Here's a long story, tldr: It will be a bumpy ride but can be very worth it under the right circumstances. A couple of years ago, I worked at a small company w

Here's a long story, tldr: It will be a bumpy ride but can be very worth it under the right circumstances. A couple of years ago, I worked at a small company where the management asked me to Interview someone for a Junior role. They were a recent graduate. They did not do that well in the technical interview. Failed to answer some very basic questions, even when given the option to google the answers. So my review for the candidate was: If hired, do not expect any useful (read: big feature) contribution from them for at least 2 months or so. Expect at least a couple of major screw ups in the first month or so. It would have been safer for us to hire the guy with 2-3 years of experience for that junior role at a slightly higher cost. The management hired them anyway. The first few screw ups did happen. They messed up the master branch with some broken commits. (Not sure why we did not have master branch protection rules back then). They did not know certain basic things and needed a bit more hand holding by various team members. We had to make them rewrite their bad code on every other pull request. But very quickly, the new hire became a very useful part of the company. I was so glad to be wrong about my interview. They were happy to test out and automate a lot of the manual tasks. That would have costed us a lot of "senior developer time". The product needed to work on windows, linux, mac, mobile devices etc.. So a lot of things needed to be tested. They created so much documentation and examples for our product, that we ended up finding many bugs in our own code. They fixed a lot of those minor bugs too and came up with new features and implemented them. Honestly, the product got most of the polishing because of them. I am not too sure what exactly I learned about interviewing juniors from this. But I can tell you, In all of the small companies I worked, there were a lot of badly defined tasks that needed to get done. Juniors can grow themselves AND the company by fixing a lot of those things. I think it is more about "What work do we have that the candidate can / will get done?" As opposed to "Are they a good candidate for us?".