In this episode, you'll learn what Swizec looks for in Junior Developer in 2021 and how you can crack the coding interview by highlighting your potential.
Talking Points
- What employers look for in Juniors
- What projects will impress employers?
- The difference between front-end engineer and front-end developer
- An introduction to JSON bureaucracy
- How to measure your own ability and skill
- How Google hire Juniors
- What Swizec learned from Richard Hamming
- Swizec's career vision
- An introduction to the Senior Mindset
- What Juniors can expect from seniors
- What to expect from Senior Developers
Quotable Quotes
"I started in Europe and I was like, wait, I'm reading about all these people from the US who have these amazing careers and they get paid ridiculous amounts of money. I want to have that kind of career. So that's been my vision to try to solve interesting problems. Big problems." - Swizec Teller
"A lot of my friends in big tech, when you ask them about their job, they always say, 'yeah, you know, the money is good'. That's not the career I want. I never wanna be somewhere where the best thing is 'the money is good'" - Swizec Teller
"What employers are primarily looking for in a junior frontend developer is a lot of potential" - Swizec Teller
"Employers are looking for somebody who's going to hit the ground running, but nobody's expecting a junior developer to come in and like build their new infrastructure or re-engineer their entire app" - Swizec Teller
"As a junior, you're not really being hired for your experience. But instead you want to show your teachability and potential to grow in the role" - Alex Booker
"If you can show that your side project actually hit the market and had actual users and you responded to those users and improved on the app. That is a lot more interesting" - Swizec Teller
"By the time you get to someone like me, I usually don't even really look at your resume or anything because most resumes are honestly very the same. We have a specific challenge. I'm evaluating your specific skill in that challenge and that's what we wanna talk about" - Swizec Teller
"You want the best candidate, not the best resume writer necessarily" - Alex Booker
"If I can, I avoid looking at the resume because I don't want to be, 'oh my God, this person used to work at Google'" - Swizec Teller
"Turns out that being an engineer is worth about a 20 to $30,000 bump in salary compared to being a developer" - Swizec Teller
"A developer is somebody who can take a spec and write code that fits the spec. But an engineer is somebody who can take a problem and solve the problem and just happens to be using code, to solve the problem" - Swizec Teller
"You could probably start as a junior developer, and then over time, learn new ways of thinking and learn different tools aside from code to solve problems. And if you choose to, you could graduate to become an engineer one day" - Alex Booker
"The best way to become an engineer is kind of by necessity" - Swizec Teller
"There's no absolute skill level. There's nothing that says, 'oh, you are absolutely great'. I think it depends a lot, first on what is the vision for your career? What is it that you want out of your career? What kind of engineer do you want to be?" - Swizec Teller
"One easy way to measure is to start getting involved in open source. The fundamental thing that is equal to all of them is ,can you solve a problem using code? And you gotta just get opinions from other people and they will tell you, 'Hey, yeah, this is great code', or 'this is not great code'." - Swizec Teller
"Evidently some people are better than others, but it's really hard to say what it is that makes them better or worse" - Swizec Teller
"Being a successful programmer, isn't only measured by the code that you write. You might be the person that gels everybody together. You might have really good ideas. You might be able to ask very good questions that unveil potential problems of an implementation. You might be an advocate for starting small and dreaming big and bring a sort of principle and attitude to the team that can really help all kinds of things." - Alex Booker
"A lot of engineers, especially junior engineers can be very eager to just go and start building rather than, slow down. First ask questions, figure out what it is exactly that you're building" - Swizec Teller
"I like to approach people from the perspective of everyone is coachable. Everyone can learn, but it does take exposure over time" - Swizec Teller
"I think that everyone can be shifted to a growth mindset and everyone can become the person who is coachable, who grows, who learns. It just takes time" - Swizec Teller
"I have a kind of evolving vision, which I think is also important. You do have to change your vision as circumstances change." - Swizec Teller
"The quickest way you can see if somebody is more of a mid-level or junior engineer or a senior is to ask them about, DRY, the Don't Repeat Yourself principle. And I feel like the more senior the person, the less they care about their code not being duplicated and writing abstractions" - Swizec Teller
"The more senior you are, the dumber and simpler, your code starts looking, it's like Einstein used to say, 'If you can't explain it simply, or if you can't write your code simply, you probably don't understand the problem enough yet'." - Swizec Teller