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.
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!).
> 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.
Once X is widely known as a path to wealth, entry level positions get flooded with applications (e.g. a junior posting at my company could easily receive 1000 resumes) beyond what they are capable of judging on an individual basis. Once companies hit this point, they start looking for heuristics to cut down on the amount of searching they need to do. "Gatekeeping" is these heuristics.
Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested. Why? Because those schools do a good job of filtering out bad candidates, and offer up enough good ones to fully meet the hiring needs of the company, figuring any generational geniuses they miss will make a name for themselves some other way and can be hired later.
So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.
I used to get kinda miffed that super popular restaurants like Border Cafe in Harvard Square do not take reservations, so you basically have to wait an hour or two to get a spot. But from their point of view it makes perfect sense. Why would they go through the trouble if they fill their tables at 100% with a line around the block
to boot? That's how I think of the hiring pipelines as well.
p.s. Yes this is out of date somewhat but I promise Border Cafe was a hopping place 20 years ago :-)
Reservations are worse. You have cancellations, and fragmentation if any party leaves early. This can more than make the difference between a restaurant being profitable or not.
Although I’m not sure this can be extended by analogy to only hiring from “top” schools. Beyond, they don’t don’t need to do something so they don’t.
>So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.
the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes. if they are smarter it is bc of direct filtering by SAT at the admissions stage and indirect genetic confounds, not because elite institutions actually teach useful things better.
> the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes
As someone who taught kids like this I can't agree. I taught hundreds of kids real math, writing, and programming skills that I now use in my professional life as a highly paid software engineer. Some of those kids have reconnected with me as adults to tell me I made a difference in their lives and credit my teaching (which their parents paid thousands for) as a very meaningful part of their success.
What are the KPI's of the people doing the recruiting strategy for these organizations?
They're incentivized to hire people who will fit in, and perform well. After a certain level of competency, from any school, this is no longer a distinguishing feature. So they double down on the culture fit, and the easiest way to eliminate risk is to hire from a pool of people who have already demonstrated that culture.
I has a very illuminating chat once with a hiring consultant developing the onboarding/induction process and activity package for graduate engineers starting at a global oil&gas company (different industry, but the same level of gatekeeping).
When taking the grads through these activities, she was struck by the fact they all looked and sounded nearly identical(even with obligatory racial diversity). She later found out that the two managers in charge of graduate program were hiring exclusively from the two engineering schools they themselves had attended, and that they were running into a terrible time retaining graduates after the program had finished, as they usually stepped off into more boutique consultancies or went to work on passion projects as money was never the motivator.
The recommendation from her consultancy was to broaden their hiring practices, and that drawing exclusively upper crust engineers who just saw the role as a stepping stone was going to hurt them in the long run, whereas they'd get much better loyalty from middle class graduates.
status signalling games are correlated with success in the real world almost by definition, but that does not mean they are useful to society or that we should tolerate ever greater shares of resources ploughed into them. it is a zero sum game!
>As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.
This is funny to me, because in most debates about the function and efficacy of public schools, I'm assured by the other side that money isn't the issue.
They're partly right. The US has some aggressively stupid educational policy such as teaching reading via 3 cueing (which I won't go into here), but they've also fallen for a bit of accounting trick.
Most obviously, schools being funded via property tax in most states means rich districts tend to receive more money than schools in poorer districts. Less obvious is that because the US doesn't offer many services generally those that are offered are often routed through the schools and attributed to the education budget e.g. many kinds of therapists and aides are part of school budgets in the US but are part budget under various health department budgets in other countries and thus those countries' total spend on students is undercounted.
Similarly, countries that invest in making sure there are enough social services to ensure a good life for even the bottom 20% of society need to spend a lot less fixing the problems that arise from growing up with a bad home life and get more bang for their buck.
It's not the state money. It's all the private money the parents dump on top. The tutoring, the extracurricular, the sports, the summer camp, etc, etc, etc, all the shit that teaches them the norms of white collar society so they can fit in enough to do ok in college and beyond.
>Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested.
Yes, and this is certainly not a new phenomenon. I used to work with a recruiting department at a large upper-end law firm. They only took new associates from the top 10 universities. This was 35 years ago. So there's nothing new under the sun.
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.
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.
It may have at one point, but Goodhart's Law is always looming in the background, waiting to fuck with any filter you care to come up with. In the last few generations, the shift to college being viewed (and subsidized) as an effectively-required vocational training program has diminished the quality of education in degree programs expected to turn out workers while pushing a lot of people through who would not otherwise have been interested in higher education. It's no longer a very effective filter for quality applicants
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.
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)
Taxing "success" doesn't make it failure even with top bracket paying 90% of it back. The hyperbole and melodrama of economic winners complaining about taxes tends to make me unsympathetic. Meanwhile for the median earner, oftentimes admirable work is effectively taxed into stagnation or failure, not by the government per se, but by the upwards money funnels controlled by rent seekers further up the hierarchy, the negative lottery of savings-draining misfortunes, useless mandatory insurance, taxes they actually pay because they don't have access to as many accounting tricks, employers that collude to pay them less than they're worth, and so on.
Taxing success is part of what got us here. We let these rogue optimizers get really big because of this dumb theory that everyone can somehow automagically benefit from these entities that accumulate massive power and influence. What actually happens is what always happens in such arrangements: When the entity gets powerful enough to ignore or alter the deal, they will, inevitably, whether that deal is taxes, checks and balances, or being subject to any sort of market forces, like there being competition in your market or consumers caring about (and being able to make choices about) the quality of good or service you are selling them. Risk-aversion means that such entities will try to insulate themselves from threats to their power by whatever means they have available, and we have seen time and time again that this includes subverting all the high-minded idealism of both democracy and free market economics.
They want to punish people and companies for getting good at their jobs to such an extent that there are no rewards for doing something well. The argument is fully analogous to economic growth being bad and by reversal poverty being good.
> 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
> Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone
The only way we have ever discovered of widely making more of anything is scaling processes and organisations that work. If you punish scale you punish success. This is true for manufacturing, agriculture and education and those feed into everything.
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?
You chose the example, not me. Also, my contention isn't that the global economy doesn't make sense, of course it makes sense, otherwise it wouldn't be there. What I'm saying is that prioritizing economies of scale is good for the bottom line of companies that do it and generally bad for everyone else on long timescales
I'm lucky to have a decently large yard in a decently arable part of the world. The garden in my home produces enough fresh vegetables for my (moderate) needs, but it certainly doesn't produce all the food I eat.
I don’t see an “upper-middle class” filter in this particular case though. The company college hiring pipelines are often not limited to Ivy League or “top 10” universities. For example my company was looking fOr summer interns, and any college would work. We’ve had an intern on our team from college which was ranked around #80... gave him full time offer btw.
You've found a feature, not a bug. In my view, wealth and power concentration is the point of nations and empires, not the side effect. Keeping all that power within a few like minded hands is how the upper classes keep their heads attached to their shoulders. From there it's turtles all the way down.
> What's the systemic issue that keeps doing wealth gatekeeping?
UMC wants these jobs reserved for its children.
Btw, what's wrong with that? If the job itself doesn't require any particular skill or competence but is very rewarding, why should they not reserve it for themselves?
There still exists jobs that can't be filled through these networks and they are open to anyone.
FWIW, I’ve worked with some very talented college students from lesser-known universities who were able to land FAANG jobs at graduation. They weren’t directly recruited, but their applications were still taken seriously, at least at the time (few years back)
A parallel problem I’m seeing is that much of the internet advice for juniors is written as if the world revolves around FAANG companies. A lot of the local college students I’ve mentored slate convinced that a reasonable starting compensation is $200K for 1st year CS graduates at every company and that they’re going to get it by playing a game where they interview at 5 different companies simultaneously and make them bid against each other. It’s a shock when they enter the job market and realize companies aren’t in a rush to pay them Google-level salaries for basic webdev or app development work.
It’s bad enough that when I start talking to new mentees I can almost guess which internet communities and even blog posts they’ve been using to gather their view of CS jobs.
> FWIW, I’ve worked with some very talented college students from lesser-known universities who were able to land FAANG jobs at graduation. They weren’t directly recruited, but their applications were still taken seriously, at least at the time
Can confirm. I come from an average state school and landed a FAANG internship for next summer. I always try to get my foot in the door early so there’s still undeniably plenty of spots left because if it comes down to two equally qualified candidates, they’re probably picking the Stanford student over the other student.
> A parallel problem I’m seeing is that much of the internet advice for juniors is written as if the world revolves around FAANG companies.
I see this sentiment on Reddit so much that at times I wonder how much of "everyone is rejecting juniors" can be attributed to juniors applying to only FAANG's and getting rejected.
Regarding the unreasonable salary expectations, I think that's just case of students seeing insane salaries in the Bay Area and thinking that it's reflective of the entire industry rather than a response to the insane cost of living in the bay area. A new-grad making $200k per year sounds insane on paper, until you realize that a studio apartment near the office is going to run you $4k/month
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!
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.
It's even more nuanced than you describe. Even within the hiring funnel, which school you go to often determines where you end up in the company. I will take my old employer (Intel) as an example. MIT, Stanford, etc. had a monopoly on "integration" engineers, which were the high visibility/high impact roles that coordinated all of the wafer fabrication steps among the engineers in process, yield, metrology, etc. The rank-and-file process, data analysis, etc. engineers were pulled from the next tier of schools. Finally, metrology, reliability, and QA came from all over, usually 2nd or 3rd rung state schools.
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.
Yes, exactly. One of the things we had going for us as an industry is that our interviews might be BS but at least anyone had a shot. You didn’t have to go to Harvard. Now that’s ending.
Not that easily, especially when there are things that are rarely used in actual development that CS courses force you to memorize - it’s hard to know what is important and what is not. Code interview prep books being 400+ pages kind of show this.
