3 ms·

Ask HN: Hiring managers, what do you look for in a junior dev?

• laurentl 8y ago
  - what does 0-3 years of experience mean to me? I assume this is in the context of "0-3 years of experience is specified in the job description". Answer: nothing. There's very little in common between a new graduate with 0 experience and someone who's worked in the field for 3 years. To answer the implied question: 0-1 year of experience means that I will have to teach you how to code, write documentation, test, use Git (not in the narrow sense of git add / commit but managing branches, merging, creating PRs), follow a requirement document, work in a team, and generally not pee on the rug. At 2 years of experience or more, I expect the puppy training to be done. - Am I hoping to retain them for a long time? Ideally, yes. Since it'll take 6-12 months for them to learn their craft (which implies a fair bit of involvement from myself and the lead dev), I would be sorely annoyed if they quit right after the ramp-up period. But salary inflation being what it is, it's a very real possibility. I try to stave this off by giving more responsibility gradually and making sure there's always something new to learn (of course, this only reinforces their market value and hence the temptation to jump ship for a big raise). Realistically, I consider 2 years to be a minimum and 3 years to be a good tenure. - Do I prefer exposure to certain technology? Not necessarily looking for a given technology or language, but for a certain well-roundedness. I like seeing candidates who have worked with more than 1 language, ideally with different paradigms (imperative / functional, low-level / higher-level). Ideally some front and some back experience, even if it's only a portfolio webpage for the front and toying around with Twitter APIs or setting up a Django project for the back. This makes me more confident that the candidate will be able to pick up our particular stack, and can be trained to work on different components. Any knowledge of how things work under the hood (ie what does the compiler do, how does the request get from the client to the server, how do you host a service on AWS, why is it a good idea to use https and sanitize your inputs...) is a nice bonus. - How do I measure "willingness to learn" during the hiring process? I test what the candidate knows of their favorite programming language internals; what they know of the broader ecosystem (network, security, infrastructure, etc). This tells me if they're naturally curious about topics which should be of direct interest to them, or if they just copy/paste the first answer from SO. And obviously the basics: have they looked at our website, do they know the company, did they read up on the stack we use if they haven't used it before (this is literally in the job description), etc.