

Ask HN: good places to find less experienced engineers? - joshu

Any suggestions on how to find engineers who are less far along the experience curve? We've done a good job finding very senior folks, but it feels like a mix would be better.<p>I guess the second question is how to evaluate more junior folks? It seems easier to figure out what you expect of a truly senior engineer...
======
aditya
What about engineers straight out of college? Or is that too junior?

Also, re: how to interview junior people. I'd say the one thing they don't
have is experience, or to measure a senior engineer's abilities it makes sense
to ask how many times have you built this <insert rocket ship> before, and
what did you learn?

For a junior engineer, it is enough to test for willingness to learn, and
aptitude for problem solving. Personally, I hate brain teasers and straight up
algorithmic complexity type questions. But, given a real world system, asking
them how they would build it is usually a good start. So, test for ability to
understand big problems, break them down into smaller problems and then figure
out a way to attack each small problem.

Curious about other people's interviewing ideas.

------
shailesh
Two scenarios:

1\. With 2+ years of experience, the person should be able to solve a small
programming assignment and upload it on GitHub / BitBucket.

2\. Evaluating an absolute fresher is a little hard. Puzzle and a simple
programming problem helps. Great care has to be taken in designing or even
selecting what kind of puzzles to be asked. Also, the puzzles tend to get
shared very quickly by candidates who appeared for the interview rounds. This
needs to be factored in those puzzles.

~~~
joshu
We're not looking for a huge number of people...

------
pmb
College career fairs.

~~~
maxbrown
This is all well and good, but speaking as a non-engineering college student,
you're going to have to weed out A LOT of non-engineers at a general college
career fair.

If you're hiring just for engineer/developer types, I would go straight to the
college of engineering's professors and/or career center. You may be able to
get the professors to send out e-mails to their students about the
opportunity, or have the career center let you hold info sessions for
interested students.

~~~
nathanb
Some colleges have engineering- or even cs-specific career fairs. I know
Virginia Tech does...it's called the CSRC fair, and it's held twice a year. I
recruit there for my company, and we get everyone from sophomores looking for
internships to PhDs looking for full-time research positions. Many of the grad
students have industry experience as well if you're looking for candidates who
aren't completely inexperienced.

Other engineering colleges likely have the same thing.

<http://www.cs.vt.edu/partnering/employer>

------
req2
As someone who has mostly unsuccessfully looked for junior positions...

I see some, but not many, junior positions on job sites like 37signals' or
Stack Overflow's, or Monster, or Dice... A lot of the 'junior' positions want
things that don't seem terribly junior- several years experience in a certain
conjunction of technologies.

My computer science education has largely come from books like K&R and
Programming Pearls, C2Wiki, Wikipedia, and a whole bunch of personal projects
in Python, C, and occasionally C++. It's not exactly conducive to the commonly
posted requirements for a junior position.

My limited perspective suggests it's a lot easier to make a good junior
engineer than it is to find one that meets your requirements.

------
Ben_Dean
Write interesting job posts. You may be able to tap into the small but
motivated and smart pool of people with non-traditional backgrounds.

Evaluating them means being clear with yourself about what makes one a
suitable candidate. Extracurricular projects of any sort are going to be
invaluable, but ask general problem-solving questions and feel out how they
do. Do they ask questions when they're stumped, but don't get stumped until
they've chewed the problem over for themselves? That's the number one sign of
a good junior programmer.

------
nickadams
Rochester Institute of Technology (<http://www.rit.edu>)

Look for recent grads and co-op students. Less experienced -- maybe -- but
definitely not less talented.

<http://sse.se.rit.edu/>
[http://www.rit.edu/academicaffairs/centerforstudentinnovatio...](http://www.rit.edu/academicaffairs/centerforstudentinnovation/)
<http://www.rit.edu/emcs/oce/>

------
FirstHopSystems
Figuring out the basic concepts they are familiar with might be a good start.
If they have the capability to learn from other more experienced engineers.

Having the means to figure out what domain a challenge/problem is in would be
another plus.

EDIT: Defining a Junior engineer might be a good place to start.

~~~
joshu
Yeah. We have three engineering folks: My cofounder, who has 8 years
experience (and a CS PhD), myself, with 13 years experience, and one more with
16 years experience. We've all built significant projects outside of a job,
we've all lead teams and been responsible for products, etc. So I guess that's
fairly senior.

More junior would be folks with just a few years experience, or haven't built
or led major projects. Even more junior would be right out of school.

------
SkyMarshal
Off the top of my head, both
reddit/r/[learnprogramming|coding|lisp|haskell|etc.] and Stackoverflow
questioners who are asking things a junior engineer would typically ask. Maybe
the same at Quora too.

------
goalieca
You've found one fresh out of grad school right here ;)

------
JoachimSchipper
Internships (for students, obviously)? Joel is a big fan. Do note that this
takes a while...

------
xtrycatchx
you can gamble here in the Philippines (Cebu)

