3 ms·
TLDR: I don't use coding exercises in any capacity to hire junior developers onto my remote team of freelancers. -- When I hire Clojure juniors, I have a set
by CameronBarre 7y ago
TLDR:
I don't use coding exercises in any capacity to hire junior developers onto my remote team of freelancers.
--
When I hire Clojure juniors, I have a set of questions that I've put in the job posting that they will have answered prior to me speaking with them.
I still speak to the person if they completely ignore the request to answer the questions.
There are probably 20-30 questions, some are objective, others are subjective, and a lot of questions are meant to evoke somewhat passionate answers, or at the very least, allow someone to display their passion.
Some have to do with qualities I would expect a certain type of clojure developer to posses.
Others have to do with the shape of our system, such as specific questions about tools in our stack.
The last variety are questions to gauge where on the spectrum of learning someone is at in regards to specific software development topics and practices.
I never disqualify candidates who don't have much experience with our stack, all I need to see (in their github repo) is that they write Clojure competently, and I need to understand from speaking with them and reading their questions, that they are a competent and interested individual.
I give most people I speak with a fair shot with the intention of improving my team's on-boarding process, which hopefully improves with every successful new hire, in other words, they bring the core competency required to participate in our environment and we fill in the gaps with respect to our architecture, methodology, and our stack.
- algaeontoast 7y agoCurious how'd you define "junior"? As someone with about a year and change of experience out of college and 1.5 yrs of professional "co-ops" during college - I still consider myself very junior but feel at a disadvantage to NCG's. Especially since my team at a FAANG was flushed giving me a weird work history :/
- CameronBarre 7y agoIt sounds like our worlds are different, I don't work for a FAANG, but in my world: A junior is someone who has put time and effort into learning our programming language, but may not have previous industry experience with it. After speaking with them, I'm either convinced or not that given a reasonable burn in time they can become an independent and productive member of the team. I like to see a work history with other stacks of course. There's really no concrete basis on which to judge what anyone is truly capable of, especially in our industry, sometimes it comes down to giving someone a fair chance and hitting the eject button if it isn't working out. As a remote independent person who hires other remote independent people, on a contractual basis, I think I'm allowed to take more humanitarian liberties when I have hiring decisions to make, due to the structure of remote work and the qualities that independent people tend to have. Hope that helps.
- algaeontoast 7y agoThis definitely helps! I think my biggest blind-spots have to do with system design / tooling. At least in terms of grappling with what changes are / are not reasonable (basically knowing what tasks to stretch myself on - but somehow gauging when I think the scope of a task is wonky and avoiding those to not screw myself) Do you have any tips for finding companies that might be as open to "moderate juniors" like you've described?
- CameronBarre 7y agoSearch for easy wins, shun refactoring, and always try to build the next thing better, rather than going backwards to retroactively "fix" working (but perhaps less than ideal) things. I can't really advise on finding companies. I haven't had to search for one myself in a while. Like I said, I'm a freelancer, so I just go with the flow until I can find a new opportunity. Good luck, believe in yourself more and don't worry so much about categorizing yourself!