Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

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I haven't really paid attention to that market for quite a while, but when I was actively looking for a job as a junior dev in SF in 2012, I remember being absolutely maddened by patio11's repeated comments the roaring demand for devs. "Anyone who can fizzbuzz" was the phrase I remember him using.

At that time I was junior, but I'd made and published 3 flash games, hacked on the UI of my WP blog quite a bit and made some basic tools with Node.js. I could definitely fizzbuzz, discuss time and space complexity, solve the equivalent of today's easy leetcode questions and more. And yet I saw my savings dwindle towards zero while reading on HN about how easy it was to get a job as a dev.

My feeling is that there's always been a considerable demand for great devs and very little demand for juniors. I've seen companies advertise positions for interns but I honestly can't recall a single time they were advertising roles for junior or entry level devs.

I lucked into my first job with a startup and never had to go through the job hunt as a junior candidate (other than through a few big company mass grad hire processes which were an absolute fucking joke, and thank god I didn't actually pass any of them), but this mirrors my experience with hiring juniors.

Every time I've done it I've been inundated with candidates. You pretty much have the pick of the litter.

Personally I'd prefer to hire a lot more juniors. I think most senior front-end developers are pretty rubbish at their jobs and have spent most of an easy career on autopilot learning bad habits and bad development practices. I much prefer to work with juniors, before those "senior" (mostly enterprise and consulting) devs have got to them.

The problem is it's just not possible to train juniors the right way fast enough. I'm confident I can train almost anyone with basic programming aptitude to be a 95th percentile front-end dev, but it'll take a year or two, and my already average productivity will tank during it.

Most managers won't understand or accept that. They would, except that there's always someone else selling them the "get people productive in 2 weeks!" bullshit, which you can't compete with. Big companies (the ones with the budget to train juniors) pay a huge amount of lip service to training, but are pretty much universally bad places to actually train great devs. They're good at turning them into average consultants that get flustered with their tools and stuck all the time, because they overengineer everything and never bothered to learn from first principles. (Then they give up and pretend to work while spending 8 hours a day whinging on HN about how bad the JS ecosystem is).

And if you're doing your own thing without managers to mess it up, then you probably live and die by your productivity. Unless someone wants to throw a stack of money at you just to create great devs without accomplishing much else, then it's not gonna happen naturally.

There's other impediments too. I love working in person with juniors, but not as much as I hate commuting. And I think training juniors is one of the few things that's much harder to do remotely.

This is why there's so much demand for great devs. There's just so few of them. The industry isn't set up to train juniors, and the places that can waste the resources to do it are the ones that have environments which turn them into idiots.

It’s really a sad state of affairs. An industry that hates its own young in experience while pushing ageism on its elderly in age. An ouroboros industry.

Ironically a downturn might help with that culture. The problems you mention have been exacerbated by the "tech bro" attitudes of twenty-something or maybe thirty-something seniors and founders working in businesses that have been more about winning the next funding round than making a good product that produces a sustainable profit. That gravy train is probably off the rails for a while now and it's possible that we will see more interest in hiring or retaining older devs with the experience to actually get results. We might also see less emphasis on job-hopping very frequently for career growth and that will make hiring and training up juniors more attractive.

>The problem is it's just not possible to train juniors the right way fast enough. I'm confident I can train almost anyone with basic programming aptitude to be a 95th percentile front-end dev, but it'll take a year or two, and my already average productivity will tank during it.

Nobody taught me anything, apart my teachers at University. Nobody hand holded me. I was able to learn and grow by myself, by reading, applying, trying to find solutions, applying those solutions. Which I continue to this day.

Why should be juniors hand holded? You show them the application, you explain it to them, you give them time to look into it, you reply to their questions about the application and you give them tasks. If they are any good, they should be capable to learn without hand holding.

I don't think parent was talking about hand-holding at all.

> You show them the application, you explain it to them, you give them time to look into it, you reply to their questions about the application and you give them tasks.

