[HN Gopher] Why nobody hires junior developers and what happens ...
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Why nobody hires junior developers and what happens next
Author : arnvald
Score : 69 points
Date : 2021-10-16 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.notonlycode.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.notonlycode.org)
| codr7 wrote:
| May I recommend my previous employer; who likes to hire infant
| developers, teach them a framework and sell their "services" for
| piles of cash.
| ragona wrote:
| This article neglects to understand the massive college-hire
| pipelines that top companies set up. It's not that companies
| aren't hiring junior developers, it's that they _only_ hire from
| their college recruiting pipeline for their entry level roles.
| It's become a common policy to not make "industry" hires at
| SWE-1; that's basically the college hire rung.
|
| Tell you what, I would not want to be a brand new developer
| without university connections trying to get a role right now. If
| you start looking without top internships and a degree from a
| school with connections it seems like it'll be rough.
| [deleted]
| jimmaswell wrote:
| For new grads in recent times, TCS and the like can be a great
| career starter if you can settle for the job not being
| glamorous, having to move where they put you, and high
| variability in career development depending on what you get put
| on (possibly paid to do nothing at all for stretches of time,
| which are on you to do something productive with or not). Good
| beginning pay for a fresh grad and high job security. Not even
| sure how relevant having to move is anymore with so much more
| being remote.
| manachar wrote:
| What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping?
|
| It crops up over and over. If X is a path to upper-middle class
| or above, it's almost inevitable that filters and gates are put
| in to place that primarily work to ensure it's available only
| to children of the upper-middle class or above.
|
| There's nothing inherently within most software development
| that makes it out of reach of being treated like a technical
| skill like electricians, carpentry, or plumbing.
|
| Personally, I suspect it's more to do with "cultural fit"
| issues than skill issues. College is a great filter to find
| people who self-select and are trained to fit into the global
| corporate world.
|
| Unfortunately, the side effect of this is concentrating wealth
| into the hands of people whom already have significant wealth
| and advantages. Efforts to counteract this (like the GI Bill,
| and college loans) have tended to have additional expensive
| barriers to weed out people deemed a "bad fit". For example,
| requiring more advanced degrees or hard to get internships
| (that may even be unpaid!).
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The systemic issue in my experience is the extraordinary
| flood of poor-to-mediocre candidates you get for entry-level
| roles...
|
| I personally really hate college-gating admissions and would
| rather legally forbid that kind of discrimination (as far as,
| not allowing college to be on a resume). But it's impossible
| to deny that it helps solve a real filtering problem tech
| companies face.
| dustingetz wrote:
| scale. big companies set up basically mechanical processes
| that remove or reduce variance from human decision making,
| not just in recruiting but also their software dev,
| marketing, factory assembly lines, this is how scale works. a
| side effect of increased process is you can no longer achieve
| outlier results but the average result is predictable. and
| predictable results (predictable revenue) is precisely what
| big companies want.
| advael wrote:
| I think this is actually a great argument for _incredibly
| stringent_ anti-trust that prevents companies from getting
| very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces
| extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in
| the company, including customers who have to integrate the
| heavy level of process into their usage, employees who have
| to deal with all the process but don 't personally reap
| much of its benefits, competitors who are edged out by
| economies of scale more significantly than other
| competitive edges, and reactionary regulation to harms
| caused by all this that tend to create both more entry
| barriers for competitors and more process. Scale and
| automated processes are a means of reducing risk for
| shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them
| should be a priority for everyone who isn't already wealthy
| enough to angel-invest (And probably those who are too,
| ultimately, although this does not bear out in the short
| term)
| dustingetz wrote:
| economies of scale are why we are rich, imagine if you
| had to grow your own vegetables
| advael wrote:
| Most of the vegetables I eat are grown in my backyard. As
| for "why we are rich", who is the "we" in that sentence?
| You? Me? Some aggregate across millions - maybe even
| billions - of people that's meaningless to most of them?
| richwater wrote:
| Dumb anecdote not replicated in the real world.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Gatekeeping effectively boils down to using a heuristic to
| make a decision (good or bad).
