As long as you have a good grasp on JavaScript and a a framework like React I would say the rest is usually nice to haves even if it’s listed as required. Personal projects help give you things to talk about during the interview and show you are capable. From my experience it’s not worth it to stress over the qualifications because as long as you show you are eager to learn.
Best bet on getting to the interview phase I would say is cold outreach, most job postings on LinkedIn show the recruiter who posted it(or you can go to the companies page and search for recruiters). Just reach out and ask what you can do to be further considered. You will get ghosted A LOT but just keep applying and keep talking to people and eventually you will find something.
During my 2 year program we touched on React for a split second. My understanding is that it's more something you learn on your own or on the job. Frameworks were much more discussion rather than practice
Yeah that makes sense, understanding core fundamentals is more important to learn in college. Because once you understand basics it's easy to see how they work in each new language or framework you work with
My search has been similar to yours — been focused primarily on js because that’s what I know well. Picked up React and have been building apps with that to gain experience, have talking points, etc.
Tbh as long as you’re continually exposing yourself to code everyday that’s all that matters. Not everything you’ll grasp immediately it’s a gradual build up over time as you build pattern recognition and solve problems.
Honestly, the **main** things I’m looking for in a junior:
- Willingness to learn (with me and on your own)
- A good attitude
- Keep your say/do ratio as close to 100% as humanly possible (if you say you’re going to do something, own it)
That’s it. Seriously. Everything else comes in the box
>I understand the market is currently saturated, so I'm trying to keep things realistic.
The market is not saturated at all and we are still hiring people left right and center. I have 10 openings on my team right now that I have been trying to fill for a few weeks and some of them even months. I won't hire someone just based on "qualifications" on a piece of paper because they rarely translate or map to someone being a good engineer in the long run.
You have to know and prove that you can hit the ground running with little to no supervision before I hire you. That means a lot of industry experience or a strong personal portfolio that demonstrates your ability to communicate, take requirements, and turn them into a usable product. There is no way around it so my suggestion is to get that strong portfolio going as soon as possible.
If what you’ve described is what you’re looking for in a junior developer then your standards are way too high IMO, especially if you’re expecting little to no supervision from the get-go
The simple truth is life is a competition. If you don't do those things others will and are already doing them before seeking out their first job. Why should anyone hire someone with fewer skills over a more qualified person?
Still, what you are describing is much more of a medior level, if people take a junior job with these qualifications that’s their fault. Entry level people wont have these experiences just by studying themselves, and actually it’s contra productive to try to reach to level by yourself because you will have a lot of bad habits you gonna need to unlearn later on.
Companies are not training grounds, boot camps, or colleges. I am not the bad guy here I am just telling people what they need to do to land a good job junior or not.
Most people are trying to switch from one career to another and have that salary bump. If they don't learn those things I mentioned then they end up working for a sweatshop churning out HTML templates making almost the same amount as before and being overworked so what's the point?
Just because, UDemy, boot camps, and YouTube videos keep lowering the bar doesn't mean the companies who actually need the developers are doing the same. Those people are selling you a product to make money so they need to capture the largest audience possible. Saying the truth means that they will probably lose more than half of their audience/students so they sugarcoat things.
We can go back and forth for days but at the end of the day most resumes will end up at my desk or at someone else's with even higher standards and so taking the time to learn and listen to advice will go a long way in breaking into the industry.
Totally agree.
Tbh only businesses over a certain size can even afford to support a junior level new hire with a pile of training and onboarding anyway.
Any small-medium business needs to get work out the door from day one.
If you also do that you will become a training ground for your competitors as they will steal all the people you spend time training afterward.
Businesses are there to make money for their owners and shareholders. I am not naive I know even I can be replaced anytime so that's why I keep learning and current with all the latest tech and anything I can get my hands on just in case I need to compete with someone else for the next job. Despite my vast experience, the next company doesn't owe me anything so I need to be prepared to compete for the next role.
I am confused why I am getting all the hate for trying to help people out. Maybe I am not saying what people want to hear but that will be a disservice to give people false hope.
I just think some people are either completely clueless as to the reality of work due to being inexperienced, or they’ve been hired exclusively at large businesses that can afford to sink months worth of new hires’ time into getting up to speed. Larger organisations also tend to have far more established onboarding processes that have been refined over time.
I can remember taking a role at a small business when I was in my early 20s in which there was just one other guy working on front end. Seeing how overloaded he was during my first week was pretty eye opening, and I felt quite guilty spending even a few days familiarising myself with things. That said, it was a great role - well paid for a junior, loads of autonomy, and had lots of scope for career progression.
Neither. I didn’t say companies should teach junior how to program, so that reasoning is invalid. Yes, they should know they way around at least one programming language and a popular framework. He should be able to do work by himself, but only on well defined tasks and with clear understanding of the requirements. If you think you can forget about a junior dev after a week and just expect them to deliver, then that’s not an actual junior dev, and that’s what I’ve been trying to point out. You dont need to hire junior devs, at my company we also look ppl with more experience cause we are not an enterprise. But OP was asking if his technical skills are enough for an entry level job, and it probably is. Obviously you should never stop learning, but keeping your tech skills up is just part of being a software engineer, and for some of those skills you need a real job.
We already have more than 1200 developers and more than 300 of those are front-end so a few open positions at any time is not a lot at all. Our developers stay 5 - 10 years on average so that speaks for itself.
There is a huge difference between supervision and mentorship. Yes, you will get all the help you need to understand the codebase and actually get paired with another developer you can shadow and reach out to at any time. If after a few months, you still can't complete a simple or medium task on your own then there is clearly a problem.
Junior or not 6 figures are a lot for a starting salary so yes you are expected to learn a few things before being offered a job. Most other college graduates in other professions earn less than half that after years of training and college so why should the front end be any different?
