What should a junior developer look for in a company?
It’s probable you won’t get to pick and choose in a junior developer job market. But regardless of the job market, as a junior developer there is one main thing you should be looking for in your next company: it should help you grow. Every company you join should help you gain the necessary experience to advance your career in the way you want.
There are some red flags that can help you understand if a company won’t fit this principle:
- 🚩 No senior developers. This could mean the company has nothing to offer to more senior developers. It is a bad prospect if there is no one to mentor you.
- 🚩 No training program. They don’t need to have a full-blown internal university, but they should be able to answer the question “what tools can you offer for me to learn and grow?”
- 🚩 Contributing to production from the start. As mentioned earlier, junior developers are expected to grow within the company. If the company is expecting you to be productive from the start, they may just be after cheap labor. This also means that you will have to deal with bad quality code from junior developers before you.
- 🚩 Low Glassdoor reviews. This is true for any position at a company, not only for junior positions.
- 🚩 High employee rotation. Check how long employees have traditionally stayed in the company by doing a search on Linkedin. If people tend to leave early, it could mean that there is no chance to grow. It could also mean that people learn a lot and are able to move to better paying companies fast, so make your own conclusions.
Note how ping pong tables, big salaries and other perks are not that relevant when learning!
How about salaries?
Salary shouldn’t be the main drive at this point in your career. It may even be a deterrent for the hiring team if they feel that you are more focused on making a quick buck than in growing technically. In this industry, chances are you’ll get increasingly good salaries as you grow technically.
The hiring team may be taken aback if they feel that a junior candidate is more focused on making a quick buck than in growing technically.
Here are some resources and articles to know what salaries look like for developers on different experience levels:
- Glassdoor is your friend when researching companies and salaries
- Transparency at Stuart Engineering
- Salario de un programador en España en 2017
- What is the average software developer salary around the world 2020?
How about full remote?
I wouldn’t expect nor recommend going full remote as a junior developer. Learning benefits greatly from interaction happening In Real Life™. Serendipity and happenstance with colleagues and mentors is invaluable when starting in a new industry.
Working remotely is definitely interesting to many people. In my experience, being “full remote” is in itself a skill. Furthermore, it’s a skill you can only get with experience. So you’ll need to grow it as any other skill by working in remote-friendly companies who have remote team members and a remote-first mentality. Definitely look for that when you choose a company if this is your end goal.
Conclusions
If you’ve taken the first step to start a career on software development, you’ve got a great path ahead of you. A key point on this path will be the hiring process.
Behind every interview there is a team eager to welcome you as a new colleague; and they will be looking for someone as eager to join them as they are, someone who will give the best they have to offer. Although basic technical skills will be a must, there is just as much importance put on the potential you show to become a great developer down the line.
I hope the suggestions here help you on your first steps on this path!
Check out the presentation that inspired this post.