|
| Once a heuristic is known, people who want $thing will
| optimize for $arbitrary_heuristic. Those with more resources
| will use them to optimize better. Toss in natural human
| network effects (eg, giving a friend advice), and those with
| resources will tend to dominate.
|
| You need active countervailing forces to avoid that natural
| tendency.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I recommend a book that discusses this topic in detail:
| Pedigree.
|
| Basically discusses the mechanisms of how connections and
| wealth affect hiring.
| nostrebored wrote:
| I made this mistake. I did undergrad research instead of
| internships in school and was sure I wanted to do a PhD --
| until my final semester.
|
| I ultimately wound up having to do a much worse internship than
| I would've gotten partnered with my school. It took me nearly
| three months to find it. Big mistake that I recommend anyone in
| University reading this right now to avoid. Diversify your
| experiences!
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| I can't believe that the biggest (and supposedly "best") tech
| companies recruit from only a small selection of schools, and
| completely ignore 99% of applications from other schools.
|
| I used to think it was a total waste of talent, but the more
| experience I get in industry, the more I realize that it's
| probably for the best that so many of us are forgotten by the
| big companies. It gives me hope that we can escape the
| Google/Facebook duopoly that we live in now.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I basically did that out of a small university with no
| internship experience or strong university/personal
| connections, in 2013.
|
| It was definitely a struggle at start and I've had to struggle
| through some really crappy roles, but I'm doing pretty solid
| now. Making almost double now than I was when I started out,
| I'm a team lead now and very happy with the company I am with
| now.
| arnvald wrote:
| Hi, author here, that's a very fair point that I didn't
| consider. It totally makes sense that the number of available
| jobs looks smaller than it is, because some of them are never
| really advertised in public. Thanks for sharing that!
| joe-collins wrote:
| That does suggest that the doom-and-gloom predictions are
| wrong, but I'd hesitate to call those jobs "available" when
| they only exist for a tiny slice of the job-seekers.
| theptip wrote:
| Yep, this is the "credential" that you buy when you go to
| college. You also buy knowledge but the credential is
| nontrivial.
|
| Boot camps seem to be another path for non-credentialed people
| to get on the first rung of the ladder. They typically do a
| similar kind of "hiring funnel" as a college would with big
| companies.
| taurath wrote:
| It's absolutely true, and interviews at most companies are set
| up like "did you take an algorithms course", with questions
| like "develop a path finding algorithm (a*)" for web frontend
| work.
|
| I am self taught and got "lucky" finding a small company paying
| peanuts that had a lot for me to do. I interviewed multiple
| people with several yoe and degrees and found they couldn't do
| very simple things that anyone who'd built any frontend could
| have done. That was over 8 years ago now and I've moved on to
| much bigger companies and much more responsibility.
|
| But I tell my friends nowadays you have to get very lucky to
| find any company that will hire you based on ability to code
| rather than ability to pass a theory heavy interview.
| mettamage wrote:
| I didn't know this was the case, took a vacation/sabbatical for
| a year and suddenly couldn't apply to FAANG anymore because I
| missed the "graduation cycle".
|
| I feel so stupid, if I had known then I would have never taken
| a sabbatical.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| This especially sucks because the CS Academia track is much
| less diverse than outside of it: Coding bootcamps, self-taught,
| etc. have all the diverse candidates companies claim they're
| looking for and I can guarantee those folks are hungrier and
| want it more than most college grads.
| headphoneswater wrote:
| I screen resumes for my team and pick up one or two juniors a
| year honestly it's hard to wade though the 20-30 identical
| resumes we get a week from bootcamp grads with the same copy and
| pasted example projects listed under their completed work
|
| Now I've worked with some bootcampers who excelled and turned out
| to be fantastic developers so I'm not aginst the concept but
| you've got to differentiate yourself a bit
| throwaway45886 wrote:
| You could "fix" hiring juniors if there were a school that taught
| real world professional software engineering by immersion.
| Colleges don't do it, boot camps don't do it.
