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It doesn't sound like the writer was fired for doing her job. It sounds like she did a really good job, given the circumstances, and that her bosses used two pr

It doesn't sound like the writer was fired for doing her job. It sounds like she did a really good job, given the circumstances, and that her bosses used two pretty quintessential management techniques - deadlines and negging - to motivate her and her colleagues to outperform. But this demo - her bosses ran out of money, and even if the text field did work, but they didn't get the money from this investor, they were going to be fired. That aside, as other commenters have noted, junior developers need instruction. That's easy to say if you're Facebook, and every 22 year old you hire is "junior" but also went to Harvard. They're not really the same kind of "junior" as the 50th percentile 22 year old college graduate. In my experience Facebook hires these "junior" developers because they thrive despite receiving little to no meaningful instruction - as if "code reviews" or a month of onboarding on Mercurial really teach anyone anything. The small startup is gambling that maybe they can find these 22 year olds that Facebook has missed, which is a reasonable gamble, there are a lot that were missed. But it was never about finding someone who needed instruction. Also, it's never been my experience that paying bad developers more money made them better. Paying good developers more money does. It's tough.

thewarrior 5y ago
To add some more context to how Facebook hires juniors - Yes Facebook now only hires juniors once they complete an internship where they have to thrive with very limited instruction. And yes it’s mostly elite college graduates.
didibus 5y ago
Big tech can also support lots of junior developers, because they can scale their teams. They don't need to operate lean, they could have one dev per Class if they wanted, so even if the code base is a big mess, they can just throw more brute force at it by having two, three, four teams, or as many as needed to work on the code base and break it down into smaller services each team can focus on.

thewarrior 5y ago

To add some more context to how Facebook hires juniors - Yes Facebook now only hires juniors once they complete an internship where they have to thrive with very limited instruction. And yes it’s mostly elite college graduates.

didibus 5y ago

Big tech can also support lots of junior developers, because they can scale their teams. They don't need to operate lean, they could have one dev per Class if they wanted, so even if the code base is a big mess, they can just throw more brute force at it by having two, three, four teams, or as many as needed to work on the code base and break it down into smaller services each team can focus on.