Ask HN: Why Will No One Hire Jr. Devs?

[meeps]

I'm graduating from a developer bootcamp in Portland, OR next month. I have extensive startup experience in non-developer roles. As I'm pounding the pavement looking for my first jr. developer gig, I'm finding many companies are turning their backs on jr. developer candidates without reviewing work / resumes / etc at all. It seems like a lot of people are excited about training jr. devs, but not excited about hiring them. Does anyone have any tips for a new jr. dev out in the wild? Why are companies reluctant to hire jrs?

[frankpinto]

We're a 5 person team at Ayalo (http://ayalo.co) with one junior dev; we've had trouble making it work so I'll share some reasons why:

- Lack of confidence in his deliverables. The worst is being told its done because it works on local and for small data sets (he's in charge of internal analytics) and then when we try it on production with a months worth of data it crashes.

- Having to constantly remind him of the 80-20 rule. 80% of effects are due to 20% of the functionality and having to guide him to focus on that 20%. You want to be able to leave a dev working for two days, even a week, without worrying that he's accidentally inflating the scope of something. More experienced devs have a better sense of the importance and time-scale of the things they're working on.

- He's often so overwhelmed with having to learn things he doesn't know, or debug things he doesn't fully understand, that he doesn't have time or energy to think about ways in which to improve the company or product outside of his job description.

- Junior devs often need constant check-ins because they're sometimes ashamed of having to ask. This happens no matter how many times you reinforce that asking questions is the only way to learn, its human nature to a certain extent.

My perspective, from a bootstrapped pre-seed post-launch startup, is that early on you want people that can drive forward with you, that can push you, not people you have to pull along with you. We've kept our junior dev because he's motivated, passionate, and has potential. But I'd be lying if I said he doesn't hinder our speed

[alanpca]

I feel like including the company name and then proceeding to trash your employee was a poor choice.

[frankpinto]

Noted, I was worried it would come off like that, my mistake. We're completely transparent with him and he appreciates the clarity into where he actually stands in terms of skill and what needs to be improved. To be clear, though, I meant those points to be more general; framing it around him as the example was the poor choice. I've worked with other devs with a similar level of experience and those are just things I see all the time

[nincomp00p]

i think it is nice that your company shows the clarity for these points

[mattm]

If I may so, you've identified this, but a 5 person team is way too small to have a junior dev unless they really know what they are doing. You're really doing a disservice to him because you're expecting way more than he can deliver and you don't have the resources to help him develop his skills. I've seen this situation before and it's frustrating for all parties.

In regards to the OP, he should target larger companies (>50 employees). These companies will have better systems in place to be able to take on junior devs in a way that won't be overwhelming.

[frankpinto]

True. He's grown tremendously while he's been with us and its really not like we're wasting each others time. We constantly ask him to tell us when we're expecting too much and to set his pace / workload. Measured stress outside of your comfort zone is one of the best ways to learn IMO and I do a lot of work with him personally to get him up to speed.

[rogueleaderr]

I interviewed a few candidates from NYC-based developer bootcamps and the experience scared me away from even trying to interview any more.

The people I interviewed (admittedly only three, but the ones who I thought had the strongest resumes out of their cohorts), were unable to complete even basic real-world programming tasks during the interviews. I would literally sit them down, show them my code base, and ask them to make a minor improvement to a page (i.e something that would take me <10-20 minutes to do myself). None of them got close to finishing the task in a reasonable way.

I think the basic problem is that programming is hard and learning to do it at a professional level takes a lot longer than 8-12 weeks. Much like learning to be a lawyer takes more than 12 weeks -- you wouldn't hire a criminal defense lawyer who had graduated from a "lawyer bootcamp."

If you actually do have the skills to do the job, the best way to demonstrate it is to build a complete, functional, polished website and put your code on Github. Some candidates I looked at had "bootcamp demo projects" on Github but the quality of them was way, way below where it needed to be to prove they were adequately skilled.

As they say: "show, don't tell".

[meeps]

Great advice. I totally get your concern. That sounds like a horrible experience. As for me, each day I work on a personal rails project that I'm really excited about, and I think that polishing this up will help my case.

