The Junior Contractors

Recently, we have hired a bunch of Junior developers via a Bootcamp company. This company basically takes people on an intensive training course, then they find them work. So they are essentially a contracting company, but are sending out fresh-faced developers to their first jobs. Let’s refer to them as Training Company.

As far as I understand, the intention is to hire them permanently, but my company is prepared to pay the premium for the Training Company to educate them.

I think to preserve their own interests, the Training Company give them assignments/exams to complete. This way they can understand how good they are and quickly reassign them if they are let go by their current “employer”.

So for the past two weeks, these Juniors have either been studying for an Agile exam, or writing an essay based on work they completed, but they are doing it in company time, not in their own free time.

So the way I see it; they are getting paid by my employer to do work for the Training Company… with the Training Company pocketing a fee.

They are completely mugging us off there.

Yet, if the intention is to employ them permanently after the initial contract; then all these assignments the Training Company give them are pointless. Unless of course, you can prove that these assignments and exams are actually beneficial.

One of the Juniors comes back from the exam and says they have failed. They then go up to their line manager and say “was that a retrospective I led last week?”, the line manager brutally replies “no, it was a refinement session; that’s exactly why you failed”.