|
| I want every junior dev to work on a fake team building a fake
| product for 24 months, with a senior (not a "professor", but a
| real senior dev) shadowing and pointing out common pitfalls and
| how to avoid them. I know they wouldn't write _amazing_ code, but
| I could trust they would do everything else right. (My dream
| would be that CompSci was taught more like a trade school)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Computer science is only vaguely related to software
| engineering. Having CompSci knowledge helps but isn't enough by
| itself, and similarly, not having it isn't a big deal for the
| majority of projects.
|
| We don't need to change CompSci, what we need is a proper
| "software engineering" _trade_ school that focuses on actual
| day to day software development (including soft skills and
| dealing with project management, etc).
|
| The fact that a lot of companies only hire senior people and
| want experience suggests that there's a lot of stuff people
| only pick up with experience that's not being taught anywhere -
| something that a proper school should be able to fix.
| dionysus_jon wrote:
| Anecdotes without any data
| new_guy wrote:
| Because going to a 'bootcamp' for a couple of weeks doesn't make
| you anymore of a 'developer' than playing operation[0] makes you
| a surgeon.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_(game)
| kleinsch wrote:
| Instead of gatekeeping off what we each consider a developer to
| be, let's relate it back to the article. The problem for
| bootcamp grads is that at the FAANG level (the companies with
| money and motivation to train juniors) they only hire juniors
| who interned at FAANG. They only recruit interns from
| universities. So if you just got out of a 12 week bootcamp,
| going to be hard to compete with a 4 year degree (or graduate)
| + 3 months work at a real company. Even outside the FAANG
| level, there are thousands of new grads with degrees and work
| experience applying for entry level jobs.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Yet somehow we have all these people calling themselves
| "engineers" who couldn't code themselves out of anything more
| complex than a CRUD app.
| akudha wrote:
| That is because most of the "jobs" require just that skill or
| some other very limited skill.
|
| I was asked to hand over the stuff that I was working on,
| when I left a job. It was interesting to find out the girl I
| was supposed to train, didn't know even the absolute basic
| programming stuff. She had been in the company for five years
| and was well liked. She was doing just one specific thing all
| those years, and she was _very_ good at it. She got raises
| every year, the company had a perverse interest in keeping
| her that way.
|
| I have worked in a dozen places in my life. Though tall
| promises are made during interviews, not one of those
| companies gave a shit about employee growth etc. only way to
| do something interesting was to leave and find another job -
| rinse and repeat.
|
| It is not just the employees fault their skills stagnate.
| Employers also contribute to it.
| walshemj wrote:
| And how does CS degree where your learning just the Math
| Heavy theory do that? if you did an EE, Mech or Civil Degree
| maybe those are more appropriate.
| paulcole wrote:
| Serious question then, how does someone become a 'developer'?
| WalterSear wrote:
| Write code. Create stuff. Schooling can only ever provide you
| a starting off point.
| adventured wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with using a bootcamp to get started.
| Everyone has to start somewhere. The bootcamps have often
| gotten a bad reputation for pretending they prepare you to
| dive right into a serious job as an experienced developer.
| Many of them are guilty of misleading people to pull
| customers, doing the typical thing of promising overly fast
| results.
|
| Bootcamps, self-education, go to school for it, internships;
| a combination of things. There are plenty of ways to get
| started and keep progressing.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| By developing software.
|
| ...which is why "developer" is not a good job-description. I
| suppose it's as if both a bricklayer and a civil-engineer
| referred to themselves as "builders".
|
| -----------
|
| I think you meant to ask "how does someone become an SWE?" -
| in which case (because we don't have professional licensing
| for SWE compared to civil-eng) it's somewhat vaguer and, in
| my opinion, more based on the opinions of those around you. I
| suppose a succinct definition is "applies engineering
| principles to a problem-solving project" - and one can argue
| that being self-taught or a coding-camp attendee - or even an
| AS graduate - will very likely lack exposure to training in
| engineering principles that they can apply to their work.
| paulcole wrote:
| No, I definitely didn't mean SWE. I quoted the post I was
| replying to and they said 'developer.'
