New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of wh...
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Not in any way a new phenomenon, there's a reason fizzbuzz was invented, there's been a steady stream of CS graduates who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag ever since the profession hit the mainstream.
Actually fucking interview your candidates, especially if you're sourcing candidates from a country with for-profit education and/or rote learning cultures, both of which suck when it comes to failing people who didn't learn anything. No BS coding tests go for "explain this code to me" kind of stuff, worst case they can understand code but suck at producing it, that's still prime QA material right there.
We do two "code challenges":
The first is in the first round, the second is in the technical interview. Neither are difficult, and we provide any equations they'll need.
It's much more important that they can reason about requirements than code something quick, because life won't give you firm requirements, and we don't want a ton of back and forth with product team if we can avoid it, so we need to catch most of that at the start.
In short, we're looking for actual software engineers, not code monkeys.
Those are good approaches, I would note that the "90% is written" one is mostly about code comprehension, not writing (as in: Actually architect something), and the requirement thing is a thing that you should, IMO, learn as a junior, it's not a prerequisite. It needs a lot of experience, and often domain knowledge new candidates have no chance of having. But, then, throwing such stuff at them and then judging them by their approach, not end result, should be fair.
The main question I ask myself, in general, is "can this person look at code from different angles". Somewhat like rotating a cube in your mind's eye if you get what I mean. And it might even be that they're no good at it, but they demonstrate the ability when talking about coffee making. People who don't get lost when you're talking about cash registers having a common queue having better overall latency than cash registers with individual queues. Just as a carpenter would ask someone "do you like working with your hands", the question is "do you like to rotate implication structures in your mind".
judging them by their approach, not end result, should be fair.
Yup, that's the approach. It's okay if they don't finish, I want to know how they approach the problem. We absolutely adjust our decision based on the role.
If they can extend existing code and design a new system (with minimal new code) and ask the right questions, we can work with them.
I’m just getting started on my third attempt at changing careers from sys-admining over to coding (starting with the Odin project this time). I’m not sure the questions you ask, while interesting, will be covered. Can you point to some resources or subject matter to research to get exposure to these questions? The non coding, coding questions are interesting to me and I’m curious if my experience will help or if it’s something I need to account for while learning.
We stay away from riddles, and instead focus on CS concepts. We'll rephrase to avoid jargon if you don't have a formal education, or it has been a while. Here are a few categories:
And some practical details like:
That covers most of it. We don't expect every candidate to know everything, we just want to get an idea of the breadth and depth of their knowledge.
Love it. So much to look into. Appreciate your time.
Most hiring managers are looking for unicorns
Sounds nice? What type of place you work at? I'm guess not a big corp
We're a somewhat big player in a niche industry that manufactures for a large industry. Yearly profits are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, market cap is a few billion, so low end of mid cap stocks. I don't want to doxx myself, but think of something like producing drills for oil rigs and you won't be far off.
We have about 50 software developers across three time zones (7 or 8 scrum teams) and a pretty high requirement for correctness and very little emphasis on rapid delivery. It's okay if it takes more time, as long as can plan around it, so we end up with estimates like 2-3 months for things that could have an MVP in under a month (in fact, we often build an MVP during estimation), with the extra time spent testing.
So yeah, it's a nice place to work. I very rarely stay late, and it's never because a project is late, but because of a high severity bug in prod (e.g. a customer can't complete a task).