Like many of us, I started my career as a junior developer 😃 In 2006 I joined Nestoria, a property search startup based in London, as a summer intern. I joined full time the following year after finishing my third year of university, and over the following eight years I was promoted through several individual contributor and management roles until I became the CTO of a 28 person tech business providing high quality property search across 9 countries.

Throughout my time at Nestoria we kept our internship program going with a mixture of 3, 6, 9 and 12 month internships across development, product and sales. Because of that we got really good at hiring and onboarding new inexperienced folks onto our team and getting them from zero to productive in 4-6 weeks so we could then expect 2-11 months of great work from them before they went back to university, found a more permanent job elsewhere, or in a few cases joined us more permanently.

More recently, in 2017, I joined CharlieHR as a senior developer and later stepped up into the Head of Engineering position. When I joined, Charlie was a team of experienced Rubyists working in cross-functional teams and I saw a huge opportunity to bring some junior developers into the mix. I saw that Charlie had most of the ingredients needed for junior developers to thrive - a supportive team, tidy codebase, decent test suite, regular code reviews - and so I made the case for us to hire our first junior developer.

What I hadn’t foreseen was the incredible supply of junior Ruby developers available. We were struggling to hire experienced Ruby developers in under three months, but for juniors we could get 50 strong applicants within a week of putting a role live. Bootcamps like Le Wagon and Makers Academy are producing new junior Ruby developers all the time and you want to tap into that market.

I know there’s a lot of apprehension about hiring your first junior developer. You’re not sure what your expectations should be; what kinds of work they can and can’t do. You don’t want them to have a bad time or feel unsupported at your company. You don’t want to waste your time or theirs.

This set of Notion pages is designed as a guide to avoiding those pitfalls and hiring, onboarding and supporting junior developers effectively. To start out with it’s just going to be my experience and opinions, but I’d love it to evolve and improve with feedback, so please get in touch.

Alex

Twitter: @kaokun

Email: [email protected]