|
| Honestly, it seems like a bootcamp is a great way to get
| introduced to the possibility of an entry-level job as a
| developer but not an SWE.
| aloisdg wrote:
| I would said by developing. I don't care where do you start.
| Just grab a keyboard and start. Choose a personal project. It
| can be an app for your phone, a small game, a website for
| your local sport club, a mod, a bot, whatever. You can
| reinvent the wheel, you can innovate, use all the libraries
| you want. There is no rules but start. Then line after line,
| bug after bug, someone become a developer. You will be your
| first user. Shit starts with the second one. You don't to be
| a professional one. You don't have to earn money. I think,
| that you just have to develop.
| greggman3 wrote:
| By developing ?
|
| I'm sure this isn't a good answer but I'd written tons of
| hobby programs before I got my first developer job. Not
| because someday I wanted a job but because I actually enjoyed
| programming and creating things on the computer. If you don't
| enjoy it or do enjoy it but don't have the time to do it
| outside of work I don't know what to suggest.
|
| I get that might be considered "no fair". I guess maybe you
| can become a doctor or lawyer without doing doctoring or
| lawyering in your spare time? But can you become an artist? I
| feel like most successful artists (video game artists,
| fashion designers, graphic designers, motion graphics
| editors) won't get the experience and job by just taking a
| crash course and then applying. You get in by showing a
| portfolio of art you've created.
|
| Programming might not be similar to art but it feels like
| getting in is similar, you show a portfolio of stuff you've
| created. And via this creation you learn much of the stuff
| you need to pass the interviews have stuff to show.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Programming might not be similar to art but it feels like
| getting in is similar, you show a portfolio of stuff you've
| created.
|
| Isn't this just based on your own experiences and biases
| and the way things have been done historically because
| developers have mostly been people who had access to
| computers as kids/teenagers/college students?
|
| > If you don't enjoy it or do enjoy it but don't have the
| time to do it outside of work I don't know what to suggest.
|
| Maybe a bootcamp to get the basic skills and then seek out
| an entry-level job?
| pyb wrote:
| Where it would make sense, I am interested in consulting with
| companies on this problem. I'd be pairing with your junior
| developer full-time to help them onboard more comfortably. Please
| reach out if that sounds interesting.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Software development gets marketed as an easy desk job that pays
| well. Reality is you either need a certain mindset (sitting in
| front of a computer 8 hours a day and trying to figure out how to
| get it to do something is not something most people find
| fulfilling) or need to be prepared for a really boring mentally
| taxing grind that's going to take years.
|
| I've seen people trying to get into development from bootcamps
| and just break under the requirements just to contribute to a
| modern project. Not to mention that the bare-minimum approach to
| problem solving is going to slow down your learning process (you
| can only get so far with copy pasting and Google).
| Zababa wrote:
| > need to be prepared for a really boring mentally taxing grind
| that's going to take years.
|
| Isn't this most jobs these days?
| [deleted]
| moonchrome wrote:
| It can be, that's why aptitude/affinity are important and why
| I don't think software is the right choice for a large % of
| people I see getting into it recently.
| zz865 wrote:
| I work for a big corp that hires lots of grads and it really
| isn't working out. The first year they take a lot more work than
| they produce, but start to get useful. People used to stay for
| 2-4 years so it was worth it for the company, recently people
| have been leaving pretty much after those first 12 months (this
| is pre-covid too). I used to spend a lot of time helping the
| grads but it really isn't worth it.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| There is information missing here. Why are they leaving? What
| work are you giving them it takes _that_ long to play even?
| What kind of juniors are you hiring to begin with?
| devwastaken wrote:
| 1. Those on top naturally don't see the problem. Or they do and
| are intentionally disengenuous. People like their 150K paycheck
| and know that they're replaceable if we allow more workers.
|
| 2. Companies made their bed and are lying in it. They refuse to
| invest into devs because they know they're gone in 2 years.