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.
Part of it is just incredible laziness. One year my team was late in selecting intern resumes to interview for joining our team the next summer, and getting later because prospects who were contacted had already accepted internships elsewhere. When I was asked to help out selecting resumes to contact, they were all stored in a google drive folder with subfolders for each school. I asked for a list of who had already been contacted so I don't submit duplicates, and learned that the former guy doing it had just gone into the UC Berkeley folder and was picking files from there. One, no wonder they were taken, but two, come on... I downloaded everything into a flat local folder, and reviewed resumes by a mix of random selection with shuf and pdfgrep'ing some keywords I thought might be unique.
> tech companies recruit from only a small selection of schools
I don't really think it's true. At least a few years ago, I saw statistics that one of the highest represented universities at Apple was San Jose State — simply due to being large and local.
I recently had the opportunity to interview 3 fresh college graduates for Apple jobs, so out of curiosity, I looked up their colleges to see what kind of filters the recruiters are applying (I thought all 3 were well qualified). 2 of the 3 went to universities ranked between 10-20 in Computer Science in the US, the 3rd went to a college that is not ranked in any discipline in the US News rankings.
So I highly doubt that the filtering is as narrow as is claimed. Unpredictable and not particularly accurate, I'll easily believe.
Most of the well funded fast growth startups that could meaningfully challenge big tech are actually even more picky about pedigree for entry level hires.
Perhaps that's why they fail? They are trying to play by the same rules, on the same field, with the same types of people. A well-funded, fast-growth startup that hired from a pool of people who don't think and believe the same things as the big-tech hires might do better at addressing the problems that plague big tech.
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!
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.
In the years that followed I went almost into a depression because of it. Because I worked so hard (obtaining multiple masters) to try to get a shot and never got one. In retrospect, I feel my approach to FAANG was a much riskier endeavor than I realized.
And then it got complicated. People on HN offered to refer me. It never fully worked out. Here is why:
* Sometimes I screwed it up by not strongly chasing after it
* I wasn’t a recent enough grad anymore, I needed to interview for E4
* One time an acquaintance of mine offered to give a referral and then ultimately didn’t but before he didn’t, I declined a referral from a HN’er to the same company because of it
I am working at an okay company, but I feel stuck. I want to work with people that want to treat the company they work for as if it is their own. I want fellow colleagues to be entrepreneurial. I am missing that.
How entrepreneurial is someone who will work only in companies created 20+ years ago, enjoying the comforts of a monopolistic market position created off of the work of other engineers? Some people go work at a big company, some others go work a company big.
You should interview at a few startups to see what they are like. Good chance to meet with people and ask questions, in my experience, they will have a much bigger emphasis on culture/Q&A interviews
You should really talk to someone about this, because you attitude of “I missed out on an internship, so my life is ruined” isn’t healthy.
People at FAANGs don’t “own the company by any means any more.
And the fact that you have a job (and probably a good job in software) shows how privileged US developers can be.
Having an office job, in a growth industry, in an in-demand field, in a country with lots of opportunities is a huge privilege that most don’t have have.
Sure you don’t work at an ad-tech FAANG company earning obscene rates, but it’s not the end of the world.
> 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.
As someone who graduated shortly after the dot-com bubble burst, I'm extremely bitter about this behavior. I basically got screwed out of that pipeline by economic circumstance, then was far enough removed to no longer qualify for it once things recovered.
(And that pipeline isn't just the hiring of new grads, but also the system of internship and co-op opportunities that lead to such hiring.)
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.
Somewhere, from across the bay, blows a wind, and on it wafts the faintest whisper, an echo of an echo, which seems to say, if you listen closely, closely,
Institutional racism~
...Jokes aside - and not to make anyone feel guilty, or to be divisive, but to point out a natural consequence of the above described dynamic - I went to an HBCU. Companies did not visit campus with the frequency that I came to understand they did PWIs of similar cultural or academic standing. I imagine that if companies don't visit your school, you're not on the shortlist for, er, "meritocratic" recruitment preferences.
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.
Yeah but to be a good programmer, it helps a lot to have a real CS education. "Hunger" and "wanting it more" is no substitute for understanding CS fundamentals
Realities and realities. In most EU countries, companies would hire even garbage men if they prove they can code a little bit, because of such high demand for programmers.
Most companies I know like to hire junior devs and form them to their company culture rather than to deal with the "baggage" of senior devs with 15 - 20 years of experience.
More and more senior devs complain that they are essentially "unhireable" because of their experience and age.
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.
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.
But coming from a small uni in Normandy, France, it's also possible not to go to a "top" internship, shit that up and be let go with a kick in the ass.
You can go to a small do-it-all no-money startup for a few years, suffer your ass through it, climb up a few more job and end up exactly at the same place with a very good story and a lot of experience from doing more with less that top companies can appreciate, and actually be the one bossing the silver spoons into work.
It's a fallacy to think people are disadvantaged by not going straight to the top with no real world experience.
How does hiring immigrants fit into this pipeline? Every team I've worked was majority immigrant (myself included ;), from entry level all the way to a few layers up the management chain. Most didn't go to any US schools.
This is something I’ve been experiencing in my quest to switch from IT to SWE.
Entry level jobs are for new grads, and absolutely nobody cares about personal projects or professional experience that doesn’t have “software engineer” in the job title.
> 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.
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.
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, not everyone can land a SWE internship, but at least show food service experience or something). 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).
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>
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
Yeah that’s what I meant. You need some sort of work experience. Flipping burgers, doing tech support or a SWE intern. Having no experience is the red flag.
When I was in college I was asked to review a few resume's for some fellow students. A number of the resume's I saw that no work experience whatsoever. I remember asking the students like hey did you forget to include your work experience or something and they all told me that they basically never had a job before, no flipping burgers, no internship, nada.
It sounds unbelievable but it happens, alot. It's one thing when all your experience so far has been flipping burgers or driving Uber, but it's another when they literally have never had a job their entire life.
Yeah my parents kicked me into work at 14 up to 18 just for the sake of understanding what it is and it was invaluable in my first interview for a big boy job: the fact I started at 14 to earn some money and was proud of it and could even give recommendations to deal with clients (worked in an auction store carrying furniture for people every weekend of my teenage years despite having rich parents) seriously impressed the boss and all his worries about me not coming from a top uni whatever were compensated by my understanding of his own suffering.
As a junior, the best best way to pass an interview is understanding you're a cost and accepting experience is part of the pay. Any sign of you expecting to be "paid your due" or "resisting undue exploitation" is an immediate ulcer inducing stress for the hiring person "omg he knows nothing, will take months to start producing above his cost, and he's already talking like a diva". Leave after 6 months if you must, telling the boss you cant possibly survive
I’m changing careers in my late 20s. I have a pretty solid experience in IT and a BROAD background. What would that look like to you if I were to be applying as an intern? I’m not sure if being experienced is a pro or a con.
> seriously, a resume with no internship or even unrelated work like food service is a red flag
I'm going to ding this ... hard.
First and most importantly: some students I knew were trying to accelerate their path through college. They didn't want to rack up huge loans and wanted out ASAP to start making money. This group included both right out of high school as well as returning non-traditional students. They simply didn't have time for employment. And, with Covid, I suspect that this cohort is going to have a big boost.
Second: some students are helping take care of their family and going to college is enough of a time struggle. You are knocking this group out--and my experience suggests that a lot of them are female. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a good example from this class.
Third: personally, my experience suggests that those working "food service" jobs, specifically, are sub par. This applies only to that group and not other "customer service" roles (like retail sales). "Food service" is a time consuming job with weak wages and unstable hours dealing with a psychologically draining public cohort. Anyone with a brain wired for programming wants out of that kind of job post haste and has some level of skill to do so.
However, even then, I try not to let prior experience color my perceptions of junior engineers and programmers.
Junior engineers need to be "teachable" more than anything else. Generally, what I look for is what they absorbed from one of their teachers that isn't in the book.
Good teachers are always giving off a bag of pearls of wisdom beyond the scope of the class. Students in my classes got exposed to automated testing, source control, and an IDE. Often I'd give out epigrams of wisdom "70% of the time use a hash table; 30% of the time use a vector; 0.01% of the time ask somebody what you should be using instead when those don't work."
Good programmers and engineers latch onto something out of that bag because they find it interesting. That's what you're looking for in an interview as it signifies they can be taught and actually want to do this. I find this is probably more important even than absolute GPA.
> 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).
Sadly, this does seem to be true for the majority of junior folks. They just can't code. I don't really know how you get out of a degree program without that, but they somehow do.
I suspect this is the simple reason why so many companies just go after the "elite" schools--you can't escape from those programs without having at least a minimum level of competence at coding.
> Sadly, this does seem to be true for the majority of junior folks. They just can't code. I don't really know how you get out of a degree program without that, but they somehow do.
I don't know if this applies to the top CS schools, but now that CS is quickly becoming the most popular major at the majority of US colleges, you have to expect the average quality to drop. Once upon a time, CS programs were filled with the kids who were innately just really into computers. Now they're filled with all of the kids who don't necessarily love tech, but just compared "SWE Salary" vs "Doctor Salary" vs "I-banker Salary" when deciding what to major in. Now that crazy FAANG salaries and "day in the life" videos are splattered all over Twitter and YouTube, more and more money/prestige chasers will be graduating with CS degrees even if they just scraped by without really absorbing the material and writing a lot of code.
That is more or less my conclusion, however it seems incredibly hard (that me personally) to find out if they have that skill during an interview. Do you have some tips on that?
Biggest general tip: practice and experience. Do some mock interviews. Sit in with some other interviewers just as an observer. Be extremely critical of your own performance as an interviewer.