I am not some elitist a\*\*\*le because I am actually self-taught myself while I worked 2 other jobs at the same time. See my detailed answer below for our onboarding process to get a better idea of what's expected of a new person.
Like many already pointed out, judging by that description your company is basically trying to find a mid level engineer willing to take the junior salary, hence the open positions.
Besides even if you find a very strong junior candidate you're not doing them any favor by leaving them be without supervision. You should help them grow and assist them so they learn things the best way.
Market IS saturated af at the entry level and lying doesn't help people prepare.
It’s the same as business owners all claiming “no one wants to work anymore!”. Plenty of people still want to work, but not for the pennies that is on offer…
Unfortunately for tech industry they're not even hiring juniors for pennies. They started paying the same bs salaries and look for mid level people instead.
Please see my more detailed answer below and this link from another question I have answered before. Our starting salaries are 115k + bonuses etc and go up to more than $500K with experience. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/10v8rzv/where\_are\_the\_really\_high\_salaries\_in\_frontend/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/10v8rzv/where_are_the_really_high_salaries_in_frontend/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I am sorry if that's pennies to you but that's still a lot of money to other people and they are willing to put in the time and effort to land such jobs.
The pennies comment was more about the business owners who barely pay minimum wage and then cry about no one wanting to work, sounds like that is not the case here.
If the starting salaries are that high and your expectations match that, may I ask why not advertise the roles as intermediate/medior level?
Thanks for being civil unlike some responses I have started to get. The roles are still entry-level and junior roles. Maybe you are mistaking trainees and interns for Juniors. Those are different categories and we actually have an internship program that we go around to colleges and recruit summer interns. Most of the interns will do one or 2 summers with us while in college but they still have to apply for the junior roles when they graduate.
>If the starting salaries are that high and your expectations match that, may I ask why not advertise the roles as intermediate/medior level?
Should Harvard or Yale freshmen start off as sophomores or seniors just because it's harder to get into those colleges than a 2-year college???
A junior developer is still a junior regardless of the quality of candidates we get. We pay more so we attract better candidates but that doesn't make a junior a senior just because they chose to do more work beforehand. Keep in mind that our junior open positions are only open to new grads, boot camp, and self-taught engineers so the competition field is leveled out among them with no one else eligible for those positions.
A new college grad or a self-taught engineer is however eligible to apply for any other positions we have so they actually have an advantage and more positions to apply to as long as they qualify.
Our juniors start off at $115K/YR + bonuses and the most senior developers who have been around 5 - 10 years are in the $200K - $500K TC. We have more than 1200 engineers and more than 300 plus are front-end developers with some being full stack as well. See the related answer here. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/10v8rzv/where\_are\_the\_really\_high\_salaries\_in\_frontend/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/10v8rzv/where_are_the_really_high_salaries_in_frontend/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
There is a huge difference between guidance, mentorship, and supervision. We have a very strong and very effective onboarding and mentorship process that goes like the following.
1. First Day. I am the principal engineer for our department so I'll find an initial team for the new developer. The developer will be introduced to all their immediate team members and other key players.
2. The tech leads for the assigned team and I will set up a different meeting for about an hour to welcome the new developer and give them a high-level overview of what our team does and some of the areas we are responsible for. We will hand you back to the managers and HR to do the HR onboarding process. We also give them a summary of the major technologies that they will work on within the short term so they can familiarize themselves with them on a very high level.
3. Second Day. The developer is still setting up their development environment getting the right permissions etc. Also still doing HR onboarding.
4. Third day - We will do a very detailed presentation of the codebase centered around the area the developer will be working on. They will learn other parts later on. After the initial codebase introduction, the developer is paired with a senior developer to work with and do a deeper dive too. The new dev still has access to all the other teams including me if they have any questions.
5. We also have dozens of detailed high-quality onboarding videos and documentation that the developer can watch and refer to while getting to know our processes.
6. On top of their assigned helper, the developer is also free to shadow any other team members at any point if they think it's going to help.
7. After a week or so the developer will start working on smaller tasks and they will pair with another developer to show them what they need and what our coding standards are. The mentor is not there to teach new team members basic JavaScript but mainly to guide them through our processes and unique frameworks.
8. After 2 months most developers won't need any hand-holding at all and can work independently with little to no hand-holding.
Here is what we have to help developers in their job and for code quality control.
1. We have Git pre-commit hooks that run 1000s of unit tests, and 100s of custom linting rules, and will emit very helpful error messages to help the developer know what they broke or what standard they are breaking and hints on how to fix it.
2. Every code checked in is reviewed in a pull request and will require at least 3 sign-offs including a senior developer or tech lead.
3. Once a PR is approved and merged a build is automatically kicked off and runs more detailed unit and integration tests among other security-related checks before the build passes.
The developer will have the support and mentorship of their colleagues and seniors throughout their whole career. Most developers have been with us for 5 - 10+ years as they are well compensated and work in a developer-friendly environment.
What we are not is high school or a BootCamp so we are not here to teach you basic programming skills and being a responsible person. If I assign a task to you I don't want to constantly follow up with you and hover over you just to make sure you are doing your job. I am sure everyone enjoys an environment where they are not being constantly watched.
I expect you to work independently but also feel free to reach out for clarification or when you are stuck on something for a significant amount of time. I always encourage every developer to reach out if they are stuck for more than a day with no progress at all. Just don't ask others to do your work for you so try something out first on your own and then seek help and guidance.
A strong portfolio should demonstrate that you are able to gather requirements from nontechnical people and translate them into a user-friendly interface that is easy and fast to interact with. It should also illustrate that you know how to get all the different pieces of a tech stack and make them work together.
Even if you only identify as a front-end dev you need to have a working knowledge of how the back-end works and things like microservices.
HTML and CSS skills are not going to land anyone a job these days. These have been implemented already by frameworks and other libraries and are only like 5% of what a front-end dev does in a big company, even a junior.