| They're gone in 2 years because companies don't give incentives
| to stay. They would rather hire someone else and pay them more
| than pay an existing employee more. Lots of made up reasons as to
| why, it's become culture and everyone goes along with it.
|
| 3. Software work is exported to India and elsewhere. That's not a
| new fact, it's been going on since the 90's. Cheap global labor
| pushes out domestic labor. But no senator with the superpac's to
| get elected would ever dream of restricting global markets. Their
| salary depends on them not doing so.
|
| 4. A company will never say their market isn't in demand. That's
| like saying your company is unprofitable or that it makes bad
| products. It may be true, but you always say you're viable and
| make the best. Same as how you say your jobs are in high demand.
| More applicants = more control, you can pay less with less
| benefits.
|
| So while those in power do nothing because they're not affected,
| graduating students are met with little to no jobs, and we yet
| again see more socioeconomic decline. If dev work was in high
| demand there wouldn't be an unemployed compsci student in the
| U.S. yet I know multiple. Companies and those with the incentives
| are lying.
| itake wrote:
| > People like their 150K paycheck and know that they're
| replaceable if we allow more workers.
|
| can you elaborate? as a senior dev myself, I am def
| replaceable, but my role in the company is completely different
| than what is expected of a junior engineer. There is zero
| chance I could/would be replaced by a junior engineer and I
| love have junior talent on my team to do the work I am not
| interested in.
|
| > 2. Companies made their bed and are lying in it.
|
| no... companies love hiring junior engineers directly from
| college because they are wayyyy cheaper than senior talent, it
| doesn't matter if they leave after 2 years. Training up an
| employee only takes a few months.
| wilde wrote:
| Most companies are running some sort of copy of Google's hiring
| pipeline, which doesn't evaluate the ability to learn (the key to
| finding good junior candidates). The startup I used to work at
| tried to fix this by pair programming with the candidate for an
| hour on a trivial feature in the codebase. I felt like it did a
| reasonable job of finding people who learn quickly, though it
| didn't often select for strong problem solving.
| varsketiz wrote:
| I work in a unicorn that has 300+ developers and we run a
| bootcamp program every year ourselves that lasts 3 months. We
| give offers at junior level to basically every motivated and
| capable participant (50%+). We dont source from specific schools.
| Other top startups in my country have similar programs. I would
| say that people tend to hire juniors for better salaries and with
| less requirements than when I was starting out.
| prhn wrote:
| We just hired two junior devs, and we could have hired more if we
| had the recs.
|
| Please tell me where all these seniors are coming from, because
| we certainly couldn't find a single qualified one during twelve+
| months of interviewing.
|
| I also haven't observed "remote work makes onboarding and
| training more challenging" in companies that are dedicated to
| their remote workforce (which is basically everybody right now?).
| I've been remote for almost 10 years.
|
| Attrition of senior devs will always be a problem because
| managers don't properly incentivize sticking around. Most senior
| devs will never put in the long hours to reach Staff Engineer. I
| don't blame them, but there needs to be a way to see professional
| and financial growth for senior engineers who are doing their
| jobs well.
|
| And lastly "everyone's understaffed" because management never
| lets the calendar breathe. There's always more work scheduled in
| a given quarter than there are engineers, but management doesn't
| adjust the schedule accordingly. You could hire 5 senior
| engineers and they would still make this mistake.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Please tell me where all these seniors are coming from,
| because we certainly couldn't find a single qualified one
| during twelve+ months of interviewing.
|
| I'm not sure what the company's situation is but when I see
| these challenges, there are usually one of several issues:
|
| 1. Companies are expecting senior devs but not willing to give
| Senior pay
|
| 2. Companies are giving senior pay, perhaps on a national
| scale, but the pay is not sufficient for the region (e.g., 200k
| for a senior dev in the Bay Area is barely enough)
|
| 3. Companies are in an area w/o talent and are expecting
| relocations without sufficient risk permium given the cyclical
| nature of the tech job market
|
| 4. Expecting long hours but unwilling to pay sufficiently for
| employees to afford 24-hr childcare.
