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When Should You Hire a Junior Developer?

• UK-AL 13y ago
  Considering a lot of start up founders are pretty much straight of college. And many people develop projects in their own time. I think junior developers are really underestimated. When you hire a junior you could be hiring someone crap, or someone who could be better than your seniors(I've met some bad senior developers), especially if they've been developing code since they 13 or something. Informally those types could have more experience than your experienced devs. Self taught developers may also underestimate what a cs degree confers. They may not know specific frameworks, but they probably know more than you about compilers, formal grammars, machine learning and stuff like that.
  • justinmares 13y ago
    Good point. Especially given how easy it is to retrain junior developers through things like Treehouse and dev bootcamps, I think it's an investment more companies will start making.
    • rfnslyr 13y ago
      Please find me these jobs because I'm having a hard time deciding what to eat tomorrow. Will I go with the usual rationed slice of wonderbread or go gourmet with a can of tuna?
      • michaelochurch 13y ago
        It's actually not as easy to find programming jobs as people make it seem. It can be hard, especially if you're starting out; it's just not as hellish as for non-technical jobs. There's a terrifying rule-of-thumb called the $20,000 rule (it gets adjusted for inflation periodically; it used to be $10,000) that says that your job hunts will take 1 month per $20,000 in salary. That seems to be accurate for non-techs. In technology, it's about 1 month per $50,000-- if you're already in the game. It's still inconvenient, but not the nightmare it'd be if that number were 1 month per $20,000. Getting your first dev job-- without connections or a CS degree-- is hard as hell. What seems to work for a lot of people is to take a job that involves programming and use that as a launchpad. If you know how to write Excel macros, automate all the office shit work. Then learn VBA. Then learn Python because VBA sucks. Now learn some front-end stuff (HTML, CSS, Javascript). This'll take over a year, but good things don't happen overnight. Soon, you'll be a fully-fledged programmer. If you work your ass off, you'll pass the people who started coasting at 24 and be running circles around them in 5 years.
        • Stwerner 13y ago
          Funny, this is more or less my trajectory over the last ~4 years after changing majors from CS 2 years in and graduating with an Econ degree. Got an entry level job at a bank in ATM support in Pittsburgh and spent the time in-between calls writing excel macros and command line programs to make the job even simpler while also working on my own rails projects at night. This led to a junior dev job at a php shop after a year and a half, which after another year and a half and launching a startup of my own, I finally made it to New York City as the second engineering hire at a startup.
    • michaelochurch 13y ago
      I'm skeptical of the Dev Bootcamp phenomenon, if only because it seems like many of them are very expensive. I've heard of five-digit tuitions for three-month programs. Then again, I guess it's good for us that this is happening because it will drive up the value of high-end programming talent. I've heard that "teaching programming is the new teaching English abroad" and that could be good for us as a group; we'll get better pay and more autonomy in the long run.
      • justinmares 13y ago
        Sure, but considering that an average salary in SF is 80-90k, seems like an investment worth making if they can deliver what they promise. Especially when compared against the cost of a 4 year CS education.
        • UK-AL 13y ago
          I don't like dev bootcamps. I think they produce people who know specific things like web dev with ruby or iOS development. They are like the java schools spolsky warned us about. I think the best developers are generally educated in cs.
        • michaelochurch 13y ago
          I agree. My worry is about the long term; what happens when they stop leading to $90k salaries because there are too many people coming out of them? Who does the accreditation? The four-year university education may be a dinosaur, but that system had sound reasons (one can debate whether those are "good") for limiting admissions.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    Self taught developers may also underestimate what a cs degree confers. They may not know specific frameworks, but they probably know more than you about compilers, formal grammars, machine learning and stuff like that. I think you'd be surprised by the wide variation in both the CS graduate and self-taught pools. Lots of overlap on that matter. There are a lot programmers who understand CS quite well but studied other topics in school. There are also plenty of CS programs that don't seem to be turning out a lot of competent engineers. Hell, there are PhDs who can't even code. Knowing the fundamentals is important-- often, it's extremely valuable, because you need that stuff to hit the high notes-- but if it doesn't come with practical abilities pertaining to how to write code, learn new libraries, and pick up technologies, then it's just book-learning that's already probably 10 years old.
  • devonbarrett 13y ago
    You can self teach CS so you end up with the same knowledge as someone who took a degree.