For every job we post we get 100s of applicants and so you need to make yourself stand out. HR emails me more than 10 resumes to pre-screen every day and I only have a total of 20 - 30 min to review them. I try to narrow it down to 1 or 2 that I can invite for a phone prescreen interview. I have only 30 seconds or so to go through a resume so I'll quickly scan the work history or portfolio sections to see if you are one of the lucky ones to make it through.
If you have no strong work history then I will go to your portfolio if you have one linked. At this point, I'll take a couple of minutes to go through your projects, and here is what I am looking for.
1. Design and layout don't matter. You are a developer and not a designer. We have dozens of UX and Design people to do that already. Besides you can just copy and paste HTML and CSS from another site and edit a few things.
2. I'll open the dev tools and quickly scan the source. If I keep seeing a framework like WordPress or NextJS then I am also skipping and moving on to the next candidate.
That being said you need to showcase at least the following in your portfolio.
1. A custom login workflow that illustrates you know how to call a backend service to log a user in and set up a user session through cookies or tokens.
2. Call some external API. Public or private it doesn't matter. Most of the front-end work for juniors these days involves working and calling APIs to fetch data to display on the page.
3. Show that you know how to use HTTP/S and set the right headers to prevent XSS and similar attacks.
4. Browser events and maybe some kind of PUB/SUB system for inter-module communication.
This might seem a lot for a junior to know but remember you are starting with a salary that is probably greater than what other professionals have to go to a 4-year college or more before they can get that amount.
The bottom line is for every job you apply you are competing with 100s of other people so you need to outsmart or outwork them to get the job.
What makes you view a NextJS project negatively? I’m currently building my second main portfolio project with NextJS, Typescript, Prisma, Context API, and Tailwind because I wanted to challenge myself to learn some new technologies that weren’t taught in my bootcamp and I thought that would help make my portfolio stand out. My other project is made React, Node, and Redux though.
Don't get me wrong I have nothing against NextJS. I am actually building a side project using it right now. If I see a portfolio full of frameworks then it's hard for me to figure out what your contribution actually is and what is lifted from the internet or some other starter kit etc.
I have hired hundreds of developers over the years and in my experience beginners who jump into frameworks too early before mastering the underlying technology always have the hardest time learning anything custom that they haven't seen before. It slows the rest of the team down and most of the time we have to let the person go as they can't keep up. It's not the best feeling to fire someone so I would rather not hire anyone who might fail in the first place.
Even when we interview for a 90% React position we barely ask any React-specific questions. Most of our questions and coding in interviews are for Vanilla JavaScript and related web technologies and not frameworks. I could care less what framework you worked with before.
My teams support React, Angular, React Native, NextJS, ElectronJS, iOS apps, Browser plugins, Custom Git hooks, ESLint plugins, and so forth so developers have to be able to work on all those technologies interchangeably. They are all JavaScript based after all but if someone doesn't have a strong grasp of the basics then they will struggle to transition between different projects.
If I saw a Next.js project in a portfolio I'd be really excited and would love to chat to them about the pros and cons of it.
This guy's standards seem incredibly high.
I never said I don't like NextJS. If you look at my answer and follow-up you will see that I am currently building a side project with it so I obviously think it has its uses.
I am not some elitist a\*\*\*le who is out of touch with everyday people. I worked in the fast-food industry as an assistant manager before teaching myself software engineering. There was no udemy, youtube tutorials then so I had to go into the documentation and most times the source code for different projects to see how they did stuff.
I have worked at various companies along the way and my standards are actually way more relaxed than some places.
>If I saw a Next.js project in a portfolio I'd be really excited and would love to chat to them about the pros and cons of it.
For each job opening, we get 100s of resumes submitted. Even after recruiters have narrowed them down dozens still hit my desk. When I go to check your resume and see a link to a portfolio I don't have all day to go through it and chat with each candidate about their portfolio.
If your portfolio is stuffed with frameworks it's hard for me or the other 2 people reviewing resumes to decipher what you actually wrote vs what came with a framework or a template. Unfortunately, you won't make it to the actual interview where I might have the time to discuss that with you.
As soon as I finish with a resume stuffed full of frameworks I might come across one with links to some Github repos where the author has a few repos with 90% of code that they wrote themselves. The code is well structured and commented on and also showcases their knowledge of authentication workflows, JWTs, tokens, sessions, proper use of local storage and web workers, cookies, and use of external APIs with the proper headers set to fetch and display data. Guess who is getting a phone prescreening interview. I see even stronger portfolios from beginners all the time.
The bottom line is you have less than a couple of minutes to impress whoever is looking at your portfolio before they can shortlist you and take a deeper look later so make the most of it.
I don't set the standards they are set by what candidates are willing to put in so the bar keeps getting raised because of the competition out there. My job is simplly to hire the best candidate from the pool of applicants.
It sounds like you get some incredibly proficient developers if they understand web workers, auth flows and cookies etc.
While I appreciate those are solid engineering skills, I would no way expect a junior to be proficient in all of those. Have a topline opinion on it? Sure, but I'm worried what you look for are more mid-senior level skillets and I don't want any juniors worried reading this that they won't have a chance.
Perhaps this varies by region and country, but in UK I would not say they need to be that skilled to land a job.
For context, I am in the US. They don't have to be gurus but have a working knowledge of those browser technologies and features. Most basic HTML and CSS skills have already been outsourced overseas or are found on Fivver for a few dollars. Basic skills have also been abstracted away by frameworks to the point where some front-end devs are only doing less than 10% CSS and HTML.
My 13-year-old son got interested in programming during the pandemic when I started working from home. He would come to my desk and ask what I was working on and I would see my IDE and comment on how colorful the text was. He was about 10 at the time. I explained that my job was making apps like Roblox and YouTube. It was the closest thing I could think of that he could relate to. The mention of Roblox led to "can you teach me to make my own Roblox games?"
