The company I work for sometimes has problems with recruitment, because they don’t often offer wages comparable with the rest of the industry. Also, there are companies offering more money with better transport links. Instead of increasing wages, they often have the idea of acquiring unskilled workers and training them up; hoping enough of them will be long-term employees.

The thing is, although that has worked in the past, we were in a situation where we had experienced C# developers teaching Juniors C# to work on C#. Now we have the case that C# developers are expected to teach Juniors Web-related technologies like Javascript and AWS.

We have hired a batch of these Juniors from Bootcamp companies that do “crash courses”, where they learn various skills within 3 months, then they find them a proper job. Some of them I’ve asked questions, expecting them to be more knowledgable than me, and then they say something along the lines of “this is new to me, I didn’t study it”. So what are they doing their crash course on? We are hiring them for Javascript and AWS and they come here and tell us they haven’t seen it before.

The other day, one of these Juniors asked me a question, but added: “I expect you won’t know because this is new to you as well, but I don’t know who I can ask”. This is exactly the problem. How can we train them if we are trying to learn ourselves. The whole point of hiring Juniors is that you have enough Seniors to turn them into good developers and this just can’t happen with our structure. The fact that a Junior has joined, all excited to learn and start an exciting career; only to find he has little support and is set to struggle; it’s disheartening, and he knows this already.

Managers are proper proud of all this recruitment though, and even HR/Marketing have placed sponsored articles about it in a local newspaper. One article was about how one guy had all these dead end jobs and now he is employed to produce “solutions and codes”. Such strange phrasing.