|
| I was naive 20yrs ago. This may be obvious, but it wasnt
| obvious to me 20yrs ago, so let me address the three above
| common causes
|
| 1. There is a strong correlation between senior dev and mature
| lives -- senior devs often have children, mortgages, dental
| payments, college tuition. This means you cant give them ramen-
| pay. The typical response on HN is "well if you marry another
| person at FAANG..." -- ok let me stop you there. My wife doesnt
| work at FAANG. She's not an engineer. Most devs dont have
| spouses at a FAANG, so you cant rely on some mysterious FAANG
| spouse who's subsidizes your company's poor pay.
|
| 2. A to-remain-unnamed Series A company in the Bay cold-reached
| out to me offering 120k/yr cash for a Staff engr role. That
| works for three dudes in bunk beds eating ramen. Except I cant
| bunk with three dudes if I have two kids. Nor can our family of
| four stay in a studio apartment.
|
| 3. This is less obvious, because the current bull cycle has
| been so long. But dev jobs come and go. Companies die and new
| comapnies are born. This is fine in NY/SF but a major problem
| in some rural city. You cant easily uproot a family and move to
| middle-of-nowhere for a job that may only last a year. It is
| very disruptive to families. So you have to pay -- a lot -- to
| make up for this. Otherwise, few are willing to take the risk.
| If someone does take the risk, they may be commuting and
| maintaining two residences, so you have to overpay for that.
|
| 4. Senior devs often have children. School drop-offs, pick-ups,
| etc. If you want senior devs to work long hours, you need to
| pay sufficiently for them to afford 24hr child care. Or you
| give them flexibility, or you give them remote.
|
| I dont think there is any mysterious job shortage or worker
| shortage. A lot of it is economics and the struggle of raising
| children, paying for school districts, death-by-a-thousand-cuts
| of medical copays/coinsurance, paying for childrens' braces,
| etc.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| > There is a strong correlation between senior dev and live
| -- senior devs often have children, mortgages, dental
| payments, college tuition.
|
| Maybe not though, considering how often the title "senior" is
| given out like candy to people in their 30s and even 20s.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Well if they want a "senior" dev a year or two out of
| college, there is no shortage of non-top5 college grads and
| bootcamp grads. If they are having a hard time, I suspect
| they are looking for true senior devs.
| arnvald wrote:
| Hi! Author here.
|
| > Please tell me where all these seniors are coming from,
| because we certainly couldn't find a single qualified one
| during twelve+ months of interviewing.
|
| Are you looking for some niche skills? I've interviewed a
| number of candidates this year for a scale-up (senior Python
| devs) in Netherlands and I've talked to a lot of great
| developers, unfortunately most of the time they had a number of
| better offers that I could not match.
|
| > I also haven't observed "remote work makes onboarding and
| training more challenging" in companies that are dedicated to
| their remote workforce (which is basically everybody right
| now?). I've been remote for almost 10 years.
|
| I feel a lot of companies are not really "dedicated" to remote
| work, rather that they can't wait to bring people back to the
| office at least for 1-2 days a week. I've seen a number of
| issues with remote onboarding - laptops coming late, issues
| with setting up the dev environment (and doing a debugging over
| Zoom for 2h). I've changed jobs twice during pandemic and in
| both cases I felt the companies still haven't figured out how
| to move all the new employee introduction to on-line.
|
| Also, I can't agree more with your last 2 paragraphs, I have
| the same observations!
| whitepoplar wrote:
| What's the compensation range for senior devs your company
| wanted to hire?
| [deleted]
| Tarucho wrote:
| And what age range?
| avodonosov wrote:
| Statistics to support the claim?
