and block out everything else from her life... it can be intense. - Try to find a decent job ASAP after graduation, the initial salary isn't important and (IMO) it's still not a bad idea to do any pro-bono or below market contract work if the experience itself would be esp. good. My friend's first year or so ended up being a mixture of moderately paid and poorly paid contract work. - In the end though, she ended up making $70k w/ great benefits, fully remote in San Diego (roughly equiv to ~$100k in SV) in less than two years from graduation, nearly double what she made at her previous job. With her first year and some 4-5 projects under her belt interviews were considerably easier to get.
  - arghIdontwantto 9y ago
    Thanks. I run a consultancy business and she can intern/learn with me. That isn't the problem. Is actually finding resources for her to start from zero. Where we live there aren't really any bootcamps. Was looking more for information on books or online courses that really do assume zero knowledge from the student. I can try and do it myself (and of course, I'll help when I can) but it is hard to even think of where to start. Should she learn Javascript on an online editor? Install node and try typescript locally? Just install a full version of Visual studio and let her click the buttons until she can understand what is going on? I remember learning how to program by reading the QBasic manual that came with my computer at the time and try to modify some source code (probably Gorila.BAS) but not sure if that is the most efficient way to do it nowadays (and I was young, had all the time in the world, so if it took me 2 months to get a square moving onscreen wasn't a problem).

thex10 9y ago

She, as a junior dev without a degree, would rather not throw away her crucial first few years of her career to a startup that won't even bother to think about helping cultivate her. You may think that's heinous, but I'm OK with that.

rdiddly 9y ago

I'm almost 50 and I don't share your opinion, so that's probably not it... She's not falsely advertising herself; she clearly states "junior" developer. And she's looking for a place with some idea of what mentorship means - a concept and practice that, I might add, is commonplace in traditional engineering fields. It has even been formalized into the licensing process in those that require licensing (subsets of civil engineering mostly). Yet in software it's surprisingly common to refuse to acknowledge that mentoring has any place or role. Is this wishful thinking on the part of introverted devs who would rather not do it? Then we wonder where all these cowboy coders came from. Well, they taught themselves, like you wanted! The truth is though, you're right - mentorship is not a startup kind of thing. The author would find it easier to get what she needs by working a few years for a BigCorp. They can offer more mentoring because they can afford it, they take a longer-term view, and the people hiring might even be more than just one or two years more experienced than the candidate. Whereas a startup is likely to be young, fast, and ainobodygot time fadat. Edit to add: Author didn't major in CS yet somehow learned JS, so it seems like she can indeed teach herself.

thex10 9y ago
Co-signed. This is essentially what I did - I worked in startups a few years but realized I wanted more mentoring, so I went to a BigCorp and got it! If she finds a startup that could give her that, more power to her.

stale2002 9y ago

"Why would a high stakes startup engage a liability like you?" Thats fair. But if that is the company's opinion, then they shouldn't waste anyone's time by reaching out to her and interviewing her. Sometimes things are not a good fit, and that is ok. But it is disrespectful to waste people's time when you are clearly so not interested in them. This is not about "She deserves a job". This is about "she deserves respect as a candidate". Basic stuff like not sending follow up emails for weeks to a candidate, no matter who the candidate is, tells me that a company cares very little about respecting anyone and should be avoided.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

Rubbish. Coding-at-all can be self-learned. Computer science requires formal teaching. Good, industrial-quality coding requires mentoring. When I graduated from university, my code was crap and I barely even knew the words "version control". When I had some internships and finished my MSc, I kinda knew what version control was. After I was a year into my first Real Job, then I could actually do testing, code formatting, and commit messaging properly, then I could produce code that would pass review and get merged without problem, and mostly wouldn't create regression problems. This is learned on the job, every time, for every person.

dozzie 9y ago
> Good, industrial-quality coding requires mentoring. For some value of "good", "industrial-quality", "requires", and "mentoring". I belive, for instance, that it's perfectly attainable to learn how to write robust production code without getting somebody to learn that from. I've seen it happen.
- Clubber 9y ago
  It's possible, but it's a lot more painful. "Learning the hard way," is called that for a reason. When building enterprise class software, learning the hard way involves a lot of production downtime and scalability issues that could be avoided by someone who has done it before.
  - dozzie 9y ago
    Funny choice of words, you know. "Enterprise class software" I've seen up to now is mostly overcomplicated, slow, resource-hungry garbage beyond repair. I don't think people writing "enterprise class software" for living have much to teach anybody with regard to scalability or operations.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      They can be. Maybe you need to work in better shops. It is, by definition all of that: Although there is no single, widely accepted list of enterprise software characteristics,[4] they generally include performance, scalability, and robustness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago

I'm the far side of 50, and I was expecting this to be a clueless and demanding me me me piece. It wasn't. At all. I think she stated some perfectly reasonable adult expectations, to the point where if I was hiring and her code was good I'd certainly consider her - precisely because she has reasonable adult expectations, and that's a transferrable skill that's rarer than it should be in developers at all levels.

rainbowmverse 9y ago

That's okay. No one wants to work for someone who thinks it's okay to call an adult they don't know and have consent from princess.