In various jobs I have held I have had to sit in and conduct interviews for a junior developer role. Junior developers by their nature have very little industry experience and very few projects which they can discuss at length.
It is about Passion
In those interviews I wasn’t looking for someone that had all the answers, I was looking for someone that I thought the team would enjoy working with and teaching.
What I look for in a junior developer is passion. There has to be a fire in their belly and a genuine desire to learn about things that right now probably seem so unknowable.
It is about Communication
Junior developers generally won’t have had too much interview experience, so I would not be looking for a candidate who maintains eye contact at all times and answers everything without first taking time to think.
What I do look for is someone who can communicate – even with my limited experience as an interviewer I feel it is apparent when someone isn’t communicating well because of nerves, or isn’t communicating well because it isn’t in their nature to communicate.
Communication is a massive part of our job, we are telling stories through code and through commit messages and through support emails. I am not good enough to teach someone how to be a good communicator so I would like to hire people who are by their nature communicators.
It is about honesty
I look for honesty.
I was once in an interview where the interviewee said they had looked at our website’s source code (we asked). Before putting out the position we had introduced a comment at the very top of the site saying something along the lines of;
<!-- Hello there, if you are interviewing with us and mention that you seen this comment, you will score major points! -->
We asked what they noticed and they had no comment (and clearly looked very nervous). There was no way we could hire them.
It doesn’t have to be this extreme of course, what really turns me off about a candidate is when you ask them “Do you know much about technology y” and instead of answering “No, but I have heard it is like technology x which I know about”, or “No, sorry, is there another name I might have heard it being called”, they answer with “Ummm yeah, I think so, it is like this thing that lets you do this thing that…”
It is honestly better to be honest!
It is about the mindset
When asked a hypothetical question like “The client is reporting that the email form we built them isn’t working, how would you handle this” we generally aren’t looking for technical answers.
I want to know about how you think about things – being able to think on your feet is incredibly important and I want to know what type of thought process you use.
I also want to know about how you might communicate the issue with your hypothetical teammates and this hypothetical client.
It is about the questions you ask
In my experience the questions you get asked at the end of an interview are very telling and say a lot about the interviewee.
First up, have questions. There is nothing worse than asking nothing.
Second up, know that there are no dumb questions – you won’t get marked down for asking something you think everyone else knows.
Good questions I have heard before include topics such as;
- If there is a training budget
- What is a normal day like for a dev in the company
- Who would I be reporting to and what is their role
- Why has a position opened up
- Are there any main projects that I would be spending most of my time on?
It is about… Time I wrapped up
If you're a junior developer who has landed an interview, you may be interested in my post interview tips for junior developers.
This article originally appeared on tosbourn.com
Latest comments (31)
Good points. What I realized after my job hunt was finally over this year, is that a lot of it is about personality and culture fit.
Skills can be trained, but not your personality.
Good article, especially as I'm a newbie. Just wish the industry was the same in Estonia. They think of Juniors here as if they are seniors but willing to accept a Junior salary.
I think I agree with both of you guys.
Letting a candidate talk about the technologies the likes, not asking the company stack is a great to measure his excitement, why?
I think that when you ask about the technologies that the company uses, if the candidate is not fully aware of how to use them, or only have a slight idea he may feel a bit uncomfortable and cornered.
However, if you let him speak about the technologies he's worked/experienced with, what problems he solved or tried to solve will be a better way to see his passion. People to talk about themselves, and letting the candidates talk about things in his personal experience would be a good thing and more practical one
Smarts, Passion, Mindset in priority I'll take 2 out of 3 but must include smarts
toby, as a 20 year vet of this industry i can say that "passion" is one of those words that masquerades as "a person who does too much work and will eventually burn out because they have a bad manager"
i appreciate your points made but i think you're confusing "desire for work" with "love of technology" - just my take.
thanks.
In regards to "I am not good enough to teach someone how to be a good communicator so I would like to hire people who are by their nature communicators."
Communication can be learned and practiced like other skills, it might be easier for some for sure, but it's not really a big deal their nature sort of thing.
How many questions is too many?
I've only ever worked in restaurants and gas stations and every time I've had an interview I've asked tons of questions (one time annoying an interviewer, still have nightmares about that interview lol)
Great question!
The main thing is to be aware of how long the interview was scheduled for and if you're running over you could say something like "if you don't mind, I have a few more questions but I realise we're running over, could I email them across for you to answer when you have time?"
That's a really good idea. Thank you so much
I've had great success in hiring junior developers. More success than with seniors frankly.
I came to realize years ago that interview questions can be very misleading. There are people that are good at it and people that aren't. In my particular (international) market everyone is kind of bad at interviews. But that doesn't mean they don't have talent.
What I look for is the ability to learn and if they've learned something that I consider meaty enough to be interesting. Being a good student is also an important factor (but not necessarily a good predictor either). If we think they're smart, we put them through a trial process where they are taught many things and those that show that they can learn quickly are kept.
This has been more effective than playing a game of chance where people are somehow supposed to know how to react in your interviews to obscure questions.
Good discussion, however I think the hidden comment on the page part is a bit silly. Aside from the fact that it is a leading question designed to trap the candidate, it's also something you'd rarely run into with modern apps and browsers. I can't remember the last time I used "view source," it's almost always inspecting specific elements on the page or looking at the performance, source or network tabs of my dev tools for insights.
Fair point. This post was originally written about 5 years ago.
It wasn’t designed as a trap, just so happened the candidate lied.
Great post! Couldn’t agree more with your view
I think. you make a lot of good points... For a too idealistic world. I am myself in a position, where I have to hire developers. And there are some points, which can never be truly seen in any number of interviews. Let me give you an instance of what I mean:
The mindset question: Until today, I have had no junior, who answered from a human pov, rather than a technical one. Even if this were the case, the true answer can be seen, only when this soul under pressure from diverse points, gets an angry email/phone call from the customer. We all know the theory, but practically there is a whole different story. The answer can be easily faked and even well sold. For this part, what I have found, it can give a sort of an idea, is having a playing afternoon "interview" with the team and the new devs. We would play high pressure and competitive games. After some point, after they are already under pressure and tired, I would approach them (and not only me) and ask them dumb/ weird questions, to see how they react. It gives you an interesting view. I have had many devs, who are technically great, but really not great characters.
I really like your points, they are very up-to-date and forthcoming. But somehow, I fear, that a good candidate can really say, what we like to hear and check every point of this list, without truly being able to.
Maybe it is high time, we came up with a new method to inteview (junior) developers...
YES! I'm fully behind this. I think something I should have said from the outset of the post is that this is my stab with a broken system.
Hiring needs a lot of work across the industry, especially when it comes to new folk coming in.
Good suggestions; however they would surely only be useful to work out how passionate they are about those things? You couldn’t hire someone for liking a certain IDE.
Might I suggest they/them over he/him
My first and currently only software engineering job, I got mainly due to my passion and interest in software engineering and technology. Plus ‘my can do/willingly to learn attitude’ according to my teammates. I said it was my only job in industry as I left to go off to university. Because I was lucky enough to land the job without any sort of degree or formal train in software engineering. I have been invited back to work there as a freelancer over the summer.🤗
What suggestions do you have to judge someone who doesn't have any coding experience to draw upon at interview?
Hahaha, that's a really interesting way to show if a potential candidate is honest.