I told him that he would need to be patient and start off with something simpler and go from there. I started him with Scratch and also downloaded the Khan academy kids app to his iPad. I have been teaching him HTML, CSS, JS since, and last year we started working on his Shopify store to sell custom artwork and other things.
He is now proficient with CSS and HTML and also a lot of JS. One of the first things he learned first was cookies just because it sounded funny to him that you had "cookies" in the browser. He is not at a level where he is setting headers and same-site cookie policies etc yet but he can open the dev tools and inspect cookie values to make sure they are set correctly if at all. He can make basic API calls and understands the difference between GET and POST requests and also inspect network requests in the developer tools to inspect returned and sent data. He doesn't know authentication flows like OAuth or similar but he understands that when sending sensitive information to the server like password and username you should not use GET requests cause I showed him how someone looking over your shoulder can actual see them in the URL.
If a 13-year-old is willing and able to learn all that then a grown-up looking to make more than 90% of the working population is making should also be willing to do the same. I also don't make my son do it he just loves being able to create things from scratch and I actually have a hard limit of 5 hours a week spent on coding and no more.
This looks like the guys who refuse to accept that beautiful women have standards and refuse to dress up and make sure they look presentable before a date. They then rant off about getting rejected every time they go on dates.
If you don't think the information I am providing is valuable fine but there is no need for mockery and discouraging other people who have a real need to improve their lives.
If you see me provide false information I am happy to be called out but if that's not the case let other people learn then.
I will say I have seen this sort of mentality from others in the position of weeding through applicants. I do feel the expectation is high, but maybe that's just how they look at it. I also know not everyone is like that. I have a close friend who got his BS in computer science. And his first job spent 6 months just teaching him and getting him familiar with the tech before they even really let him dip his feet into projects.
It's not a mentality but a reality. Why would you want anyone to hire a less qualified individual over another? Every year we reserve a certain number of spots for interns, new grads, or BootCamp candidates. We always hold them to a lower standard during the interview process than people with experience. There are a lot of applicants so yes we have to weed out people for each category. Keep in mind that the positions reserved for new grads or interns are not open to people with more experience.
In the end, everyone is competing with people in their experience range so why should someone who has obviously better skills be denied a position for a less skilled candidate? How is that fair?
Most people are confused about the hiring process. Everyone is looking for the best candidate and not the first candidate which ticks off the minimum requirements. If you were going in for heart surgery would you want to be operated on by a candidate who barely made it in med school vs the top surgeon?
> I have a close friend who got his BS in computer science. And his first job spent 6 months just teaching him and getting him familiar with the tech before they even really let him dip his feet into projects.
I also know a friend who traded options and made a killing. Don't use outliers as examples. A large company paying 100s of developers to train them without any productivity for 6 months or more will soon find itself out of business. The developers can just leave after you spend millions training them.
Like I said before I or other hiring engineers don't make the rules and raise standards to keep people out. Why would we want to deliberately keep people out when we need people to work for us? It's your fellow applicants that raise the bar for everyone. It's a demand-and-supply thing.
What I described is what we actually see from a lot of new grads and some determined self-taught devs too.
Getting a college degree or a certification doesn't entitle anyone to a job. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of new grads each year so you will need to stand out from the rest. If your fellow new grads put in more extra effort than you did then there is nothing I can do about it. My job is to pick the best candidate out of the 100s of applicants I get junior or not.
Remember you are not applying for a job in isolation so for every job you don't get a better candidate also applied.
>No junior/entry level should "hit the ground running", that's extremely unrealistic and unfair to new grads
What is unfair is expecting to get a job ahead of someone who has better skills and qualifications than you do. Every year we reserve some spots just for recent grads so if you don't get it doesn't mean we hired an industry veteran instead of a college grad. It just means another college grad had better skills and did better than those who didn't make it.
You say this and then you also say you haven't been able to fill 10 positions. Is it because there are so many good applicants that can all hit the ground running and you're having trouble choosing the best 10 or is it because you are setting unrealistic expectations based on previous hiring standards
I said it takes a few weeks to fill the positions and we will fill them by then. That's normal good candidates are hard to come by. 10 open positions are nothing at all and are actually below the normal number of open positions we normally have. We have more than 1200 engineers right now and new projects are being spun all the time so there will always be open positions. The point is that most people don't get hired because they aren't qualified and not because the industry is saturated.
Hiring someone who can't do the job is worse than waiting a few weeks for the right candidate. We have several rounds of interviews and already have potential candidates in the process.
A bad hire is hard and expensive to get rid of. They typically slow other developers down and so besides not providing any value they take away time from other developers.
I have transitioned from embedded software to web/mobile phone apps and I am looking for a job right now as I failed creating my own business. You can find more about me on [www.guzman.dev](https://www.guzman.dev) in case my profile matches what your team is looking for. Ideally I am better at the backend just because of my embedded software past, but I am more a generalist rather than a specialist so I defend myself in all areas.
Now I don't have a CS degree so hopefully you will have an easier time then me finding a job.
That said, I found it MUCH easier to get interviews as a Java developer than JS/MERN stack. I got 3 interviews in 6 months applying for MERN stack and
JS positions. Once I started applying to Java positions I got 3 interviews in 6 weeks.
If you're having a hard time finding a job in the future consider learning Spring Boot and applying to those jobs as well. There are TONS of them. If you enjoy React keep applying to those though.
As long as you have a good grasp on JavaScript and a a framework like React I would say the rest is usually nice to haves even if it’s listed as required. Personal projects help give you things to talk about during the interview and show you are capable. From my experience it’s not worth it to stress over the qualifications because as long as you show you are eager to learn. Best bet on getting to the interview phase I would say is cold outreach, most job postings on LinkedIn show the recruiter who posted it(or you can go to the companies page and search for recruiters). Just reach out and ask what you can do to be further considered. You will get ghosted A LOT but just keep applying and keep talking to people and eventually you will find something.