It feels silly. However, it helps a lot. Sitting in on an interview is especially useful. You can pay attention to the reactions of the interviewee a lot better when you're not running the interview. You will recognize lots of cringeworthy moments--pay attention to them and try not to do them yourself. Asking other people in your company to answer your interview questions will pinpoint places that are vague or unclear and possibly even incorrect. It also helps calibrate--if already employed people can't pass your interview loop, your interview loop sucks.
However, interviewing is a human thing, so like any social question, there are no hard and fast answers.
Three particular pieces of advice I give:
1) Basic courtesy and professionalism
Good grief. Why are people so terrible about this?
Don't leave an interviewee alone. Be on time. Remember their name. Try to call them what they want to be called (my name has various shortenings that I don't care about--some people care very much, though). Offer them drinks and bathroom breaks. Read their resume more that 30 seconds before entering the room. Actually read their resume. Don't make them drive for lunch. Have their reimbursement check by the end of the interview. Thank them for their time.
This industry seems to have so few people willing to provide even basic courtesy and respect that it makes me cringe. This industry is small and the wheel turns a lot--that person you are interviewing may be your interviewer in 5 years and absolutely will remember you if you are kind and professional.
2) Listen. Really listen. Shut up and listen. Pay attention to the person in front of you and try to make them feel like they are the most important, most interesting person in the world.
The person IS important. You're trying to hire them and make them your colleague. Treat them like it.
When you do this, people will tell you a lot. They almost can't help it. You're not trying to trick anybody; you just want them to be who they are professionally.
3) Start from slightly above neutral and give minus and plus assessments.
Sure, if they can't pass your FizzBuzz equivalent, you don't want to hire them.
However, too many interviewers start from default "You're flunking" and it's very difficult to get out of that. This is a junior person--by definition, they're going to have a difficult time moving your needle in the positive direction.
Given this is a junior person, the interviewer needs to work to hunt for positives. Your questions need to have enough open-endedness that an interviewee can impress you to varying degrees. If you find something that you deem positive on their resume, ask them about it and give them the opportunity to score some points.
Finally, one thing to do is simply be honest about your job positions. Most positions are not rocket science--they are standard coding positions with some business specific quirks. If your junior candidate got a degree with a better than 3.0 GPA from any decent (read: something like ABET accredited) program, they have pretty much already demonstrated that they have the motivation and acumen to do your job.
So, if they "didn't pass your loop" you should have a really clear reason why you are not hiring them. If multiple junior people aren't passing your interview loop for junior people, the problem is more likely with the interview loop or your job expectations than the junior candidates.
You misread my post (or I wrote it poorly). I’m saying people should have some experience, even if it’s not tech experience, by the time they’re graduating school.
There are lots of people who have reasons for not having any "experience" coming out of school due to external time constraints.
Single mothers, for example, have it particularly hard. Any single mother who manages to drag herself through a CS degree has so much persistence that she can definitely do your job.
As I point out, many students with hard time and money constraints try to compress the time to get their degree. The best way to do that is to take heavy course loads with no summer breaks and not do employment.
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.
Don't be afraid of applying. If they find you a good problem solver, who is eager to learn, is humble and has reasonable cognitive skills, many companies may decide to extend an offer, even if they don't have an opening exactly to your profile at the moment.
I've seen this happen with friends of mine applying remotely during the pandemic.
Also came here to call BS : around 1/2 of the developers I work with are junior. Provided they are smart and willing to take direction, the more the merrier. Software is different than most other professions in this respect because a junior practitioner is able to demonstrate ability without a professional job (try that as a junior neurosurgeon).
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.
This is a highly overlooked point. In these massive developer organizations, you're able to focus more and more on the core of your profession and have to deal less and less with catchall technical tasks. The scope of work is very different and you can't expect the skillsets working in a startup to be applicable to those in tech giants and vice versa.
Tech has an issue where only a handful of titles try to cover a massive diversity of actual skillsets. I'm not entirely sure if this is good or bad but it at least leads to significant confusion when assessing someone's abilities. Not all SEs are the same in terms of their focuses, there are lots of flavors in reality.
I see so many job postings for “fresh grad” roles. I interpret them as “we’re not going to pay very much, so take your senior skills elsewhere”. Current company hires a lot of fresh grads and interns, not always a good staffing decision for the projects since they need a lot of mentoring.
Are we about to start swinging back to the “nobody hires really experienced devs because they’re too old/expensive” discussion soon?
Yep. The FANG I work at now mostly hires out of school. The schools generally tend to be the ones existing engineers came from(not your typical Ivy leagues or big names) but we do mix it up.
Previously I worked at a small but growing defense contractor and they also hired Jr's and recent grads.
It's a big world though, and I can't say my small sample of it is representative of the bigger whole.
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).
I'd add that there are now so many bootcamp candidates that want a J-O-B and have a passing interest in computers that just filtering them out gets old. The only realistic option for a small team is to reject bootcamp candidates from the get go. You will of course have a few exceptions, but good luck finding them.
A comp sci degree really is a much better filter for junior devs.
I hire bootcamp grads because I don't see too many comp sci grads with github repos that include working code - and in the rare case it almost never includes comments in the code nor passing tests. It's just a job - I'm measuring ability not passion.
A github is really a much better filter for any dev.
Most of the time I’ve seen one, it’s been full of code that is irrelevant, poor or both. Or someone has touted that they’re a committer to a significant OSS project and a git blame shows they’ve done virtually nothing except a readme.
You'd be sad to here this but I have seen lot of people cheat in this, by copying projects and changing small things, thus I don't think it's a good filter in practice. (Unless everyone in your company can spot bullshit while hiring).
And this is not specific to bootcamps. Any measure popular enough will be gamed, Leetcode or GitHub.
In my experience after applying to a few dozen jobs in my quest to switch from IT to SWE, not a single one has taken a serious look at my GitHub projects.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Training up an employee only takes a few months.
Uh??? No it doesn't. There's a huge skill discrepancy between senior devs and junior devs. You can train them to be somewhat useful, but it'll take years for them to champion complex projects by themselves, and even then, it takes years on top to be able to gather reqs, ask the right questions to stakeholders, and make a scalable, solid implementation.
Juniors are great if you have low hanging fruits, or you want to invest in a great hire.
> Uh??? No it doesn't. There's a huge skill discrepancy between senior devs and junior devs.
Most companies take the bet that they don't need to train juniors to seniors, they just need to get them to some minimum level of positive contribution.
> it takes years on top to be able to gather reqs, ask the right questions to stakeholders, and make a scalable, solid implementation
Sometimes you just need some people to update HTML templates, update an API call to your charging platform to include a description, or any number of smaller tasks that pop up. It's why it's called shit work.
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.
> 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!
·Saying "there is no such thing" does not make it true. What are you? 10?
·You should be able to look whatever you want, even old.
·I`ve been in lots of situations where the first thing the hiring manager asks is the candidate age and drops the CV as soon it finds out is older than 35.
yes you're right this is cutural, but the question doesn't really have any context.
It's just in many countries it's illegal to ask that question, and from my experience working for a couple of Australian and (1) US companies, no one gives a shit about your age, as in the number. Your manager/workmates don't care, HR doesn't have a criterion for it, it's illegal and that's my answer to the question.
Again they may care if you are really old.
I know back in my home country in Asia it's legal to have an age criterion.
>> 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. Also, you cant pay rent with illiquid stock options in a series A firm even if the options vested already.
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.
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.
Usually then comes down to the issue of the company seeing a senior dev as someone with 10-15 years experience, but offering pay that would suit a senior dev of 3-5 years experience.
> 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.
Self taught is easy. I actually prioritize self taught programmers over someone with a CS degree. Someone who taught themselves c++ for fun usually understands the concepts. College grads it is really hit or miss. There’s that fizz buzz thing that gets brought up all the time.
But self taught often runs short when you get into theoretical stuff... Then again most CS grads won't recall any of that..
It depends what you do, but if someone is implementing array types it's bad not to know about amortized complexity. Then again, most people rarely implement arrays :)
At the end of the day, the best you can do is aim to have good people from a variety backgrounds.
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.
In my experience, the worst CS grads are worse than the worst bootcamp grads, but the best CS grads are better than the best bootcamp grads.
Bootcamps self-select for people who actually tend to have some interest, and force them to learn to graduate. So all bootcamp grads (or at least those from decent bootcamps) learn a decent amount during the bootcamp.
University often gets people who are just there for the degree. When I was in university I marked for many classes, and also helped students, and there are many people who simply have no interest in the material and do not learn a thing. They can still graduate by doing the minimum amount of prep for tests, relying on others for projects and assignments, and cheating.
However, university is also a 4 year long process where you can choose to take challenging courses in a variety of subjects, pursue cutting-edge research projects, and do whatever else you want in your free time. A motivated university student can graduate with not only what they learned in class, but accumulated knowledge from the books they read, courses they took, and projects they worked on outside of class. Plus a deep understanding of all the theory and such covered in class.
Which isn't to say they're better in any sort of judgemental sense - give a bootcamp grad another 3.5 years purely dedicated to learning, and they'd be just as capable.
Unfortunately, relatively few people actually make the most of their time in university, or even come close. (At least, in terms of learning - perhaps they value other things more, which is fine, but we're speaking of employable skills.) Maybe 10% of students at my university graduated with a level of skill equal to or better than a motivated bootcamp grad.
Very true, was looking at the GP which was comparing bootcamps to college, and maintaining that thread. May not apply to the parent who did not mention bootcamps.
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
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.
Sounds like your pay or working conditions are below market.
As always, companies don't really have problems hiring or keeping workers. They just have problems at their price point, which they are unwilling to change.
Possibly, but it used to be frowned upon for people to switch jobs after a year - it was a bad thing to have on your resume. People joined a grad program with the understanding that they'd hang around after they were trained. Now that deal is gone - we shouldn't bother training them in the first place.
