[LRUG] Juniors

[Glenn @ Ruby Pond Ltd]

> I can't speak for everyone but my experience is that while the boot camps
> provide an excellent introduction to web development, the developers they
> produce are often not immediately employable.
>

We've hired 2 developers from Hackbright recently, so admittedly my
experience is limited to that one program. Both have been able to
independently ship new product features and major refactorings within 2
months after mentoring and guidance. Hackbright is a Python based
curriculum so the on the job training has also meant learning Ruby and Go
which are the primary languages in use at Heroku.

It's a really small sample but I think the success has mostly been on the
back of two factors (in order of impact):

- I think most of the success of Hackbright isn't in the curriculum but in
a rigorous selection and qualification process. The graduates appear to
have degrees in other fields and all of them have shown an aptitude to
learn new complex ideas really quickly.
- We've been fortunate to have a handful of colleagues who are good
mentors, with just enough slack.

Expecting any junior to be immediately productive within the first week is
naive but we're not talking a year of being in the wilderness either. The
perceived risks can be mitigated with some focussed upfront effort on the
part of the new employer. And with a developer facing product we've had the
added benefit of being able to witness first hand the problems a junior dev
has using our tools, and we've empowered them to do something about it.
It's more than justified the effort just to get the empathy for this
perspective.

G
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20140521/b2271474/attachment.html>