In this talk, Jeff Dickey will explain why, as an industry, we need to encourage companies to hire more junior developers. Also, once we do hire junior developers: he will show how to foster a learning culture within your team to allow them to advance their skills as quickly as possible.

1. +1
LEVELING UP DEVELOPERS
Why and how to hire junior developers

2. WHY HIRE JUNIOR DEVS?

3. WE NEED MORE DEVELOPERS
This is a great career and there is plenty of work to be done.
!
It shouldn’t be relegated to a uniform group of people.

4. NEW DEVS COME FROM
DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS
•
Diverse teams are more creative.
•
Diverse teams can solve complex problems better and faster.
•
Diversity has been scientifically proven to increase sales,
customers, market share and profits.
Source: http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_au/au/87c4e2a523340310VgnVCM3000001c56f00aRCRD.htm

5. THIS STUFF ISN’T SO HARD
ANYMORE!
Yes, there are engineers out there building compilers, search engines,
and recommendation engines.
But I don’t. I mostly make social webapps.

6. And even recommendation engines are easy now.
Just use Redis.
http://00f.net/2011/03/10/redis-as-a-recommendation-engine/

7. IT’S ALSO EASY TO LEARN
Spend 5 minutes trying out Dash and tell me I’m wrong.
https://dash.generalassemb.ly

8. THESE PEOPLE THINK SO TOO
Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer
because it teaches you how to think.
— Steve Jobs
Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers
as we can find. There just aren't enough people who are trained and
have these skills today. — Mark Zuckerberg
At a time when people are saying "I want a good job - I got out of
college and I couldnt find one," every single year in America there is
a standing demand for 120,000 people who are training in computer
science. — Bill Clinton
Source: code.org

9. HAVE A CONTINUUM OF
SKILL LEVELS

10. SKILL POLARITY IS BAD
•
Junior developers will never feel like they can
reach senior level
•
Senior developers will never respect the junior
developers

11. GET RID OF TITLES
•
Titles polarize teams destroying learning culture.
•
Nobody is 'senior' with everything.
•
I would rather be a junior anyways.

12. !
A learning culture isn’t just about getting smarter developers.

13. A learning culture allows engineers to learn more about the product.
Have your team finding problems, not solutions.

14. DO THIS BY EXPERIMENTING
•
Have a hack day.
•
Build crazy experiments.
•
Prototype new ideas.
•
Throw shit away.

15. ALLOW EXPERIMENTATION
WITH YOUR TECH STACK
•
GitHub provides Pull Requests to ‘suggest’ changes
without forcing them.
•
Git allows feature branching to play with new
ideas along with normal work.
•
Automated testing provides confidence nothing
will break when experimenting.

16. NEW EMPLOYEES ARE
EXCITED
They’ll never be as enthusiastic as they are on day one. Make
sure you pile their plate so high they have a ton to crunch on.

17. SPEAK IN NARRATIVES
Storytelling is a much more effective means of explaining
concepts than info sessions.

18. GIVE THE NEW DEV A
MENTOR
Someone willing to be bothered at any moment, for any reason
(headphones or not)

19. PAIR!
Anyone that’s paired will say it’s the most effective way to learn
a platform.

20. TRY PAIRING ON OTHER
THINGS
•
Support
•
Design
•
BD
Cross-functional employees will learn faster and be more engaged.

21. @dickeyxxx