[sbank]

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of programming tasks were they asked to solve?

[migidomingo]

Just out of curiosity, which bootcamps did these candidates come from?

[ams6110]

Don't call yourself a "Jr."

[jeffbr13]

+1 on this.

If you were hiring, you probably wouldn't choose someone who describes themselves as a novice. Don't focus on your lack of experience, but your other attributes.

[mildavw]

The Portland startup where I work just hired 3 jr. devs. Our goal was 2 seniors and 2 juniors but we didn't get any viable senior candidates. Most candidates were eliminated at the code challenge stage. So that'd be my tip: if you have to complete a code challenge, make sure it's the best code you've ever written. Even if it's a trivial task, things like full test coverage and demonstrating that you know some OOP best practices will give you a better chance at an interview.

The two bootcamp grads we hired had much stronger skills than most of their peers. I had conversations with their instructors and, indeed, they said that these guys were top of the class.

Also note that while senior devs are hard to find, competition is fierce at the junior level. We relocated one from Boston and the other had done his bootcamp in Chicago.

[meeps]

It's great to hear that you've assembled a strong team that includes jrs. Thanks for the tips regarding the coding challenge / code quality!

[coralreef]

How old were these two?

[mildavw]

Early/mid 20's.

[bratsche]

Stop calling yourself a Jr. developer. Instead just send in your resume to places that are looking for Rails developers and include anything you've built so far.

That said, if you get an interview I'm not saying to misrepresent yourself. But you're focusing on your inexperience right now. Your resume should focus on what you've accomplished, not on what you haven't.

[meeps]

Yes, you are right. Good point here.

[phantom_oracle]

You make it unclear what your skills are. Being a bootcamp, I assume you've got RoR or Node.js as your stack?

You also don't specify where you are applying. Startups or corporates?

I've also never heard of any major tech companies in OR, so perhaps you may need to consider relocating.

If I was in your position, I would go for some company like Oracle/RackSpace/RedHat. Do the ugly grunt work for a year or so and gain a shit load of experience. Don't be afraid to do as many certifications as the company can afford as well.

You can then leave after that year or so. Go do some startup stuff, see if you like it. If you don't, you can always go back to the $90k job with your certs.

PS. Here are some keywords for a startup job (polite humour): "I know web-scale" ; "node.js and async rule the world" ; "non-relational DBs shard efficiently and beat relational DB asses" ; "rapid prototyper" ; "Rails gems" ; "convention over configuration" .

Good luck!

[meeps]

Thanks for the tips. My stack is RoR.

[whywhywhy5]

By Jr. do you mean a paid internship? And when you say no one is hiring, do you mean in Portland, OR, or including SF?

[TheCoelacanth]

They will. There are plenty of companies that hire CS grads straight out of school. The reason that you are having trouble is that a bachelors in CS is considered a basic qualification for a developer without professional experience. Spending a few months in a bootcamp is not an adequate replacement.

[jkmcf]

Companies won’t/shouldn't hire Jr devs unless they have the bandwidth and desire to mentor them. They may also see your non-dev work as a potential distraction.

[tomasien]

I don't think this is true at all. Nothing about my experience suggests this is the case. There's a very specific stage of startup that usually has little use for Jr. Devs - growing from seed to A round requires onboarding experts. But going from 0->seed or seed->validation or A/B round -> larger round or IPO requires lots of Jr. Devs.

[cnp]

In my experience, it's all about experience. Experience teaches you to come right out and ask questions, and not kill time when many of your coworkers most likely know or can intuit the answer.

I'm all about hiring new devs and giving them a chance, but if I meet someone who strikes me as somewhat shy about speaking up its definitely a red flag.

[jetsnoc]

My email address is in my profile. Please send me a resume and a little more information about yourself.

[palojobs]

why don't you send an email to fotoroll at gmail dot com with your resume ?

[markcampbell]

Because developers who are familiar with these kind of bootcamps realize that the graduates that come out aren't going to be a net positive on the team.

[peterbotond]

look for a developer without startup experience and have you both forge ahead with a startup.