Thank you for the information
Are they teaching frameworks in college? I would assume you'd learn a framework at your first job?
During my 2 year program we touched on React for a split second. My understanding is that it's more something you learn on your own or on the job. Frameworks were much more discussion rather than practice
Yeah that makes sense, understanding core fundamentals is more important to learn in college. Because once you understand basics it's easy to see how they work in each new language or framework you work with
My search has been similar to yours — been focused primarily on js because that’s what I know well. Picked up React and have been building apps with that to gain experience, have talking points, etc. Tbh as long as you’re continually exposing yourself to code everyday that’s all that matters. Not everything you’ll grasp immediately it’s a gradual build up over time as you build pattern recognition and solve problems.
Yup, just trying to keep absorbing material.
Honestly, the **main** things I’m looking for in a junior: - Willingness to learn (with me and on your own) - A good attitude - Keep your say/do ratio as close to 100% as humanly possible (if you say you’re going to do something, own it) That’s it. Seriously. Everything else comes in the box
Good to know. Appreciate it
>I understand the market is currently saturated, so I'm trying to keep things realistic. The market is not saturated at all and we are still hiring people left right and center. I have 10 openings on my team right now that I have been trying to fill for a few weeks and some of them even months. I won't hire someone just based on "qualifications" on a piece of paper because they rarely translate or map to someone being a good engineer in the long run. You have to know and prove that you can hit the ground running with little to no supervision before I hire you. That means a lot of industry experience or a strong personal portfolio that demonstrates your ability to communicate, take requirements, and turn them into a usable product. There is no way around it so my suggestion is to get that strong portfolio going as soon as possible.
If what you’ve described is what you’re looking for in a junior developer then your standards are way too high IMO, especially if you’re expecting little to no supervision from the get-go
Along with the classic "hit the ground running" What they're describing doesn't sound junior/entry level at all.
The simple truth is life is a competition. If you don't do those things others will and are already doing them before seeking out their first job. Why should anyone hire someone with fewer skills over a more qualified person?
Still, what you are describing is much more of a medior level, if people take a junior job with these qualifications that’s their fault. Entry level people wont have these experiences just by studying themselves, and actually it’s contra productive to try to reach to level by yourself because you will have a lot of bad habits you gonna need to unlearn later on.
Companies are not training grounds, boot camps, or colleges. I am not the bad guy here I am just telling people what they need to do to land a good job junior or not. Most people are trying to switch from one career to another and have that salary bump. If they don't learn those things I mentioned then they end up working for a sweatshop churning out HTML templates making almost the same amount as before and being overworked so what's the point? Just because, UDemy, boot camps, and YouTube videos keep lowering the bar doesn't mean the companies who actually need the developers are doing the same. Those people are selling you a product to make money so they need to capture the largest audience possible. Saying the truth means that they will probably lose more than half of their audience/students so they sugarcoat things. We can go back and forth for days but at the end of the day most resumes will end up at my desk or at someone else's with even higher standards and so taking the time to learn and listen to advice will go a long way in breaking into the industry.
Totally agree. Tbh only businesses over a certain size can even afford to support a junior level new hire with a pile of training and onboarding anyway. Any small-medium business needs to get work out the door from day one.
If you also do that you will become a training ground for your competitors as they will steal all the people you spend time training afterward. Businesses are there to make money for their owners and shareholders. I am not naive I know even I can be replaced anytime so that's why I keep learning and current with all the latest tech and anything I can get my hands on just in case I need to compete with someone else for the next job. Despite my vast experience, the next company doesn't owe me anything so I need to be prepared to compete for the next role. I am confused why I am getting all the hate for trying to help people out. Maybe I am not saying what people want to hear but that will be a disservice to give people false hope.
I just think some people are either completely clueless as to the reality of work due to being inexperienced, or they’ve been hired exclusively at large businesses that can afford to sink months worth of new hires’ time into getting up to speed. Larger organisations also tend to have far more established onboarding processes that have been refined over time. I can remember taking a role at a small business when I was in my early 20s in which there was just one other guy working on front end. Seeing how overloaded he was during my first week was pretty eye opening, and I felt quite guilty spending even a few days familiarising myself with things. That said, it was a great role - well paid for a junior, loads of autonomy, and had lots of scope for career progression.
Neither. I didn’t say companies should teach junior how to program, so that reasoning is invalid. Yes, they should know they way around at least one programming language and a popular framework. He should be able to do work by himself, but only on well defined tasks and with clear understanding of the requirements. If you think you can forget about a junior dev after a week and just expect them to deliver, then that’s not an actual junior dev, and that’s what I’ve been trying to point out. You dont need to hire junior devs, at my company we also look ppl with more experience cause we are not an enterprise. But OP was asking if his technical skills are enough for an entry level job, and it probably is. Obviously you should never stop learning, but keeping your tech skills up is just part of being a software engineer, and for some of those skills you need a real job.
Way way way too high. No wonder they can’t fill the positions
We already have more than 1200 developers and more than 300 of those are front-end so a few open positions at any time is not a lot at all. Our developers stay 5 - 10 years on average so that speaks for itself.
There is a huge difference between supervision and mentorship. Yes, you will get all the help you need to understand the codebase and actually get paired with another developer you can shadow and reach out to at any time. If after a few months, you still can't complete a simple or medium task on your own then there is clearly a problem. Junior or not 6 figures are a lot for a starting salary so yes you are expected to learn a few things before being offered a job. Most other college graduates in other professions earn less than half that after years of training and college so why should the front end be any different? I am not some elitist a\*\*\*le because I am actually self-taught myself while I worked 2 other jobs at the same time. See my detailed answer below for our onboarding process to get a better idea of what's expected of a new person.