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I feel like this article describes the problem well without
| making any headway on the solution. It doesn't make financial
| sense for companies to train juniors so they should... just hire
| juniors?
|
| Honestly, I think this is going to be a self-correcting problem.
| Seniors will become more and more expensive until it _is_ cost-
| effective to hire juniors. If you can hire a senior for the price
| of 1.5 juniors, you probably do. If you can only hire a senior
| for the price of 5 fresh grads, you start looking real hard for
| ways to make those juniors effective.
|
| It certainly sucks for people trying to enter the workforce now,
| but it seems like it'll ultimately reach a new equilibrium.
| arnvald wrote:
| Hi! Author here.
|
| You're right, I don't think there really is a solution - in
| such a large and global market it's impossible to convince
| enough players to start contributing more towards common good.
|
| On a macro scale we'll go back to where we were (that's also my
| conclusion in the article), but it's possible that in smaller
| scale some companies who never considered hiring juniors will
| start doing it, or compans will start collaborating more with
| bootcamps or others non-traditional schools to improve the
| skills of entry-level candidates
| ghaff wrote:
| And/or you provide better incentives for people to stick
| around. Without getting into the specifics, the dynamics are
| that many companies assume that people are going to move on in
| a few years anyway so there's no real point in investing in
| existing employees so existing employees do indeed move on in a
| couple years.
| jopsen wrote:
| > it seems that the golden days for bootcamp graduates and self-
| taught devs are over.
|
| Going to a bootcamp (or being self taught) and getting a job at
| big tech was probably never easy. Breaking into those jobs is
| easiest if you go through the internship pipeline (which starts
| at a university).
|
| Also let's not pretend that a bootcamp compares to a 3-5 year CS
| degree.
|
| Don't get me wrong I think there are lots of jobs where bootcamp
| training is more than enough.
|
| But most CS graduates will struggle with the kind of dynamic
| programming questions you risk getting asked at a job interview
| with big tech. (I know I struggled)
|
| So it's IMO no surprise if bootcamp graduates gets filtered out
| on questions like amortized complexity, big-O, computability,
| dynamic programming, or computer architecture questions.
| austincheney wrote:
| I had absolutely no problem starting my career at a major tech
| company as a self taught developer. The severely disadvantaged
| were actually the CS grads. They really wanted everything to
| look like OOP Java and until somebody mentored them otherwise
| their code was either verbose Java or (if not writing Java
| language) some kind of mysterious curse. The big employers
| preferred to hire CS grads to write Java even if it's garbage
| because they were easy to find and you knew what you were
| getting.
| angarg12 wrote:
| This is bogus. Every week I'm interviewing a handful of people
| for internships and junior roles.
|
| This is also simply not true:
|
| > top companies (big tech, high growth startups) figure out that
| they don't really need to hire a lot of junior developers,
| they'll just hire the best seniors from other companies
|
| Not only it is insanely hard to hire senior devs, but also this
| doesn't make sense. We have plenty of work to go around and not
| all of it is at the senior scope. There is always room in big
| tech to hire and train juniors.
| jopsen wrote:
| > There is always room in big tech to hire and train juniors.
|
| Am many big companies knows that if you don't, then you won't
| have senior engineers with expertise in your stack.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The vast majority of dev jobs are outside "big tech, high
| growth startups".
|
| FAANGs can't train nearly enough juniors to make up for the
| rest of the industry.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Also a surprisingly non-trivial number of FAANG engineers
| can't operate without the world class tooling and technical
| leadership support they get inside those companies.
| joe-collins wrote:
| Maybe I've been looking at the wrong companies, then. It seems
| like the majority of openings are looking for formal
| educational attainment or years of on-the-job experience that,
| as a self-taught programmer paying bills via a different field,
| I simply don't have.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| At least half, maybe the majority of our engineers are junior.
| We do reject the majority of applicants however. That's usually
| because of a bad resume (seriously, a resume with no internship
| or even unrelated work like food service is a red flag). In the
| interviews, many candidates either lack basic coding or problem
| solving skills. I don't even ask leetcode questions, and only a
| minority of folks can answer them (and I allow them to look up
| reference material online).
| mattlondon wrote:
| For a junior, "unrelated" work experience all counts IMHO.
| You can't ding some just starting out in a _first role_
| because they haven 't already had a job other than flipping
| burgers.
