I've found from being on both sides of the recruitment fence that a lot of companies (disclaimer: my experience is mostly digital-agency-based) are willing to take a risk on developers who have not quite "cut their teeth" on major projects yet but show the incentive and motivation to get their hands dirty and learn new processes etc.
From the company's point of view, especially ones who already have an active and often experienced set of developers, taking on a junior dev can be a really good thing - it gives their middleweight developers the chance to mentor and teach, and it introduces a new set of eyes to the team that is not afraid of asking what are often quite valuable questions.
It also catches developers in that awesome cocoon moment (before they become an experienced development butterfly) and they get to bed in with a company's processes and technologies as their cornerstone tech.
I guess my point is that I definitely agree that it's always worth keeping an eye out of dev jobs, as often the company will get just as much (if not more) from your application than you will!
Great article :)
I've found from being on both sides of the recruitment fence that a lot of companies (disclaimer: my experience is mostly digital-agency-based) are willing to take a risk on developers who have not quite "cut their teeth" on major projects yet but show the incentive and motivation to get their hands dirty and learn new processes etc.
From the company's point of view, especially ones who already have an active and often experienced set of developers, taking on a junior dev can be a really good thing - it gives their middleweight developers the chance to mentor and teach, and it introduces a new set of eyes to the team that is not afraid of asking what are often quite valuable questions.
It also catches developers in that awesome cocoon moment (before they become an experienced development butterfly) and they get to bed in with a company's processes and technologies as their cornerstone tech.
I guess my point is that I definitely agree that it's always worth keeping an eye out of dev jobs, as often the company will get just as much (if not more) from your application than you will!
Yes! Passion and a good attitude go farther than hard skills. I try to tell my mentees this all the time but it always takes a while to sink in.