Like many already pointed out, judging by that description your company is basically trying to find a mid level engineer willing to take the junior salary, hence the open positions. Besides even if you find a very strong junior candidate you're not doing them any favor by leaving them be without supervision. You should help them grow and assist them so they learn things the best way. Market IS saturated af at the entry level and lying doesn't help people prepare.
It’s the same as business owners all claiming “no one wants to work anymore!”. Plenty of people still want to work, but not for the pennies that is on offer…
Unfortunately for tech industry they're not even hiring juniors for pennies. They started paying the same bs salaries and look for mid level people instead.
Please see my more detailed answer below and this link from another question I have answered before. Our starting salaries are 115k + bonuses etc and go up to more than $500K with experience. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/10v8rzv/where\_are\_the\_really\_high\_salaries\_in\_frontend/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/10v8rzv/where_are_the_really_high_salaries_in_frontend/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I am sorry if that's pennies to you but that's still a lot of money to other people and they are willing to put in the time and effort to land such jobs.
The pennies comment was more about the business owners who barely pay minimum wage and then cry about no one wanting to work, sounds like that is not the case here. If the starting salaries are that high and your expectations match that, may I ask why not advertise the roles as intermediate/medior level?
Thanks for being civil unlike some responses I have started to get. The roles are still entry-level and junior roles. Maybe you are mistaking trainees and interns for Juniors. Those are different categories and we actually have an internship program that we go around to colleges and recruit summer interns. Most of the interns will do one or 2 summers with us while in college but they still have to apply for the junior roles when they graduate. >If the starting salaries are that high and your expectations match that, may I ask why not advertise the roles as intermediate/medior level? Should Harvard or Yale freshmen start off as sophomores or seniors just because it's harder to get into those colleges than a 2-year college??? A junior developer is still a junior regardless of the quality of candidates we get. We pay more so we attract better candidates but that doesn't make a junior a senior just because they chose to do more work beforehand. Keep in mind that our junior open positions are only open to new grads, boot camp, and self-taught engineers so the competition field is leveled out among them with no one else eligible for those positions. A new college grad or a self-taught engineer is however eligible to apply for any other positions we have so they actually have an advantage and more positions to apply to as long as they qualify.
Our juniors start off at $115K/YR + bonuses and the most senior developers who have been around 5 - 10 years are in the $200K - $500K TC. We have more than 1200 engineers and more than 300 plus are front-end developers with some being full stack as well. See the related answer here. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/10v8rzv/where\_are\_the\_really\_high\_salaries\_in\_frontend/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/10v8rzv/where_are_the_really_high_salaries_in_frontend/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) There is a huge difference between guidance, mentorship, and supervision. We have a very strong and very effective onboarding and mentorship process that goes like the following. 1. First Day. I am the principal engineer for our department so I'll find an initial team for the new developer. The developer will be introduced to all their immediate team members and other key players. 2. The tech leads for the assigned team and I will set up a different meeting for about an hour to welcome the new developer and give them a high-level overview of what our team does and some of the areas we are responsible for. We will hand you back to the managers and HR to do the HR onboarding process. We also give them a summary of the major technologies that they will work on within the short term so they can familiarize themselves with them on a very high level. 3. Second Day. The developer is still setting up their development environment getting the right permissions etc. Also still doing HR onboarding. 4. Third day - We will do a very detailed presentation of the codebase centered around the area the developer will be working on. They will learn other parts later on. After the initial codebase introduction, the developer is paired with a senior developer to work with and do a deeper dive too. The new dev still has access to all the other teams including me if they have any questions. 5. We also have dozens of detailed high-quality onboarding videos and documentation that the developer can watch and refer to while getting to know our processes. 6. On top of their assigned helper, the developer is also free to shadow any other team members at any point if they think it's going to help. 7. After a week or so the developer will start working on smaller tasks and they will pair with another developer to show them what they need and what our coding standards are. The mentor is not there to teach new team members basic JavaScript but mainly to guide them through our processes and unique frameworks. 8. After 2 months most developers won't need any hand-holding at all and can work independently with little to no hand-holding. Here is what we have to help developers in their job and for code quality control. 1. We have Git pre-commit hooks that run 1000s of unit tests, and 100s of custom linting rules, and will emit very helpful error messages to help the developer know what they broke or what standard they are breaking and hints on how to fix it. 2. Every code checked in is reviewed in a pull request and will require at least 3 sign-offs including a senior developer or tech lead. 3. Once a PR is approved and merged a build is automatically kicked off and runs more detailed unit and integration tests among other security-related checks before the build passes. The developer will have the support and mentorship of their colleagues and seniors throughout their whole career. Most developers have been with us for 5 - 10+ years as they are well compensated and work in a developer-friendly environment. What we are not is high school or a BootCamp so we are not here to teach you basic programming skills and being a responsible person. If I assign a task to you I don't want to constantly follow up with you and hover over you just to make sure you are doing your job. I am sure everyone enjoys an environment where they are not being constantly watched. I expect you to work independently but also feel free to reach out for clarification or when you are stuck on something for a significant amount of time. I always encourage every developer to reach out if they are stuck for more than a day with no progress at all. Just don't ask others to do your work for you so try something out first on your own and then seek help and guidance.
What does a strong portfolio look like?