Exactly; this is the training. Choosing tasks that match the other person's level, and being available to give good guidance, takes time, effort, and some skill.

Part of the problem is perhaps that you were looking for titles explicitly coded 'junior' at all. Title inflation basically means that many devs that would basically be juniors in real engineering companies are considered senior.

It's a weird market where the difference between 0 and 1 year of experience can be so dramatically reflected in salaries and opportunities.

I had 1.5 years of experience (in China). I hustled hard in SF, got rejected by 100+ companies, and really, really struggled to scrape by on some set price contract gigs.

All of that changed one night when I showed a demo of a browser game I'd made at a meetup some Groupon devs happened to be at. That lead to a phone screen, an onsite, a job and then never another time when I couldn't get a decent tech job. Of course my skills improved over time, but the biggest delta was just getting a single name on my resume that hiring recruiters respected.

I sometimes wonder how many people are out there are like me a decade ago—able to do well in whiteboard interviews, capable enough to contribute, eager... and consistently denied a chance to even try.

I suspect the answer is rather high. I had similar experiences getting back into tech when I decided archeology wasn't the field for me. I had about some years of experience paying my way through college with contract dev work, but after several offers were retracted once a execs saw my background I managed to find an old school hacker in SF said yes. They were filling in while the real boss was on medical leave. When the real boss got back, I was immediately informed shouldn't have been hired despite doing my job well.

Years and companies later, I've brought it up in those diversity hiring meetings, but that's not the sort of changes that are being sought at most places.

I saw a job posting recently looking for senior developers with 3 years of work experience. I mean, I have 3 years of full time experience + a little more experience working part time and internships, and I would consider myself a junior dev.

I’m in over 10 years now and I find the deeper I go, the less I like this senior title. I mean, what will I be in another 10 years? In 15? These titles are meaningless, really.

I agree though, at 3 years I was still fairly junior in the scheme of things. I was doing full stack work and building money-making applications from scratch, but it wasn’t great work. It wasn’t going to scale well, the front end was based on an ad-hoc framework because I was afraid of learning and implementing new tools like backbone.js, there were very few tests, not great internal tooling to aid workflows, I wasn’t a great mentor, etc. A lot of what I did was because it worked once before, and not because I knew exactly how and why. My fourth year was when I got my first senior title, though.

I like when companies distinguish engineering levels by capability. E1 through E7 for example, where E5+ would be approximately what people imagine when they hear the term senior. Unfortunately everyone uses different leveling, so it’s hard to adhere to that. Our industry would benefit from standards.

I’m hitting 15 years in the industry. I think I’m like 3x better at my job than 10 years ago when I first got my current title

Existence of staff (and less prominently, senior staff/principal) titles is now common - IC hierarchy does not end at senior as it did few years ago at 95% companies.

I got a job at a FAANG by writing a for loop to check if a number was prime right around that time. The solution was completely naive and the interview was done over the phone in less than an hour. This is an anecdote, but there were some opportunities like this.

Were you just out of school or at the beginning of your career? I've never heard of anything remotely like that but there does seem to be a very different set of expectations for 22 year-olds than for 32 or 42 year-olds with a similar set of skills and amount of experience in the industry.

Yea I was in school at the time.

Were you studying at an "approved" school? Back then that was a big thing for some of the FAANGs.

I don’t know. My school wasn’t very good, so I can’t imagine it was on any type of approved school list.

I don’t know what you graduated in. But I was given a chance at my first good company because I followed a pretty elitist (natural sciences I must add) curriculum. But in the meantime, I had found consulting jobs pretty easily. And even if they’re crap it launches you in the career.

> I don't know what you graduated in.

You don't know I graduated at all.

I'm not saying either way, but if I did, it had zero utility in my software career. Credentialism on degree subject matter for people making mid-career moves is misguided at best.

You were talking about a junior position in your post, not mid-career move.

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