At my previous job they hired a lot of junior front end devs aka straight out of uni. We found they didn't really know the fundamentals, or at least they weren't confident with them. Over about a month period we essentially gave them a fake project which used the tech they will most likely use on a project so html, sass/css, javascript and git.
We set them a task of building a font page of a site, this allowed us to know where they were, we gave feedback and they were told to improve what they had done. This went on for a 4 week period and it was quite effective, they weren't experts by any means but they were confident and knew how to figure out problems.
It might seem like a long time, but it was worth it in the end we saw these people produce better work in a shorter space of time compared to the other hires that didn't end up going through our process.
I think the most important thing to do when hiring new staff members (junior or expert) is to make them feel confident and comfortable, that way they feel more empowered and have ownership on what they are doing and don't have anxiety of what they are going to have to battle on that day.
Things I have found most effective
Documentation (you can say code should document itself, but you forget other people aren't at the same level as you)
Tests
Maintainable code (if not document why and how to work with it)
Completely agree! We have a very similar process at Synergist. We provide each of our new, junior developers that platform to learn concepts that they may have not learned in university and give them projects to build their skills. We make sure that they understand that they're already talented, but that there is just a level that they have to go up to in order to really hone into what skills they already possess; we definitely don't want to instill fear or anxiety, rather a nurturing environment.
Yeah, there's a lot of temptation to get people being "productive" as quickly as possible, but delaying productive contributions slightly in order to ensure long-term productivity in the form of good work and maintainable code seems like the way to go.
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At my previous job they hired a lot of junior front end devs aka straight out of uni. We found they didn't really know the fundamentals, or at least they weren't confident with them. Over about a month period we essentially gave them a fake project which used the tech they will most likely use on a project so html, sass/css, javascript and git.
We set them a task of building a font page of a site, this allowed us to know where they were, we gave feedback and they were told to improve what they had done. This went on for a 4 week period and it was quite effective, they weren't experts by any means but they were confident and knew how to figure out problems.
It might seem like a long time, but it was worth it in the end we saw these people produce better work in a shorter space of time compared to the other hires that didn't end up going through our process.
I think the most important thing to do when hiring new staff members (junior or expert) is to make them feel confident and comfortable, that way they feel more empowered and have ownership on what they are doing and don't have anxiety of what they are going to have to battle on that day.
Things I have found most effective
Completely agree! We have a very similar process at Synergist. We provide each of our new, junior developers that platform to learn concepts that they may have not learned in university and give them projects to build their skills. We make sure that they understand that they're already talented, but that there is just a level that they have to go up to in order to really hone into what skills they already possess; we definitely don't want to instill fear or anxiety, rather a nurturing environment.
Yeah, there's a lot of temptation to get people being "productive" as quickly as possible, but delaying productive contributions slightly in order to ensure long-term productivity in the form of good work and maintainable code seems like the way to go.