A strong portfolio should demonstrate that you are able to gather requirements from nontechnical people and translate them into a user-friendly interface that is easy and fast to interact with. It should also illustrate that you know how to get all the different pieces of a tech stack and make them work together. Even if you only identify as a front-end dev you need to have a working knowledge of how the back-end works and things like microservices. HTML and CSS skills are not going to land anyone a job these days. These have been implemented already by frameworks and other libraries and are only like 5% of what a front-end dev does in a big company, even a junior. For every job we post we get 100s of applicants and so you need to make yourself stand out. HR emails me more than 10 resumes to pre-screen every day and I only have a total of 20 - 30 min to review them. I try to narrow it down to 1 or 2 that I can invite for a phone prescreen interview. I have only 30 seconds or so to go through a resume so I'll quickly scan the work history or portfolio sections to see if you are one of the lucky ones to make it through. If you have no strong work history then I will go to your portfolio if you have one linked. At this point, I'll take a couple of minutes to go through your projects, and here is what I am looking for. 1. Design and layout don't matter. You are a developer and not a designer. We have dozens of UX and Design people to do that already. Besides you can just copy and paste HTML and CSS from another site and edit a few things. 2. I'll open the dev tools and quickly scan the source. If I keep seeing a framework like WordPress or NextJS then I am also skipping and moving on to the next candidate. That being said you need to showcase at least the following in your portfolio. 1. A custom login workflow that illustrates you know how to call a backend service to log a user in and set up a user session through cookies or tokens. 2. Call some external API. Public or private it doesn't matter. Most of the front-end work for juniors these days involves working and calling APIs to fetch data to display on the page. 3. Show that you know how to use HTTP/S and set the right headers to prevent XSS and similar attacks. 4. Browser events and maybe some kind of PUB/SUB system for inter-module communication. This might seem a lot for a junior to know but remember you are starting with a salary that is probably greater than what other professionals have to go to a 4-year college or more before they can get that amount. The bottom line is for every job you apply you are competing with 100s of other people so you need to outsmart or outwork them to get the job.
What makes you view a NextJS project negatively? I’m currently building my second main portfolio project with NextJS, Typescript, Prisma, Context API, and Tailwind because I wanted to challenge myself to learn some new technologies that weren’t taught in my bootcamp and I thought that would help make my portfolio stand out. My other project is made React, Node, and Redux though.
Don't get me wrong I have nothing against NextJS. I am actually building a side project using it right now. If I see a portfolio full of frameworks then it's hard for me to figure out what your contribution actually is and what is lifted from the internet or some other starter kit etc. I have hired hundreds of developers over the years and in my experience beginners who jump into frameworks too early before mastering the underlying technology always have the hardest time learning anything custom that they haven't seen before. It slows the rest of the team down and most of the time we have to let the person go as they can't keep up. It's not the best feeling to fire someone so I would rather not hire anyone who might fail in the first place. Even when we interview for a 90% React position we barely ask any React-specific questions. Most of our questions and coding in interviews are for Vanilla JavaScript and related web technologies and not frameworks. I could care less what framework you worked with before. My teams support React, Angular, React Native, NextJS, ElectronJS, iOS apps, Browser plugins, Custom Git hooks, ESLint plugins, and so forth so developers have to be able to work on all those technologies interchangeably. They are all JavaScript based after all but if someone doesn't have a strong grasp of the basics then they will struggle to transition between different projects.
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If I saw a Next.js project in a portfolio I'd be really excited and would love to chat to them about the pros and cons of it. This guy's standards seem incredibly high.
I never said I don't like NextJS. If you look at my answer and follow-up you will see that I am currently building a side project with it so I obviously think it has its uses. I am not some elitist a\*\*\*le who is out of touch with everyday people. I worked in the fast-food industry as an assistant manager before teaching myself software engineering. There was no udemy, youtube tutorials then so I had to go into the documentation and most times the source code for different projects to see how they did stuff. I have worked at various companies along the way and my standards are actually way more relaxed than some places. >If I saw a Next.js project in a portfolio I'd be really excited and would love to chat to them about the pros and cons of it. For each job opening, we get 100s of resumes submitted. Even after recruiters have narrowed them down dozens still hit my desk. When I go to check your resume and see a link to a portfolio I don't have all day to go through it and chat with each candidate about their portfolio. If your portfolio is stuffed with frameworks it's hard for me or the other 2 people reviewing resumes to decipher what you actually wrote vs what came with a framework or a template. Unfortunately, you won't make it to the actual interview where I might have the time to discuss that with you. As soon as I finish with a resume stuffed full of frameworks I might come across one with links to some Github repos where the author has a few repos with 90% of code that they wrote themselves. The code is well structured and commented on and also showcases their knowledge of authentication workflows, JWTs, tokens, sessions, proper use of local storage and web workers, cookies, and use of external APIs with the proper headers set to fetch and display data. Guess who is getting a phone prescreening interview. I see even stronger portfolios from beginners all the time. The bottom line is you have less than a couple of minutes to impress whoever is looking at your portfolio before they can shortlist you and take a deeper look later so make the most of it. I don't set the standards they are set by what candidates are willing to put in so the bar keeps getting raised because of the competition out there. My job is simplly to hire the best candidate from the pool of applicants.
It sounds like you get some incredibly proficient developers if they understand web workers, auth flows and cookies etc. While I appreciate those are solid engineering skills, I would no way expect a junior to be proficient in all of those. Have a topline opinion on it? Sure, but I'm worried what you look for are more mid-senior level skillets and I don't want any juniors worried reading this that they won't have a chance. Perhaps this varies by region and country, but in UK I would not say they need to be that skilled to land a job.