|
| At least someone with unrelated experience has shown that
| they have _some_ experience of holding down a job and the
| responsibility that goes with it, and can apply themselves
| doing something mindless if they have to (most intern or
| junior candidates I interview these days all want to solve
| cancer with machine learning on day 1 in their role - someone
| without a real-world reality-check who has _only_ done a
| series of silver-spoon elite internships might get
| disgruntled when they are given the shit work as a junior)
|
| Likewise some people cannot afford internships - they need to
| get paying work to pay bills and can't have the luxury of
| doing unpaid/expenses-only/etc work, or have other reasons
| like care responsibilities etc.
|
| With respect, please check your biases and give people a
| chance.
|
| </manager at a BigCo that also rejects huge numbers of
| applicants>
| anthuswilliams wrote:
| I interpreted the parent's post to mean they are
| encountering resumes which list neither internships NOR
| unrelated work experience.
| curiousllama wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that comment is saying the red flag is NOT
| having an unrelated job (given they don't have tech
| experience, which many understandably won't). Def ambiguous
| tho
| mkl95 wrote:
| > Why nobody hires junior developers
|
| There are some companies out there that hire junior developers. I
| know because I was one of them.
|
| After a few days, you will find out the hard way why no senior
| developer wanted to work for your brand new employer.
| siva7 wrote:
| Funny how this is one of these things one probably won't
| understand as a junior but first gets clear when turning into a
| senior
| huetius wrote:
| This is funny, and has a lot of truth to it, but I like
| mentoring juniors. Watching "my" juniors step up to a big
| challenge and win, or rise in the organization (even above me!)
| is more rewarding than most of my day to day work.
| c6451b wrote:
| Having been on the hiring side and interviewed plenty of juniors
| I've found there seems to be a general lack of "try" anymore. I
| remember when I started 10 years ago I felt like the average
| junior I was competing against was a very talented problem
| solver.
|
| Perhaps I'm just being given bad candidates. The majority of them
| seem to come from bootcamps these days rather than Bachelors or
| Associates programs. They're trained in a single stack and
| without the formality of problem solving you learn in a degree
| program the average bootcamp developer seems to be too linearly
| tracked to really succeed at least in the mid-grade startup world
| I am in. They're capable of brain dumping cracking the coding
| interview, can solve very trivial (e.g. linear) problems, but
| when asked to think outside the box they seem unable to because
| it doesn't fit into any nice little box they learned at the
| bootcamp. I suppose this could also be a function of people
| trying to "break into" programming from a field that is
| completely unrelated expecting easy money and a comfortable job.
| I suspect it's a shell shock for them as much as it is for me the
| interviewer.
|
| Bootcamps, in my opinion, had good intentions but ended up not
| only lowering the quality of developer but also increasing the
| pool of applicants. After getting burned by say 30% of your
| junior hires it makes sense you'd be more cautious. For every
| solid graduate from a program in IT or CS, there are 20
| "graduates" of a 4 week, extremely expensive, and borderline
| worthless bootcamp program. Programming is quickly going the way
| real estate did in the early 00's. The experienced guys will
| continue to make money and the people trying to get into the
| industry make almost nothing. ABET accredits CS programs, perhaps
| there should be an accrediting body to stop all these fly by
| night money sinkholes we call bootcamps. Lord knows the only
| people making money on bootcamp education are the frauds that run
| them.
| [deleted]
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _I suppose this could also be a function of people trying
| to "break into" programming from a field that is completely
| unrelated expecting easy money and a comfortable job._"
|
| That's pretty much what's going on. We have people coming to HN
| and literally asking how to do that:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28889090
| halo-and-talon wrote:
| This is an interesting observation and I think part of what
| makes it so hard to hire developers. What you really want are
| people that are very good at learning and problem solving in a
| practical way, but that's a really difficult skill set to
| evaluate. Data structures and algorithms are important tools,
| but they're only that: tools. So we do the equivalent of
| figuring out whether someone can swing a hammer, but that's a
| weak proxy for the skill we really want.
|
| To be fair to bootcamp grads, I think plenty of "experienced"
| hires have also just managed to stick around and are not
| necessarily great developers either. It's a really tough to pin
| down skill.
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