Sure, you could simply stop hiring junior devs and focus on poaching senior devs. With your below-market pay and working conditions, there should be no problem doing this. That'll show those junior devs who's boss!
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?
FWIW Ive heard the same thing from someone I know who ran a consultancy. He said it was 50/50 of whether a new grad would be up to speed and productive enough after 8 months. Basically the first 8 months the company was likely to lose money on the new hire.
Your comment seems to insinuate that the blame falls with the company. There is just a long ramp up that needs to happen with junior hires. There is so much technology and processes to learn about.
Let me turn it around: in what world would you find it acceptable for a paid professional to take 8 months before they stop being a liability? Especially in today's jobhop heavy environment?
Humans learn incredibly fast when motivated, so yes, I am quite skeptical when someone throws such a vague statement as if we should just accept the problems lie with juniors and not any of the many things a company could be doing wrong. In your case, "so much technology and processes", I'm already skeptical an individual needs to know that much to be productive in a junior role, for a few contexts only.
I nearly doubled my salary when I jumped ship. Market is quite competitive for decent devs even if they are junior.
And junior isn't always a good indicator on programming ability as well, my friend wrote a Pascal compiler in two days for example.
Tragedy of the commons? After they’re trained up a new company can afford to give them more money since they don’t have to break even on the training period any more.
This has been my experience as well. We have a fairly organized stack where our juniors can start being productive and learning from the first weeks
What ends up happening is that they end up leaving at the 6 month mark after they've become proficient enough to get higher paying (by a couple hundred more) job
It takes a toll on me personally, feels like I'm stuck in a never ending loop of making others better, but getting nothing in return
I agree with you - I regularly see advice on Reddit, Twitter and other forums to change jobs after 12-18 months, often people recommend juniors to jump ship as soon as recruiters reach out, that the first job should be just foot in the door to get to the industry. It means that companies hiring for entry-level positions are at a disadvantage
If you are a new dev, here are a few things to consider:
Many companies hire most during the first and last quarters of the year (Feb-Apr), (Sept-Nov).
Last quarter: New budget for next year allows us to increase devs. Early training opportunity during the slow season.
First Quarter: Things are picking up, we need more devs for the new projects.
Trying to get jobs outside of those periods may be challenging. You’ll likely face a competitive hiring process to fill vacant positions.
The easiest way to get your foot in the door in this industry is either you know someone personally that can refer you to an open position, or seek tech recruiters. (I’m not including individuals that graduates at top colleges as they should have no issues getting jobs).
Tech recruiters does have a bad vibe in our industry due to many reasons, but due to the challenges of securing that first tech job as a brand new dev, the opportunity is a fair trade.
Tech recruiting firms work closely with actual hiring managers. They know what managers are looking for. The hiring process can be fast.
Fulltime positions with benefits: Expect harder interview and bias skill aptitude from hiring manager.
Contract to hire: Easier interview. Higher initial hourly pay due to no benefits.
Things I didn’t include but are equally important, have finished personal github projects, good resume detailing your projects tech, purpose and value.
Brush up on algorithms, OOP and designs. Data structures. Work on acing the interview process.
If you live in an area/city that does not have the available framework/tech that you are interested in, move or suck it up and learn it. (Things are better now, in the US that is)
Be sure to ask what’s the salary range of the position(s). Don’t sell yourself short. And be firm on a potential salary transition. Negotiations can always happen after the 5-6 months contract. Be reasonable.
- I really didn't like that seniority equates to creating value in this article. I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior.
- Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Bootcamp is usually much shorter and very narrow. CS is longer and much broader. Software engineering became complicated enough to require some breadth (even junior engineers need to have some understand of SDLC, source control, language, main framework and couple of other things).
- On another hand, I agree, everybody wants senior people, because senior (+good) engineers create way more value than junior (and unproven).
- I think for junior engineers who don't come from the top schools it would be hard to get into a pipeline of hotshot companies. However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity? The first company where I worked had 5 people and a dog and a tiny salary. It didn't stop me from finding the next company and gradually getting to a decent place.
- If I was in junior engineer shoes, I would try to find absolutely non-glamour company (big old consulting company, something small and local, government, etc, and apply there). Get a couple of years of experience and after, expand the search to include better companies.
Also, I would challenge the core premise of this article, looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900.
> I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior
That's a good point, there's a lot of nuance to that, but when I hire junior devs I still think of them as an investment, where for the first X months I'll spend more time training them than I would spend doing all tasks that they take
> However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity?
I don't think I made this article FAANG-specific, in fact I've spent majority of my career in small companies and I always tell entry-level candidates to reach out directly to small companies because they might be open to hiring even if they don't advertise it
> looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900
Yeah, I tried a few searches like that too, and I was wondering why people find it so hard to land interviews if there's so many junior positions. So I started looking into that, I checked the first 100 or so results and a lot of them required 1-2y of professional experience, meaning the number of entry-level roles is smaller.
> Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Yeah, that's a generalization on my side, of course CS grads will have much easier time finding their first job, but unless they come from a top school they still might have problems getting interviews these days. And with the higher demand for developers in general, I would imagine that the number of entry-level opportunities should be much higher, and it should be easy for both CS-grads and other people to land interviews, but it's not happening.
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)
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.
> 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).
There are plenty of "software engineering" degrees that do focus more on these areas than traditional computer science. As an industry we look down on them and quiz textbook knowledge of algorithms to keep them out. This is something that needs to change or it turns it into a self fulfilling prophecy that these courses get seen as second rate (because the good candidates know they're making getting their first job harder by selecting such a course).
The software engineering track has long existed separately from comp sci at my tech school, at least. They discouraged people from taking CS who aren't primarily interested in theory.
> My dream would be that CompSci was taught more like a trade school
I hope that never happens. I think opening trade schools for programming is fair enough, but compsci is not about programming it should be treated as a branch of mathematics.
If somebody funded this, I would love to teach it. One reason I haven't looked for a job teaching bootcamps (despite wanting to be a teacher in a previous life) is because 3 months seems like way too short of a time to impart meaningful skills. I do think it's better than nothing, but if I were going to devote a non-trivial portion of my career to teaching, I'd like to do it confident in the knowledge that I had a real impact on the students.
FYI, if you have enough karma you can unkill dead comments by clicking on the vouch link from the page for the comment (which you can get to by clicking on the timestamp for a comment).
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.
Other fields have organizations which artificially keep their supply low in the form of licenses, certificates, degrees, etc.
Not only does that keep their salaries high, it ensures a certain calibre of junior applicants.
But in the software world, we scoff at the idea of any regulation as gatekeeping. Tech companies say everyone should learn to code. Bootcamps are happy to sell the dream.
No regulation. No standard. Open to everyone.
They've succeeded in increasing the supply but have diluted the quality to the point where being a junior developer today doesn't mean anything.
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.
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.
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
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.
Even before the pandemic, when searching for a new role, I would avoid what I call the "senior trap". When everyone on the team is senior, the new person by default is the junior developer.
With the senior trap, the new developer not only gets the "junior" tasks, but also theoretically is the last in line for promotion. Senior is not just about a bump in pay, but also expanding your responsibilities. But you cannot have too many cooks in the kitchen. I would constantly see the phenomenon over and over again, teams with nothing but senior developers.
Nowadays, I am in the market for a lead/staff level position, and I would see job listings at companies where everyone is a lead. How can that be? One company I spoke with said they basically have a flat organization and higher mainly very senior engineers.
I've worked remotely for years before the pandemic and I can demonstrate my value to potential employers. Can hit the ground running with little direction. It must be very difficult for those that are just starting out right now.
To add to the article: companies, but wary that some developers might want to work in mixed (jr/sr) environments.
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.
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.
I've been talking about this for a minute. Boot camps are pushing the "you can make tons of money in just 4 weeks" narrative. CS skills are ironically becoming a huge differentiator. that's why I've been indiehacking on https://qvault.io
This is nonsense. Senior developer here, went to a bootcamp 8 years ago and well here I am. You might as well then flip off the high percentage of HN users who are devs who didn't go to either college or a bootcamp.
Bootcamps did explode in popularity, a lot of them are crap, and more people than ever see it as the fast lane to easy street. But to equate going to a bootcamp to a surgeon playing operation is really ignorant.
Writing some CRUD apps around a database (which lets face it most of us are doing that most of the time) is by no means as important or a life changing/ending action as performing surgery.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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?
A dev-ready laptop can be had for less than $300; significantly cheaper than any bootcamp or university. Why would you attempt to invalidate another’s success by insinuating that it’s due to gatekeeping or privilege that just isn’t there?
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.
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.
…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.
I freelanced! I initially worked on a game server to develop the ultima online server I wanted (I was 14),then around 15 I was developing website in PHP and did one for my mother, which needed something for work (a mini questionnaire kind of thing), then I landed a software for an architect that needed help managing things and then one for some sort of small warehouse.
I was extremely underpaid (I set the prices, and at 16 a thousand bucks looks like a lot of money), but by the time I was 19 I had a good chunk of experience, that was even before university.
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.
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.
I know people here are going to hate this idea, but non-competes could help alleviate this problem.
Non-competes are clearly terrible for experienced employees, but I think for those who are just trying to break into the industry, it can be helpful. If a company knows that their junior engineers aren't just going to up and leave as soon as they've completed spending a bunch of money to train them and are now useful, they'd be more willing to hire more of them.
It took me three years from the time I completed a bootcamp to when I finally got a real software engineering job. Had I signed a contract that would've required me to work for a company for three years, I would've been in a much, much better situation.
And yet, 100% the people of the university that I graduated from get a job. And, it's just a random public university with just a few connections with the industry.
Moreover, the company I'm currently working with also hires people without a degree.
