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Can people even be "junior" anymore? Its relatively hard to find those kinds of positions anymore, or at the very least they are somewhat sparse. Thought it wa

Can people even be "junior" anymore? Its relatively hard to find those kinds of positions anymore, or at the very least they are somewhat sparse. Thought it was interesting that this month, much more of the "Wants to be hired" postings were juniors compared to what people were looking for in the "who's hiring" postings. Ive ctrl-fed the monthly job postings for 'junior' for the better part of year, and its getting less and less. Why hire a junior when surely you can find some established OSS person? Its so competitive these days, as much as I want personally for this not to be the case (so I can score a job), I dont see why any company would want to hire a junior dev anymore. Interviews I get tend to play this out. Everyone likes, abstractly, the pedagogical ideal of bringing someone in to learn, but when its their money on the line, they go for the most experienced individual they can acquire.

sbarre 4y ago
Our company has a structured junior onboarding program. We take in a cohort once a year and they go through a 12-month program that happens while they are on the job in their various teams, designed to help them continue to grow their overall developer skills and also learn how things work at our company (we're a pretty big enterprise). This was sort of inspired by Facebook's internal bootcamp idea, but it also grew out of the realization that we were not set up to take in juniors without some kind of structure that ensured they were provided guaranteed support to keep growing into their roles, since the teams across our department (of ~500 people) have such different focus. This program exposes all of them to the different facets of being a front-end and back-end developer, no matter what team they are on. The juniors have 2 to 4 sessions per week on different tech topics, with courses taught by volunteers from within the department who sign up to prepare the course and present it. The program has a been a huge success (both for the juniors and for the more experienced folks giving the courses), and we are starting our 3rd cohort this month. When we opened the job posting to take applications this year, we got 450 applications in 3 days, for 10 possible positions. I wish we could expand the program to take in more people but we've found that 10 is what we can handle for now.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  Sounds like a dream program to me! I can understand why its so popular.

sbarre 4y ago

Our company has a structured junior onboarding program. We take in a cohort once a year and they go through a 12-month program that happens while they are on the job in their various teams, designed to help them continue to grow their overall developer skills and also learn how things work at our company (we're a pretty big enterprise). This was sort of inspired by Facebook's internal bootcamp idea, but it also grew out of the realization that we were not set up to take in juniors without some kind of structure that ensured they were provided guaranteed support to keep growing into their roles, since the teams across our department (of ~500 people) have such different focus. This program exposes all of them to the different facets of being a front-end and back-end developer, no matter what team they are on. The juniors have 2 to 4 sessions per week on different tech topics, with courses taught by volunteers from within the department who sign up to prepare the course and present it. The program has a been a huge success (both for the juniors and for the more experienced folks giving the courses), and we are starting our 3rd cohort this month. When we opened the job posting to take applications this year, we got 450 applications in 3 days, for 10 possible positions. I wish we could expand the program to take in more people but we've found that 10 is what we can handle for now.

beepbooptheory 4y ago
Sounds like a dream program to me! I can understand why its so popular.