• stickydink 13y ago
  A little bit meta, and to be clear I'm making no assumptions, statements or complaints about here; but it's interesting that this describes the hypothetical junior developer as female. In the following line, why would the author not just say their, to include both genders? >> When you hire a junior developer, you’re going to have to invest resources in her training.
  • 727374 13y ago
    'their' is plural and therefor would be grammatically incorrect
    • akavi 13y ago
      Are you a native English speaker from the United States or the UK? If so, I'm willing to bet a large amount of money that if I were to record you speaking, it'd be less than an hour before you used 'their', 'they', or 'them' with an unambiguously singular antecedent. Singular 'they' is pervasive in English, and has a long and storied history.
    • petercooper 13y ago
      http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100184652/if-someone-tells-you-singular-they-is-wrong-please-do-tell-them-to-get-stuffed/ http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/10018465...
    • dragonwriter 13y ago
      > 'their' is plural and therefor would be grammatically incorrect No, while "their" is grammatically plural which affects verb conjugation (e.g., "he goes" vs. "they go"), its use for cases which where the antecedent is singular in number and indefinite in gender is well-established English usage which long predates the Latin-inspired prescriptivist attempt to erase such usage and was never seriously diminished in use despite that prescriptivist effort. In English as it is, rather than English as some lovers of Latin wished it would be, "they" is perfectly correct for this use.
      • 13y ago
• kyriakos 13y ago
  junior / senior are just titles that don't always mean something. better to hire a junior who is willing to learn than a burnt out senior who can't adjust to change. to be honest though in my 10 year experience in the field i've seen a lot of junior developers who believe that finishing university was the last time they ever had to learn something new.
  • mathgladiator 13y ago
    > better to hire a junior who is willing to learn than a burnt out senior who can't adjust to change. ageism much? I think it depends on the background of each candidate, and age is irrelevant. Job history, on the other hand, isn't irrelevant.
    • rquantz 13y ago
      I don't think they're saying all senior revs are like that, just that an eager junior is better than a jaded senior. Obviously an eager senior is best of all. See the above discussion about how hard it is to find those people.
• kanwisher 13y ago
  This is a pretty interesting post from a company who's product languished for years, and was an absolute bear to use. Opening up the market for people like GetSentry, Errplane, etc. I suspect they needed more senior devs not less.
• cuttooth 13y ago
  It's going to be interesting to see whether or not the development market collapses in the next couple of years when SF is finally either out of ideas or full on people (if it arguably isn't already), and the rest of the country can't keep in step because most other cities' markets are clamoring just as badly (if not worse) for the seniors. The issue, though, is that it's a catch-22 right now. Companies in smaller cities want seniors so they can get work done and not have to train anyone, but the seniors generally don't want to work in places that aren't SF/NY. Someone has to budge, unless the market is to die completely. I can't mention how many times I've seen companies posting for the same position for upwards of a year instead of simply taking a chance on someone. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but that's business. Don't run one if you can't take the risks.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    Companies in smaller cities want seniors so they can get work done and not have to train anyone, but the seniors generally don't want to work in places that aren't SF/NY. Disagree strongly. In fact, I'm moving to Baltimore (from NYC) for a few years (probably) and really looking forward to it. There are a lot of smart people there-- a lot of different kinds of smart people, unlike in, say, the Valley where there's one kind of smart people and that's programmers-- and DC is only an hour away. I might end up in California eventually, but I'm seeing a lot of interest in the most talented people in getting away from the legacy-laden "star cities". It's not quite an "exodus", but I hear more conversations about Austin than San Francisco around NYC. Six or seven years ago, Austin was barely on the map; even New York was the hinterlands except for Wall Street. Now, the general sense is that the Bay Area is for older people who were able to get in and buy a place at a reasonable price, before it got all fucked up. Makers like new places and open opportunity, as well as freedom from established hierarchies. That means they'll always be moving around from one generation to the next. To tell the truth, though, macrolocation (California vs. Texas; Northeast vs. South) seems to matter a lot less over time, and microlocation (cities vs. suburbs, proximity of cafes and bike paths) matters more. I think that trend's continuing, thanks to the Internet. 20 years ago, or even 10, being an unusual person (3-sigma intelligence; gay; artistic inclination; minority religion or, in many communities, no religion) in a B city meant social isolation. In 2013, it really doesn't; you can find your tribe even if you are, say, an atheist in the South. Someone has to budge I think that the next 15 years of talented young people are going to be more dispersed than the last 15. That means there will be fewer superhubs and that's a good thing. It does, however, fragment the labor market, which means that the volatile culture-- the two-sided itchy trigger finger dynamic-- of promiscuous job hopping and fast firing will have to go. Companies will also be more willing to invest in talent. They'll have to be that way; the extremely liquid talent market of the Bay Area now won't exist (anywhere) in 10 years.