There's a couple things this author didn't mention that is important when you analyze the software developer labor market.
First off, the overwhelming majority of developers are senior developers. If it takes X years to transition from a junior to a senior, then that means every single developer is a senior, except for those who started within the last X years. I think a lot of articles like this make the mistake of assuming that senior developers make up a small percentage of the entire developer population.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the average age of a software developer is very young. The very first generation of developers are only now starting tor retire and leave behind job openings. Other industries, for example doctors, don't have this problem. There is a rate of doctors who graduate medical school, and a rate of doctors who retire, and that rate differential determines the ease of getting hired right after medical school. The retirement rate of developers is extremely small. In 2018 I did an onsite interview at Google, and I was blown away by how young everybody was. I was 35 at the time, but it seemed the average age of people that I saw there seemed to be about 22 years old. Eventually, after a decade or so, the retirement rate will increase, and job openings for juniors will return, but it's still a long ways off.
One more thing. My personal experience is that it was easier to land a job as a junior developer back in 2010-2012 than it is to land a job today in 2020 now that I have 10 years of professional experience. It always bothers me to see people post about how its so easy to get a job if you're a senior developer, because I just don't see it. Its as hard today as it's ever been. Year after year I experience more difficulty finding a job than ever before. Every single interview I've done in my entire career since becoming a "senior" (sometime around 5 years into my career), never once have I felt like I'm being treated like I'm a valuable resource. For instance, with my last job hunting stint, I made it a policy to turn down all interviews where I was asked to do either a whiteboard problem, or a take home project. Without exception, every single company said "fine, bye". If senior developers are such a rare resource, you'd think at least one company would try to negotiate with me and try to make it work out, but no. Every single company was fine with letting me go after refusing to do the whiteboard/take-home. Even in 2010 when I was first starting out, I felt more respect coming from companies during the interview process.
I don't believe in this idea that there is a huge demand for senior developers, and extreme low demand for junior developers. It only makes sense that both would track the same level of demand. There is no fundamental difference between a junior developer and a senior developer. They are both developers. With the senior, you get a little bit more productivity, but the junior gives you productivity too. I would believe it if seniors had good demand, and juniors slight less, but still good demand. Or Senior developers low demand, and junior slightly worse demand. But I don't believe senior is high demand, and junior is low demand. That just doesn't make sense.
Without any data and based on the juniors I met, they pour out way more bugs right out of the gate and the code becomes really bad if not kept in check.
That's a substantial difference between a junior and a senior.
Of course this is dependent on technology and company onboarding and the codebase, so it's really haed.
But also a junior comes trained in one programming language, maybe two, and you encounter many different requirements that might exclude juniors. For example Company uses Elixir, no junior is trained in that, a senior polyglot will learn very fast,a junior might have problems.
This article appears at least somewhat BS to me at a first reading but I think I have found the root of my disagreement: the definition of junior.
Regarding the article:
1. One point made in the OP is that big companies don’t hire junior devs. For my definition of junior, this is false. Look at e.g. [1] where you can filter by YoE=0. I count 98 entries over a year and you can multiply that up to account for the other big companies and the fact that only a fraction of people add datapoints on that site. Not only do I think that this corresponds to a large number of people but I think it is sufficiently large to dispel the idea that only graduates from top universities can be hired at such companies (there aren’t enough graduates and many go into research or smaller higher-paying/hotter companies too). Google for one has tens of thousands of engineers. They won’t all be senior. And just look at how many internships people do.
2. The company I work for hires lots of junior devs (though we don’t call them that) and puts a lot of work into finding and mentoring interns for its size, though it is small. We seem to do an ok job of reasonably quickly getting them to the point that they are contributing more than they cost.
3. The impression I get from HN is that the job market is extremely hot at the moment and that lots of senior people really hate the “algorithms” questions or feel there is a lot of ageism. But my intuition is that someone fresh out of university who knows a programming language would be in a good position for that sort of question that is like homework and abstracted away from the real world. But maybe this impression is biased by certain people being more likely to post or me reading 20 posts from 'ChrisMarshallNYC and thinking I’ve read 20 different people.
4. When I look at how I found a job after leaving university (not so long ago) I don’t think I had too hard a time. I sent a mediocre CV to a recruitment agency and one company, did interviews with three companies (no idea how many the recruiter sent my CV to, probably more) got two offers and accepted one. This was a mix of smaller and medium-sized (think 200 employees in my country and 700 globally) businesses. Caveats would be: 1. I didn’t do CS at Uni. I didn’t do internships. But I did go to a ‘top’ university. I’m not in the US. This was before the rona.
5. I concede that the shift to remote work in early 2020 probably put a hold on recruiting at many companies as they were busy with other things or trying to work out how to do interviews. I wouldn’t want to have been graduating into that environment.
6. There definitely are companies that don’t hire junior devs but those are small companies who can’t afford to train them rather than large companies who are relatively flush with cash.
Regarding the definition of junior:
I generally think of someone trying to be hired into a junior dev position as a recent university graduate (in CS or maybe something related) who already knows how to program to a reasonable level. Perhaps the curse of so many programmers being self-taught is that people are typically expected to be able to do the job to some extent right when they start. Where I work almost all junior developers we hire are recent university graduates (we don’t have some strict filter on the university but our on-campus recruiting is reasonably targeted to places that are considered top institutions or where we got many good hires from)
It seems that the article is talking more about someone who might be changing career or who came out of a bootcamp or who didn’t go to university. Such people would require more training and there might be a higher variance in outcomes. I would imagine they would mostly be hired by small companies and not big tech companies like Google. And they might well be having a much harder time getting hired now than a few years ago.
Thanks for your comment, I agree with a number of your thoughts here.
> One point made in the OP is that big companies don’t hire junior devs.
That's something I didn't phrase well in the article. A lot of big tech companies have intership programs and graduation programs, so that they get top talent as early as possible, you're right. But looking at their growth plans, large companies can just dig deeper into the existing market and hire people who have 1-4 years of experience. Less profitable companies don't have that leverage.
> There definitely are companies that don’t hire junior devs but those are small companies who can’t afford to train them
I've seen a number of companies with such policy and often they could afford it, but decided not to. My previous company had such policy and when I asked about it, they said they just want to go as fast as possible and juniors would slow them down. And then I struggled to keep people motivated because half of our tasks were too trivial for all the seniors.
But also when I look at the list of top companies here in Netherlands (Uber, Databricks, Amazon + a few local companies) I very rarely see entry-level opportunities. Maybe because they're filled that quickly?
> I think I have found the root of my disagreement: the definition of junior
Yeah, I should have specified it in the article. Writing it I was thinking about people looking for their first job in the industry. Surely that's a very diverse group, since it includes CS grads and self-taught devs, but even CS grads have problems getting interviews these days (unless they graduate from top university)
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.
> "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."
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.
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.
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!).
Once X is widely known as a path to wealth, entry level positions get flooded with applications (e.g. a junior posting at my company could easily receive 1000 resumes) beyond what they are capable of judging on an individual basis. Once companies hit this point, they start looking for heuristics to cut down on the amount of searching they need to do. "Gatekeeping" is these heuristics.
Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested. Why? Because those schools do a good job of filtering out bad candidates, and offer up enough good ones to fully meet the hiring needs of the company, figuring any generational geniuses they miss will make a name for themselves some other way and can be hired later.
So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.
p.s. Yes this is out of date somewhat but I promise Border Cafe was a hopping place 20 years ago :-)
Although I’m not sure this can be extended by analogy to only hiring from “top” schools. Beyond, they don’t don’t need to do something so they don’t.
You heard it shut down right?
the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes. if they are smarter it is bc of direct filtering by SAT at the admissions stage and indirect genetic confounds, not because elite institutions actually teach useful things better.
As someone who taught kids like this I can't agree. I taught hundreds of kids real math, writing, and programming skills that I now use in my professional life as a highly paid software engineer. Some of those kids have reconnected with me as adults to tell me I made a difference in their lives and credit my teaching (which their parents paid thousands for) as a very meaningful part of their success.
They're incentivized to hire people who will fit in, and perform well. After a certain level of competency, from any school, this is no longer a distinguishing feature. So they double down on the culture fit, and the easiest way to eliminate risk is to hire from a pool of people who have already demonstrated that culture.
I has a very illuminating chat once with a hiring consultant developing the onboarding/induction process and activity package for graduate engineers starting at a global oil&gas company (different industry, but the same level of gatekeeping).
When taking the grads through these activities, she was struck by the fact they all looked and sounded nearly identical(even with obligatory racial diversity). She later found out that the two managers in charge of graduate program were hiring exclusively from the two engineering schools they themselves had attended, and that they were running into a terrible time retaining graduates after the program had finished, as they usually stepped off into more boutique consultancies or went to work on passion projects as money was never the motivator.
The recommendation from her consultancy was to broaden their hiring practices, and that drawing exclusively upper crust engineers who just saw the role as a stepping stone was going to hurt them in the long run, whereas they'd get much better loyalty from middle class graduates.
Especially in law, where the status signalling game is a prerequisite in a very serious sense for doing the job, attracting wealthy clients.
If you hire someone from a working class background you basically need to teach them that on the job. Even in engineering it happens.
This is funny to me, because in most debates about the function and efficacy of public schools, I'm assured by the other side that money isn't the issue.
Most obviously, schools being funded via property tax in most states means rich districts tend to receive more money than schools in poorer districts. Less obvious is that because the US doesn't offer many services generally those that are offered are often routed through the schools and attributed to the education budget e.g. many kinds of therapists and aides are part of school budgets in the US but are part budget under various health department budgets in other countries and thus those countries' total spend on students is undercounted.
Similarly, countries that invest in making sure there are enough social services to ensure a good life for even the bottom 20% of society need to spend a lot less fixing the problems that arise from growing up with a bad home life and get more bang for their buck.