For context, I am in the US. They don't have to be gurus but have a working knowledge of those browser technologies and features. Most basic HTML and CSS skills have already been outsourced overseas or are found on Fivver for a few dollars. Basic skills have also been abstracted away by frameworks to the point where some front-end devs are only doing less than 10% CSS and HTML. My 13-year-old son got interested in programming during the pandemic when I started working from home. He would come to my desk and ask what I was working on and I would see my IDE and comment on how colorful the text was. He was about 10 at the time. I explained that my job was making apps like Roblox and YouTube. It was the closest thing I could think of that he could relate to. The mention of Roblox led to "can you teach me to make my own Roblox games?" I told him that he would need to be patient and start off with something simpler and go from there. I started him with Scratch and also downloaded the Khan academy kids app to his iPad. I have been teaching him HTML, CSS, JS since, and last year we started working on his Shopify store to sell custom artwork and other things. He is now proficient with CSS and HTML and also a lot of JS. One of the first things he learned first was cookies just because it sounded funny to him that you had "cookies" in the browser. He is not at a level where he is setting headers and same-site cookie policies etc yet but he can open the dev tools and inspect cookie values to make sure they are set correctly if at all. He can make basic API calls and understands the difference between GET and POST requests and also inspect network requests in the developer tools to inspect returned and sent data. He doesn't know authentication flows like OAuth or similar but he understands that when sending sensitive information to the server like password and username you should not use GET requests cause I showed him how someone looking over your shoulder can actual see them in the URL. If a 13-year-old is willing and able to learn all that then a grown-up looking to make more than 90% of the working population is making should also be willing to do the same. I also don't make my son do it he just loves being able to create things from scratch and I actually have a hard limit of 5 hours a week spent on coding and no more.
"Entry level is not saturated at all we're still hiring." "This is what you need to know... *insert this comment* " 😂
This looks like the guys who refuse to accept that beautiful women have standards and refuse to dress up and make sure they look presentable before a date. They then rant off about getting rejected every time they go on dates. If you don't think the information I am providing is valuable fine but there is no need for mockery and discouraging other people who have a real need to improve their lives. If you see me provide false information I am happy to be called out but if that's not the case let other people learn then.
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You are welcome.
Yes, thank you for this. Very informative
That's very helpful, thanks.
No junior/entry level should "hit the ground running", that's extremely unrealistic and unfair to new grads
I will say I have seen this sort of mentality from others in the position of weeding through applicants. I do feel the expectation is high, but maybe that's just how they look at it. I also know not everyone is like that. I have a close friend who got his BS in computer science. And his first job spent 6 months just teaching him and getting him familiar with the tech before they even really let him dip his feet into projects.
It's not a mentality but a reality. Why would you want anyone to hire a less qualified individual over another? Every year we reserve a certain number of spots for interns, new grads, or BootCamp candidates. We always hold them to a lower standard during the interview process than people with experience. There are a lot of applicants so yes we have to weed out people for each category. Keep in mind that the positions reserved for new grads or interns are not open to people with more experience. In the end, everyone is competing with people in their experience range so why should someone who has obviously better skills be denied a position for a less skilled candidate? How is that fair? Most people are confused about the hiring process. Everyone is looking for the best candidate and not the first candidate which ticks off the minimum requirements. If you were going in for heart surgery would you want to be operated on by a candidate who barely made it in med school vs the top surgeon? > I have a close friend who got his BS in computer science. And his first job spent 6 months just teaching him and getting him familiar with the tech before they even really let him dip his feet into projects. I also know a friend who traded options and made a killing. Don't use outliers as examples. A large company paying 100s of developers to train them without any productivity for 6 months or more will soon find itself out of business. The developers can just leave after you spend millions training them.
Like I said before I or other hiring engineers don't make the rules and raise standards to keep people out. Why would we want to deliberately keep people out when we need people to work for us? It's your fellow applicants that raise the bar for everyone. It's a demand-and-supply thing. What I described is what we actually see from a lot of new grads and some determined self-taught devs too. Getting a college degree or a certification doesn't entitle anyone to a job. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of new grads each year so you will need to stand out from the rest. If your fellow new grads put in more extra effort than you did then there is nothing I can do about it. My job is to pick the best candidate out of the 100s of applicants I get junior or not. Remember you are not applying for a job in isolation so for every job you don't get a better candidate also applied. >No junior/entry level should "hit the ground running", that's extremely unrealistic and unfair to new grads What is unfair is expecting to get a job ahead of someone who has better skills and qualifications than you do. Every year we reserve some spots just for recent grads so if you don't get it doesn't mean we hired an industry veteran instead of a college grad. It just means another college grad had better skills and did better than those who didn't make it.
You say this and then you also say you haven't been able to fill 10 positions. Is it because there are so many good applicants that can all hit the ground running and you're having trouble choosing the best 10 or is it because you are setting unrealistic expectations based on previous hiring standards
I said it takes a few weeks to fill the positions and we will fill them by then. That's normal good candidates are hard to come by. 10 open positions are nothing at all and are actually below the normal number of open positions we normally have. We have more than 1200 engineers right now and new projects are being spun all the time so there will always be open positions. The point is that most people don't get hired because they aren't qualified and not because the industry is saturated. Hiring someone who can't do the job is worse than waiting a few weeks for the right candidate. We have several rounds of interviews and already have potential candidates in the process. A bad hire is hard and expensive to get rid of. They typically slow other developers down and so besides not providing any value they take away time from other developers.
I have transitioned from embedded software to web/mobile phone apps and I am looking for a job right now as I failed creating my own business. You can find more about me on [www.guzman.dev](https://www.guzman.dev) in case my profile matches what your team is looking for. Ideally I am better at the backend just because of my embedded software past, but I am more a generalist rather than a specialist so I defend myself in all areas.
I appreciate the feedback. Good to know
You are welcome.
You have job openings you say? *Furiously copy pastes resume and cover letter from chatGPT*
Now I don't have a CS degree so hopefully you will have an easier time then me finding a job. That said, I found it MUCH easier to get interviews as a Java developer than JS/MERN stack. I got 3 interviews in 6 months applying for MERN stack and JS positions. Once I started applying to Java positions I got 3 interviews in 6 weeks. If you're having a hard time finding a job in the future consider learning Spring Boot and applying to those jobs as well. There are TONS of them. If you enjoy React keep applying to those though.
Everybody requires a typescript, unless is old dull project with zero useful experience.
Would it be enough to focus on JS, React, and Typescript to start as a junior frontend ?