• mscottmcbee 13y ago
  I've seen it defined a couple different ways, so I'll ask for HN's opinion: What exactly constitutes a junior dev? Less than 3 years? 5? Less than X jobs?
  • bcbrown 13y ago
    Here's one: someone who doesn't yet know how to work in an industry environment, instead of an academic environment. Another: Someone who both needs hand-holding when starting a task, and lacks confidence in their final output.
• ericHosick 13y ago
  I saw Vinod Khosla @StartupGrind and he had this to say about junior people on teams (I am paraphrasing a lot): You want to have a balanced team of experienced people and junior people. This creates a team that is willing to try new "risky" ideas and at the same time allow for insight from experience. Age should not be a factor in seniority. He also noted that, unfortunately, we usually hire in our own image.
• andrewSC 13y ago
  I'm a "junior developer" (and first time poster!) who is about to graduate with a degree in CS and have a little over a year's worth of internship experience both at a medium/large (1500-2000 employees at HQ) and small/startup (~70 employees) sized company. As I apply to a number of companies I'm interested in working for it still surprises me that the majority of these listings for dev's are asking for 3+ years or 5+ years experience. Now I completely and whole-heartedly agree that if the job description mentioned something ridiculous (we need you to create custom SOAP requests using haskell) then perhaps the experience is merited. But when I actually reach out to the companies asking for 3+ years experience and ask what they're trying to accomplish in the immediate future, where they need additional developers (i.e. what team is this for), etc. I'm surprised to hear it's nothing unusual. There might be the need to occasionally do packet inspection (or something else semi-uncommon) for debugging or what have you but is this really beyond me and my peers? It might be beyond some, and while I can't speak for all the junior dev's out there, I personally am comfortable enough to do this on my own. Now please correct me if I'm wrong but basically it comes down to this: if I were the hiring manager I wouldn't focus so much on the number of years the dev has but rather if that dev "still has it" (if they're older/more experienced). By "still has it" I mean a genuine passion for writing solid code and being humble enough to know when they're wrong and changing their behavior. If it's a younger dev maybe it's best to focus on trying to determine if they have a genuine interest in becoming a better programmer and a real thirst for knowledge/love to learn (in-line with the article). My only gripe with the latter point are how some of these companies are filtering but that's entirely their choice.
  • bcbrown 13y ago
    Just because they put 3+ years experience on the job req, doesn't mean that not having 3 years experience will preclude you from consideration. Job reqs are often a wish list, and they'll hire someone who only fills some of the reqs.
• ozziegooen 13y ago
  I've been job hunting for a while as a sort of "Junior Rails Dev", and am finding it near impossible to find a job at a startup. I really question which companies will train people in some startup-heavy technologies like Rails and Node.
  • vinceguidry 13y ago
    Startups aren't the place for junior devs in any technology stack. What you need is an established, profitable small business that's NOT a tech startup. The company I work for sells makeup. You'll probably inherit a broken pile of shit, spend a year or two cleaning it up, refactoring, and upgrading to the newest stack. Take the opportunity to learn best practices and CS theory and use them in your job. When you're done, consider yourself ready for a more serious job.
• smurph 13y ago
  Joel said it best: Smart and gets things done. That's really all you need. They don't need to be rock stars or 10xers or top 1%. You just need to be able to give them something to do and have confidence that it will get done in a timely manner and the code won't end up on Daily WTF. They need to have enough passion to bring some new knowledge to the table once in a while without you explicitly telling them to go learn about X. They need to get along with their teams. I think if you just push hard for those simple things, you will end up with some top tier developers anyway.
• tp2k222 13y ago
  when you have just enough money to allow for it, but not enough money to pay for someone with any higher skill level or experience.