Yes, and this is certainly not a new phenomenon. I used to work with a recruiting department at a large upper-end law firm. They only took new associates from the top 10 universities. This was 35 years ago. So there's nothing new under the sun.
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.
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.
By this I mean an applicant funded testing (not educating) process operated by a respected institution that can be used as a heuristic for competency.
> 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
> Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone
But we can safely read advael's claim as stating "I don't eat very many vegetables", not "I produce enough food to feed myself".
Basically discusses the mechanisms of how connections and wealth affect hiring.
UMC wants these jobs reserved for its children.
Btw, what's wrong with that? If the job itself doesn't require any particular skill or competence but is very rewarding, why should they not reserve it for themselves?
There still exists jobs that can't be filled through these networks and they are open to anyone.
A parallel problem I’m seeing is that much of the internet advice for juniors is written as if the world revolves around FAANG companies. A lot of the local college students I’ve mentored slate convinced that a reasonable starting compensation is $200K for 1st year CS graduates at every company and that they’re going to get it by playing a game where they interview at 5 different companies simultaneously and make them bid against each other. It’s a shock when they enter the job market and realize companies aren’t in a rush to pay them Google-level salaries for basic webdev or app development work.
It’s bad enough that when I start talking to new mentees I can almost guess which internet communities and even blog posts they’ve been using to gather their view of CS jobs.
Can confirm. I come from an average state school and landed a FAANG internship for next summer. I always try to get my foot in the door early so there’s still undeniably plenty of spots left because if it comes down to two equally qualified candidates, they’re probably picking the Stanford student over the other student.
I see this sentiment on Reddit so much that at times I wonder how much of "everyone is rejecting juniors" can be attributed to juniors applying to only FAANG's and getting rejected.
Regarding the unreasonable salary expectations, I think that's just case of students seeing insane salaries in the Bay Area and thinking that it's reflective of the entire industry rather than a response to the insane cost of living in the bay area. A new-grad making $200k per year sounds insane on paper, until you realize that a studio apartment near the office is going to run you $4k/month
The Bay Area is expensive, but studio apartments do not cost $4,000/month.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/d/mountain-view-downtow...
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/d/mountain-view-studio-...
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$4,000/month can easily get you 1-3 bedrooms depending on how "upscale" you want to be or not.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/mountain-view-beautif...
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/mountain-view-weeks-f...
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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.
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.
I don't really think it's true. At least a few years ago, I saw statistics that one of the highest represented universities at Apple was San Jose State — simply due to being large and local.
I recently had the opportunity to interview 3 fresh college graduates for Apple jobs, so out of curiosity, I looked up their colleges to see what kind of filters the recruiters are applying (I thought all 3 were well qualified). 2 of the 3 went to universities ranked between 10-20 in Computer Science in the US, the 3rd went to a college that is not ranked in any discipline in the US News rankings.
So I highly doubt that the filtering is as narrow as is claimed. Unpredictable and not particularly accurate, I'll easily believe.
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!
I feel so stupid, if I had known then I would have never taken a sabbatical.
In the years that followed I went almost into a depression because of it. Because I worked so hard (obtaining multiple masters) to try to get a shot and never got one. In retrospect, I feel my approach to FAANG was a much riskier endeavor than I realized.
And then it got complicated. People on HN offered to refer me. It never fully worked out. Here is why: * Sometimes I screwed it up by not strongly chasing after it
* I wasn’t a recent enough grad anymore, I needed to interview for E4
* One time an acquaintance of mine offered to give a referral and then ultimately didn’t but before he didn’t, I declined a referral from a HN’er to the same company because of it
I am working at an okay company, but I feel stuck. I want to work with people that want to treat the company they work for as if it is their own. I want fellow colleagues to be entrepreneurial. I am missing that.
How entrepreneurial is someone who will work only in companies created 20+ years ago, enjoying the comforts of a monopolistic market position created off of the work of other engineers? Some people go work at a big company, some others go work a company big.
People at FAANGs don’t “own the company by any means any more.
And the fact that you have a job (and probably a good job in software) shows how privileged US developers can be.
Having an office job, in a growth industry, in an in-demand field, in a country with lots of opportunities is a huge privilege that most don’t have have.
Sure you don’t work at an ad-tech FAANG company earning obscene rates, but it’s not the end of the world.
As someone who graduated shortly after the dot-com bubble burst, I'm extremely bitter about this behavior. I basically got screwed out of that pipeline by economic circumstance, then was far enough removed to no longer qualify for it once things recovered.
(And that pipeline isn't just the hiring of new grads, but also the system of internship and co-op opportunities that lead to such hiring.)
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.
Institutional racism~
...Jokes aside - and not to make anyone feel guilty, or to be divisive, but to point out a natural consequence of the above described dynamic - I went to an HBCU. Companies did not visit campus with the frequency that I came to understand they did PWIs of similar cultural or academic standing. I imagine that if companies don't visit your school, you're not on the shortlist for, er, "meritocratic" recruitment preferences.
Most companies I know like to hire junior devs and form them to their company culture rather than to deal with the "baggage" of senior devs with 15 - 20 years of experience.
More and more senior devs complain that they are essentially "unhireable" because of their experience and age.
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.
You can go to a small do-it-all no-money startup for a few years, suffer your ass through it, climb up a few more job and end up exactly at the same place with a very good story and a lot of experience from doing more with less that top companies can appreciate, and actually be the one bossing the silver spoons into work.
It's a fallacy to think people are disadvantaged by not going straight to the top with no real world experience.
Entry level jobs are for new grads, and absolutely nobody cares about personal projects or professional experience that doesn’t have “software engineer” in the job title.
Self taught, can confirm.
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.
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>
It sounds unbelievable but it happens, alot. It's one thing when all your experience so far has been flipping burgers or driving Uber, but it's another when they literally have never had a job their entire life.
As a junior, the best best way to pass an interview is understanding you're a cost and accepting experience is part of the pay. Any sign of you expecting to be "paid your due" or "resisting undue exploitation" is an immediate ulcer inducing stress for the hiring person "omg he knows nothing, will take months to start producing above his cost, and he's already talking like a diva". Leave after 6 months if you must, telling the boss you cant possibly survive
I'm going to ding this ... hard.
First and most importantly: some students I knew were trying to accelerate their path through college. They didn't want to rack up huge loans and wanted out ASAP to start making money. This group included both right out of high school as well as returning non-traditional students. They simply didn't have time for employment. And, with Covid, I suspect that this cohort is going to have a big boost.
Second: some students are helping take care of their family and going to college is enough of a time struggle. You are knocking this group out--and my experience suggests that a lot of them are female. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a good example from this class.
Third: personally, my experience suggests that those working "food service" jobs, specifically, are sub par. This applies only to that group and not other "customer service" roles (like retail sales). "Food service" is a time consuming job with weak wages and unstable hours dealing with a psychologically draining public cohort. Anyone with a brain wired for programming wants out of that kind of job post haste and has some level of skill to do so.
However, even then, I try not to let prior experience color my perceptions of junior engineers and programmers.
Junior engineers need to be "teachable" more than anything else. Generally, what I look for is what they absorbed from one of their teachers that isn't in the book.
Good teachers are always giving off a bag of pearls of wisdom beyond the scope of the class. Students in my classes got exposed to automated testing, source control, and an IDE. Often I'd give out epigrams of wisdom "70% of the time use a hash table; 30% of the time use a vector; 0.01% of the time ask somebody what you should be using instead when those don't work."
Good programmers and engineers latch onto something out of that bag because they find it interesting. That's what you're looking for in an interview as it signifies they can be taught and actually want to do this. I find this is probably more important even than absolute GPA.
> 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).
Sadly, this does seem to be true for the majority of junior folks. They just can't code. I don't really know how you get out of a degree program without that, but they somehow do.
I suspect this is the simple reason why so many companies just go after the "elite" schools--you can't escape from those programs without having at least a minimum level of competence at coding.
I don't know if this applies to the top CS schools, but now that CS is quickly becoming the most popular major at the majority of US colleges, you have to expect the average quality to drop. Once upon a time, CS programs were filled with the kids who were innately just really into computers. Now they're filled with all of the kids who don't necessarily love tech, but just compared "SWE Salary" vs "Doctor Salary" vs "I-banker Salary" when deciding what to major in. Now that crazy FAANG salaries and "day in the life" videos are splattered all over Twitter and YouTube, more and more money/prestige chasers will be graduating with CS degrees even if they just scraped by without really absorbing the material and writing a lot of code.
It feels silly. However, it helps a lot. Sitting in on an interview is especially useful. You can pay attention to the reactions of the interviewee a lot better when you're not running the interview. You will recognize lots of cringeworthy moments--pay attention to them and try not to do them yourself. Asking other people in your company to answer your interview questions will pinpoint places that are vague or unclear and possibly even incorrect. It also helps calibrate--if already employed people can't pass your interview loop, your interview loop sucks.
However, interviewing is a human thing, so like any social question, there are no hard and fast answers.
Three particular pieces of advice I give:
1) Basic courtesy and professionalism
Good grief. Why are people so terrible about this?
Don't leave an interviewee alone. Be on time. Remember their name. Try to call them what they want to be called (my name has various shortenings that I don't care about--some people care very much, though). Offer them drinks and bathroom breaks. Read their resume more that 30 seconds before entering the room. Actually read their resume. Don't make them drive for lunch. Have their reimbursement check by the end of the interview. Thank them for their time.
This industry seems to have so few people willing to provide even basic courtesy and respect that it makes me cringe. This industry is small and the wheel turns a lot--that person you are interviewing may be your interviewer in 5 years and absolutely will remember you if you are kind and professional.
