The title pretty much explains it. My boss recruited a junior developer and he codes in the lamp stack primarily. Super nice dude but noticeably socially awkward which is expected in this field and mostly within the early days.
This developer is assigned 2 projects. 1 month to complete both and both can be completed within a week as they are small pages with simple formats.
1 week goes by, and junior dev has hardly started. 2 weeks go by; some progress but appears to be slacking based on lack of progress.
We have daily morning stand-ups to confirm progress. The dev said he made progress and is fine with every video call. This turned out to be a lie.
The projects were to convert Adobe xd designs to code. Straight forward and to the point. These are about 3 pages per project. So 6 pages of work to do in a duration of 4 weeks.
The next step was to create a simple registration page system the following month if he was able to finish his initial tasks.
This is done through the backend and the dev claimed to be a backend legend so this shouldn’t be a problem.
4 weeks pass and still little to no progress on top of that, he shows 0 communication skills. Claims he will be done by (x) day and never was and after examining the code he finished only a few hours of work.
Our team is super understanding and these projects were supposed to be due in 2 weeks' time after a month nothing was finished and the client was of course pissed.
This company pays juniors 60K a year for pretty simple work that circles around converting designs to code mainly.
Fired.
Fully remote job, with a super trusting team which is why they gave him extra time and chances but he lied about his entire background and skill set. It seemed like he only started to learn HTML and CSS.
Just felt like sharing as a warning to other juniors. If you're going to lie about certain stuff, have a backup plan. He lost an amazing job where the team let him do his thing as he claimed he was able to do.
Just a note:
He never claimed to struggle, or need guidance or assistance. He boldly mentioned in every standup that he’s making progress and is almost done.
We realized as it’s remote, he probably wasn’t actually home at most times or just lounging around.
Now my boss has asked me to sit in for future interviews with developers. As I’ve been told, the plan is to still hire junior developers. We aren’t looking for a know-it but someone who we can trust and who is really looking to do the work and learn. I’ve never been on the interviewer side of things so I’m not sure what to look out for but we will be doing interviews next week.
What on earth should I look for? How do you find/know when someone is lying or if they’re the right person to recruit in terms of junior developers?
JobAdvisor:
This developer is assigned 2 projects. 1 month to complete both and both can be completed within a week or 2.
Why are you assigning them projects with deadlines and they just got there?
1 week goes by, junior dev has hardly started. 2 weeks go by; some progress but is slacking off a lot.
When I onboarded at my current company it took a week to get my computer set up. One week two I think I had only written two lines of code.
4 weeks pass and still little to no progress and on top of that, he shows 0 communication skills. Claims he will be done by (x) day and never was and after examining code he finished only a few hours of work.
Our team is super understanding and these projects were due 2 weeks ago and after a month the client was of course pissed.
By week 2, did anyone ask the new hire why they were so behind? Sure, they should have asked for help themself, but I would hope a senior dev would be sitting down with them to see exactly what's up instead of just letting them continue to produce nothing.
When I onboarded at my current company it took a week to get my computer set up. One week two I think I had only written like two lines of code.
This is completely.. it took me a week just to figure out how to spin up a LAMP Stack. And a second week to figure out how to keep it up to date and reasonably secure, get an IDE with a remote connection set up that played nice with the stack, and familiarize me with it enough to write anything more than some test scripts.
You let the new hire (junior) work on a real project with a customer and that even has an approaching deadline? And that is supposed to be finished 1 month after being hired? Even a senior engineer needs 2-3 months to get up to speed before starting to work on real kinds of stuff. Your company is setting the junior up to fail.
P/s: this is not aimed at you but rather your boss. Your boss either doesn't know how to manage or they really dislike the new hire.