###### CTO Lunch Club # Hiring software developers with less experience is an underrated strategy ---  --- ### About me My name is Dan Sofer. My first job involved writing theorem provers in Pascal at Manchester University in the 1980s. I now run Founders & Coders CIC, the non-profit coding school I founded in 2014. --- ## About this talk I am not planning to cover anything in detail. Instead, I am going to make a series of points that I hope will provoke a conversation. --- I owe several of the insights here to The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter by Gergely Orosz. I recommend subscribing.  --- ## Different kinds of teams --- ### The inverted pyramid  ###### More likely in well-funded companies building complex systems or early-stage startups moving fast. --- ### The cooking pot  ###### Typical of many work environments. --- ### The pyramid  ###### Don’t do this unless you’re building simple boiler-plate websites. --- ## Why would anyone want to hire at entry-level in the current market? --- ### Three reasons. --- ### Reason One So your team does not lose its shape. --- ### Reason Two So you don’t forget how to do it. --- ### Reason Three The size of the pool of good people at entry level has never been higher. (although you do have to find them!) --- ## Lessons learned from 10 years of helping employers hire juniors --- **Lesson 1** Some employers are less selective about entry-level hires. This is a mistake. --- **Lesson 2** Juniors bring attributes that benefit the whole team. It’s not just about output. (if you do your hiring right) --- **Lesson 3** Diverse workplaces have lower staff turnover. --- **Lesson 4** If diversity (on whatever measure) matters to you, then hiring at entry level is essential. --- **Lesson 5** Workplaces tend to cluster into two distributions: surprisingly representative or absolutely not. --- **Lesson 6** For entry-level devs, code reading for technical interviews produces fewer false negatives. --- **Lesson 7** What employers call *“adaptability”*, I would describe as *“fearlessness”*. In other words, the willingness to try something new and to embrace your ignorance. Some people also call this *“beginner’s mindset”*. It’s a critical attribute in a developer and it can be cultivated. --- **Lesson 8** The trade-off between getting somebody to the point where they can be a useful individual contributer as quickly as possible, but who also has broad-based knowledge is non-trivial. --- **Lesson 9** Apprenticeships are not as bad a model as I thought they would be. --- **Lesson 10** One thing hasn’t changed in 10 years of doing this: a strong belief in the power of peer-led learning. --- ## Kinds of companies where hiring at entry level makes sense --- There is almost no company beyond an early-stage startup where hiring at entry level doesn’t make sense. The question is the scale at which you do it. --- ## Apprenticeships vs ## Graduate programmes vs ## coding bootcamps --- It doesn’t matter so much. The point is to find good people who are capable of self-guided learning. You will find them everywhere, but you have to look. --- ## What demands to make of a training provider --- ### Demand #1 Send me good people that meet the criteria I set. --- ### Demand #2 Prepare those people adequately in a relevant stack. --- ## The priorities of our new government --- #### The incoming administration is committed to: 1. funding public services; 2. minimising tax increases; 3. fiscal prudence. Which means they are committed to a series of difficult tradeoffs. --- The government’s training brief sits inside the Department for Education, which is unfortunate in this case, because the incoming Education Secretary has announced her “number one priority” to be Early Years. --- I wouldn’t argue with that as a priority, but it does mean that your training needs may not be a priority of government just yet. --- ## Some choice quotes from employers --- > "If seniors create the right environment then the juniors are unencumbered and can bring energy, enthusiasm and belief to their work. It can be a powerful thing." --- > "I love the cognitive diversity that career switchers bring to our team." --- > "We are actively trying to source candidates at entry level, but they tend not to be fullstack and they struggle with our technical interview process." --- > "Our .NET developers seem to find it harder to learn TypeScript/React than the other way round." --- ### ...and one from a React dev with a couple of years' experience --- > "I'm scared of DevOps. I never touch it." --- Questions or reflections?