2) Listen. Really listen. Shut up and listen. Pay attention to the person in front of you and try to make them feel like they are the most important, most interesting person in the world.
The person IS important. You're trying to hire them and make them your colleague. Treat them like it.
When you do this, people will tell you a lot. They almost can't help it. You're not trying to trick anybody; you just want them to be who they are professionally.
3) Start from slightly above neutral and give minus and plus assessments.
Sure, if they can't pass your FizzBuzz equivalent, you don't want to hire them.
However, too many interviewers start from default "You're flunking" and it's very difficult to get out of that. This is a junior person--by definition, they're going to have a difficult time moving your needle in the positive direction.
Given this is a junior person, the interviewer needs to work to hunt for positives. Your questions need to have enough open-endedness that an interviewee can impress you to varying degrees. If you find something that you deem positive on their resume, ask them about it and give them the opportunity to score some points.
Finally, one thing to do is simply be honest about your job positions. Most positions are not rocket science--they are standard coding positions with some business specific quirks. If your junior candidate got a degree with a better than 3.0 GPA from any decent (read: something like ABET accredited) program, they have pretty much already demonstrated that they have the motivation and acumen to do your job.
So, if they "didn't pass your loop" you should have a really clear reason why you are not hiring them. If multiple junior people aren't passing your interview loop for junior people, the problem is more likely with the interview loop or your job expectations than the junior candidates.
There are lots of people who have reasons for not having any "experience" coming out of school due to external time constraints.
Single mothers, for example, have it particularly hard. Any single mother who manages to drag herself through a CS degree has so much persistence that she can definitely do your job.
As I point out, many students with hard time and money constraints try to compress the time to get their degree. The best way to do that is to take heavy course loads with no summer breaks and not do employment.
I've seen this happen with friends of mine applying remotely during the pandemic.
FAANGs can’t train nearly enough juniors to make up for the rest of the industry.
Tech has an issue where only a handful of titles try to cover a massive diversity of actual skillsets. I'm not entirely sure if this is good or bad but it at least leads to significant confusion when assessing someone's abilities. Not all SEs are the same in terms of their focuses, there are lots of flavors in reality.
Are we about to start swinging back to the “nobody hires really experienced devs because they’re too old/expensive” discussion soon?
Am many big companies knows that if you don't, then you won't have senior engineers with expertise in your stack.
Previously I worked at a small but growing defense contractor and they also hired Jr's and recent grads.
It's a big world though, and I can't say my small sample of it is representative of the bigger whole.
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).
A comp sci degree really is a much better filter for junior devs.
A github is really a much better filter for any dev.
So I strongly agree with your filter claim.
And this is not specific to bootcamps. Any measure popular enough will be gamed, Leetcode or GitHub.
This is a very useful reminder for myself
Isn't this most jobs these days?
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.
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.
Uh??? No it doesn't. There's a huge skill discrepancy between senior devs and junior devs. You can train them to be somewhat useful, but it'll take years for them to champion complex projects by themselves, and even then, it takes years on top to be able to gather reqs, ask the right questions to stakeholders, and make a scalable, solid implementation.
Juniors are great if you have low hanging fruits, or you want to invest in a great hire.
Most companies take the bet that they don't need to train juniors to seniors, they just need to get them to some minimum level of positive contribution.
> it takes years on top to be able to gather reqs, ask the right questions to stakeholders, and make a scalable, solid implementation
Sometimes you just need some people to update HTML templates, update an API call to your charging platform to include a description, or any number of smaller tasks that pop up. It's why it's called shit work.
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.
> 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!
·You should be able to look whatever you want, even old.
·I`ve been in lots of situations where the first thing the hiring manager asks is the candidate age and drops the CV as soon it finds out is older than 35.
It's just in many countries it's illegal to ask that question, and from my experience working for a couple of Australian and (1) US companies, no one gives a shit about your age, as in the number. Your manager/workmates don't care, HR doesn't have a criterion for it, it's illegal and that's my answer to the question.
Again they may care if you are really old.
I know back in my home country in Asia it's legal to have an age criterion.
/s
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. Also, you cant pay rent with illiquid stock options in a series A firm even if the options vested already.
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.
Maybe not though, considering how often the title “senior” is given out like candy to people in their 30s and even 20s.
Are you implying you need to do a lot of overwork? Or just that it takes a long time?
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.
Whether they can code or not, I bet :)
But self taught often runs short when you get into theoretical stuff... Then again most CS grads won't recall any of that..
It depends what you do, but if someone is implementing array types it's bad not to know about amortized complexity. Then again, most people rarely implement arrays :)
At the end of the day, the best you can do is aim to have good people from a variety backgrounds.
Bootcamps self-select for people who actually tend to have some interest, and force them to learn to graduate. So all bootcamp grads (or at least those from decent bootcamps) learn a decent amount during the bootcamp.
University often gets people who are just there for the degree. When I was in university I marked for many classes, and also helped students, and there are many people who simply have no interest in the material and do not learn a thing. They can still graduate by doing the minimum amount of prep for tests, relying on others for projects and assignments, and cheating.
However, university is also a 4 year long process where you can choose to take challenging courses in a variety of subjects, pursue cutting-edge research projects, and do whatever else you want in your free time. A motivated university student can graduate with not only what they learned in class, but accumulated knowledge from the books they read, courses they took, and projects they worked on outside of class. Plus a deep understanding of all the theory and such covered in class.
Which isn't to say they're better in any sort of judgemental sense - give a bootcamp grad another 3.5 years purely dedicated to learning, and they'd be just as capable.
Unfortunately, relatively few people actually make the most of their time in university, or even come close. (At least, in terms of learning - perhaps they value other things more, which is fine, but we're speaking of employable skills.) Maybe 10% of students at my university graduated with a level of skill equal to or better than a motivated bootcamp grad.
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
As always, companies don't really have problems hiring or keeping workers. They just have problems at their price point, which they are unwilling to change.
Why are you still at this company?
Your comment seems to insinuate that the blame falls with the company. There is just a long ramp up that needs to happen with junior hires. There is so much technology and processes to learn about.
Humans learn incredibly fast when motivated, so yes, I am quite skeptical when someone throws such a vague statement as if we should just accept the problems lie with juniors and not any of the many things a company could be doing wrong. In your case, "so much technology and processes", I'm already skeptical an individual needs to know that much to be productive in a junior role, for a few contexts only.
Cause all the recruiters start calling. I left my first job after 12 months, BigCorp needed developers and I was offered double then current salary.
What ends up happening is that they end up leaving at the 6 month mark after they've become proficient enough to get higher paying (by a couple hundred more) job
It takes a toll on me personally, feels like I'm stuck in a never ending loop of making others better, but getting nothing in return
... Thousands? Or just hundreds?
Many companies hire most during the first and last quarters of the year (Feb-Apr), (Sept-Nov).
Last quarter: New budget for next year allows us to increase devs. Early training opportunity during the slow season.
First Quarter: Things are picking up, we need more devs for the new projects.
Trying to get jobs outside of those periods may be challenging. You’ll likely face a competitive hiring process to fill vacant positions.
The easiest way to get your foot in the door in this industry is either you know someone personally that can refer you to an open position, or seek tech recruiters. (I’m not including individuals that graduates at top colleges as they should have no issues getting jobs).
Tech recruiters does have a bad vibe in our industry due to many reasons, but due to the challenges of securing that first tech job as a brand new dev, the opportunity is a fair trade.
Tech recruiting firms work closely with actual hiring managers. They know what managers are looking for. The hiring process can be fast.
Fulltime positions with benefits: Expect harder interview and bias skill aptitude from hiring manager.
Contract to hire: Easier interview. Higher initial hourly pay due to no benefits.
Things I didn’t include but are equally important, have finished personal github projects, good resume detailing your projects tech, purpose and value.
Brush up on algorithms, OOP and designs. Data structures. Work on acing the interview process.
If you live in an area/city that does not have the available framework/tech that you are interested in, move or suck it up and learn it. (Things are better now, in the US that is)
Be sure to ask what’s the salary range of the position(s). Don’t sell yourself short. And be firm on a potential salary transition. Negotiations can always happen after the 5-6 months contract. Be reasonable.
- I really didn't like that seniority equates to creating value in this article. I knew junior engineers who could have code circles around way more senior.
- Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Bootcamp is usually much shorter and very narrow. CS is longer and much broader. Software engineering became complicated enough to require some breadth (even junior engineers need to have some understand of SDLC, source control, language, main framework and couple of other things).
- On another hand, I agree, everybody wants senior people, because senior (+good) engineers create way more value than junior (and unproven).
- I think for junior engineers who don't come from the top schools it would be hard to get into a pipeline of hotshot companies. However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity? The first company where I worked had 5 people and a dog and a tiny salary. It didn't stop me from finding the next company and gradually getting to a decent place.
- If I was in junior engineer shoes, I would try to find absolutely non-glamour company (big old consulting company, something small and local, government, etc, and apply there). Get a couple of years of experience and after, expand the search to include better companies.
Also, I would challenge the core premise of this article, looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900.
That's a good point, there's a lot of nuance to that, but when I hire junior devs I still think of them as an investment, where for the first X months I'll spend more time training them than I would spend doing all tasks that they take
> However, why do we concentrate on FAANG as a first employment opportunity?
I don't think I made this article FAANG-specific, in fact I've spent majority of my career in small companies and I always tell entry-level candidates to reach out directly to small companies because they might be open to hiring even if they don't advertise it
> looking for Junior Software engineer, I got around 700 open positions and searching for senior, I got about 900
Yeah, I tried a few searches like that too, and I was wondering why people find it so hard to land interviews if there's so many junior positions. So I started looking into that, I checked the first 100 or so results and a lot of them required 1-2y of professional experience, meaning the number of entry-level roles is smaller.
