New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code
nmn.gl
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. Sure, the code works, but ask why it works that way instead of another way? Crickets. Ask about edge cases? Blank stares. The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing. We’re trading deep understanding for quick fixes, and while it feels great in the moment, we’re going to pay for this later.
  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    We stay away from riddles, and instead focus on CS concepts. We’ll rephrase to avoid jargon if you don’t have a formal education, or it has been a while. Here are a few categories:

    • OOP concepts like SOLID
    • concurrency vs parallelism, approaches for each (generators, threads, async,’ etc), and tradeoffs
    • typing (e.g. is a Python strongly or weakly typed? Java? JavaScript?), and practical implications
    • functional programming concepts like closures, partial application, etc
    • SQL knowledge
    • types of tests, and approaches/goals for each

    And some practical details like:

    • major implementation details of our stack (Python’s GIL, browser features like service workers, etc)
    • git and docker experience
    • build systems and other dev tools

    That covers most of it. We don’t expect every candidate to know everything, we just want to get an idea of the breadth and depth of their knowledge.