> Comparing Bootcamps with CS degree is also leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Yeah, that's a generalization on my side, of course CS grads will have much easier time finding their first job, but unless they come from a top school they still might have problems getting interviews these days. And with the higher demand for developers in general, I would imagine that the number of entry-level opportunities should be much higher, and it should be easy for both CS-grads and other people to land interviews, but it's not happening.
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)
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.
There are plenty of "software engineering" degrees that do focus more on these areas than traditional computer science. As an industry we look down on them and quiz textbook knowledge of algorithms to keep them out. This is something that needs to change or it turns it into a self fulfilling prophecy that these courses get seen as second rate (because the good candidates know they're making getting their first job harder by selecting such a course).
I hope that never happens. I think opening trade schools for programming is fair enough, but compsci is not about programming it should be treated as a branch of mathematics.
Not only does that keep their salaries high, it ensures a certain calibre of junior applicants.
But in the software world, we scoff at the idea of any regulation as gatekeeping. Tech companies say everyone should learn to code. Bootcamps are happy to sell the dream.
No regulation. No standard. Open to everyone.
They've succeeded in increasing the supply but have diluted the quality to the point where being a junior developer today doesn't mean anything.
Reap what you sow.
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.
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
With the senior trap, the new developer not only gets the "junior" tasks, but also theoretically is the last in line for promotion. Senior is not just about a bump in pay, but also expanding your responsibilities. But you cannot have too many cooks in the kitchen. I would constantly see the phenomenon over and over again, teams with nothing but senior developers.
Nowadays, I am in the market for a lead/staff level position, and I would see job listings at companies where everyone is a lead. How can that be? One company I spoke with said they basically have a flat organization and higher mainly very senior engineers.
I've worked remotely for years before the pandemic and I can demonstrate my value to potential employers. Can hit the ground running with little direction. It must be very difficult for those that are just starting out right now.
To add to the article: companies, but wary that some developers might want to work in mixed (jr/sr) environments.
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_(game)
Bootcamps did explode in popularity, a lot of them are crap, and more people than ever see it as the fast lane to easy street. But to equate going to a bootcamp to a surgeon playing operation is really ignorant.
Writing some CRUD apps around a database (which lets face it most of us are doing that most of the time) is by no means as important or a life changing/ending action as performing surgery.
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.
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?
A dev-ready laptop can be had for less than $300; significantly cheaper than any bootcamp or university. Why would you attempt to invalidate another’s success by insinuating that it’s due to gatekeeping or privilege that just isn’t there?
Bootcamps, self-education, go to school for it, internships; a combination of things. There are plenty of ways to get started and keep progressing.
…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”.
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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.
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.
I was extremely underpaid (I set the prices, and at 16 a thousand bucks looks like a lot of money), but by the time I was 19 I had a good chunk of experience, that was even before university.
There is room!
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.
Non-competes are clearly terrible for experienced employees, but I think for those who are just trying to break into the industry, it can be helpful. If a company knows that their junior engineers aren't just going to up and leave as soon as they've completed spending a bunch of money to train them and are now useful, they'd be more willing to hire more of them.
It took me three years from the time I completed a bootcamp to when I finally got a real software engineering job. Had I signed a contract that would've required me to work for a company for three years, I would've been in a much, much better situation.
And yet, 100% the people of the university that I graduated from get a job. And, it's just a random public university with just a few connections with the industry.
Moreover, the company I'm currently working with also hires people without a degree.
First off, the overwhelming majority of developers are senior developers. If it takes X years to transition from a junior to a senior, then that means every single developer is a senior, except for those who started within the last X years. I think a lot of articles like this make the mistake of assuming that senior developers make up a small percentage of the entire developer population.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the average age of a software developer is very young. The very first generation of developers are only now starting tor retire and leave behind job openings. Other industries, for example doctors, don't have this problem. There is a rate of doctors who graduate medical school, and a rate of doctors who retire, and that rate differential determines the ease of getting hired right after medical school. The retirement rate of developers is extremely small. In 2018 I did an onsite interview at Google, and I was blown away by how young everybody was. I was 35 at the time, but it seemed the average age of people that I saw there seemed to be about 22 years old. Eventually, after a decade or so, the retirement rate will increase, and job openings for juniors will return, but it's still a long ways off.
One more thing. My personal experience is that it was easier to land a job as a junior developer back in 2010-2012 than it is to land a job today in 2020 now that I have 10 years of professional experience. It always bothers me to see people post about how its so easy to get a job if you're a senior developer, because I just don't see it. Its as hard today as it's ever been. Year after year I experience more difficulty finding a job than ever before. Every single interview I've done in my entire career since becoming a "senior" (sometime around 5 years into my career), never once have I felt like I'm being treated like I'm a valuable resource. For instance, with my last job hunting stint, I made it a policy to turn down all interviews where I was asked to do either a whiteboard problem, or a take home project. Without exception, every single company said "fine, bye". If senior developers are such a rare resource, you'd think at least one company would try to negotiate with me and try to make it work out, but no. Every single company was fine with letting me go after refusing to do the whiteboard/take-home. Even in 2010 when I was first starting out, I felt more respect coming from companies during the interview process.
I don't believe in this idea that there is a huge demand for senior developers, and extreme low demand for junior developers. It only makes sense that both would track the same level of demand. There is no fundamental difference between a junior developer and a senior developer. They are both developers. With the senior, you get a little bit more productivity, but the junior gives you productivity too. I would believe it if seniors had good demand, and juniors slight less, but still good demand. Or Senior developers low demand, and junior slightly worse demand. But I don't believe senior is high demand, and junior is low demand. That just doesn't make sense.
Of course this is dependent on technology and company onboarding and the codebase, so it's really haed.
But also a junior comes trained in one programming language, maybe two, and you encounter many different requirements that might exclude juniors. For example Company uses Elixir, no junior is trained in that, a senior polyglot will learn very fast,a junior might have problems.
Regarding the article:
1. One point made in the OP is that big companies don’t hire junior devs. For my definition of junior, this is false. Look at e.g. [1] where you can filter by YoE=0. I count 98 entries over a year and you can multiply that up to account for the other big companies and the fact that only a fraction of people add datapoints on that site. Not only do I think that this corresponds to a large number of people but I think it is sufficiently large to dispel the idea that only graduates from top universities can be hired at such companies (there aren’t enough graduates and many go into research or smaller higher-paying/hotter companies too). Google for one has tens of thousands of engineers. They won’t all be senior. And just look at how many internships people do.
2. The company I work for hires lots of junior devs (though we don’t call them that) and puts a lot of work into finding and mentoring interns for its size, though it is small. We seem to do an ok job of reasonably quickly getting them to the point that they are contributing more than they cost.
3. The impression I get from HN is that the job market is extremely hot at the moment and that lots of senior people really hate the “algorithms” questions or feel there is a lot of ageism. But my intuition is that someone fresh out of university who knows a programming language would be in a good position for that sort of question that is like homework and abstracted away from the real world. But maybe this impression is biased by certain people being more likely to post or me reading 20 posts from 'ChrisMarshallNYC and thinking I’ve read 20 different people.
4. When I look at how I found a job after leaving university (not so long ago) I don’t think I had too hard a time. I sent a mediocre CV to a recruitment agency and one company, did interviews with three companies (no idea how many the recruiter sent my CV to, probably more) got two offers and accepted one. This was a mix of smaller and medium-sized (think 200 employees in my country and 700 globally) businesses. Caveats would be: 1. I didn’t do CS at Uni. I didn’t do internships. But I did go to a ‘top’ university. I’m not in the US. This was before the rona.
5. I concede that the shift to remote work in early 2020 probably put a hold on recruiting at many companies as they were busy with other things or trying to work out how to do interviews. I wouldn’t want to have been graduating into that environment.
6. There definitely are companies that don’t hire junior devs but those are small companies who can’t afford to train them rather than large companies who are relatively flush with cash.
Regarding the definition of junior:
I generally think of someone trying to be hired into a junior dev position as a recent university graduate (in CS or maybe something related) who already knows how to program to a reasonable level. Perhaps the curse of so many programmers being self-taught is that people are typically expected to be able to do the job to some extent right when they start. Where I work almost all junior developers we hire are recent university graduates (we don’t have some strict filter on the university but our on-campus recruiting is reasonably targeted to places that are considered top institutions or where we got many good hires from)
It seems that the article is talking more about someone who might be changing career or who came out of a bootcamp or who didn’t go to university. Such people would require more training and there might be a higher variance in outcomes. I would imagine they would mostly be hired by small companies and not big tech companies like Google. And they might well be having a much harder time getting hired now than a few years ago.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
Thanks for your comment, I agree with a number of your thoughts here.
> One point made in the OP is that big companies don’t hire junior devs.
That's something I didn't phrase well in the article. A lot of big tech companies have intership programs and graduation programs, so that they get top talent as early as possible, you're right. But looking at their growth plans, large companies can just dig deeper into the existing market and hire people who have 1-4 years of experience. Less profitable companies don't have that leverage.
> There definitely are companies that don’t hire junior devs but those are small companies who can’t afford to train them
I've seen a number of companies with such policy and often they could afford it, but decided not to. My previous company had such policy and when I asked about it, they said they just want to go as fast as possible and juniors would slow them down. And then I struggled to keep people motivated because half of our tasks were too trivial for all the seniors.
But also when I look at the list of top companies here in Netherlands (Uber, Databricks, Amazon + a few local companies) I very rarely see entry-level opportunities. Maybe because they're filled that quickly?
> I think I have found the root of my disagreement: the definition of junior
Yeah, I should have specified it in the article. Writing it I was thinking about people looking for their first job in the industry. Surely that's a very diverse group, since it includes CS grads and self-taught devs, but even CS grads have problems getting interviews these days (unless they graduate from top university)
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.
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
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.