During the past 5 years I spent untold hours helping 3 junior devs level up in a very supporting and encouraging environment. In the end, it did not work. The devs were not self driven or motivated enough to make a difference. They would make small incremental improvements, but nothing that allowed them to work on a task independently. They have up too quickly when they ran into a difficult situation or immediately wanted to jump to a subpar solution.
We had to let them go. Then we hired an experienced dev who was self driven and the difference is night and day. The senior dev costs slightly more than the junior dev.
I don't think I will ever try the "talent development" approach again. The talent needs to do that work itself. If it is unwilling or unable, then so am I.
My conclusion from your story is that you needed to cut your losses earlier.
Put them in a situation where they need to produce a result, give them support, but if they need hand holding give them that feedback: you need to be independent on this or you will not be retained.
It sucks, but one or two experiences writing code for a junior dev and then seeing they do not even move on from there was enough. You can have the same kind of issues with crappy “senior” colleagues too, though…
Of course, if you don’t have the right kind of task for an “advanced beginner” (so to speak), that is a problem on the management end.
Bringing up junior colleagues is a fraught business, but when it succeeds you get a LOT of results out of it.
In the end, I try to keep in mind that it is all about money and time. From an individual project point of view, though, it can be very satisfying.
Talent does not grow on tree on its own but in organizations like yours, but not everyone is destined to be a talent. Those without the proper attitude for becoming a talent had to be let go, so the outcome is the same, only arguing the conclusion. You had bad luck with 3 bad ones for one good, but the usual ratio is not too far from this actually for other organizations. When you find the good attitude people it is a joy, especially if they grow into your environment, being tailor made for your figure. That will even be better than the one reused from elsewhere. ; )
I think there's a good chance that stories like these often come from situations where the one being "supported" have little to no functioning feedback cycle. Much of the time a manager just never reflects on their own communication style or that of the corporate system they're a part of, and don't realize how ambiguous someone's progression or success is. Although I am not suggesting this is OP, but in general
From that experience, it makes total sense that you wouldn't want to work with juniors like that again.
But I have the complete opposite experience. I'm a junior dev working on an embedded linux system, and some associated test applications. I have an extremely good mentor/boss who's helping me develop skills for those environments, and other associated skills that are absolutely invaluable to my career.
Now the difference of course is I am highly motivated. I love the work I do, and because it's so enjoyable and fun, I absolutely take a lot of my personal time to play around with work-related or at least work-adjacent projects.
My worry is that when I do eventually move to my next company/product, Ill be assigned to a manager that has had too many poor experiences with unmotivated juniors, and is unwilling to share their experience with me (in a cooperative manner, not just a one-sided relationship of course).
In my last job I mentored someone who was super-receptive to feedback including some that was a bit more nitpicky that I would have just let slide with a more senior person. I’ve also had a more senior person in a somewhat similar non-coding role who always seemed to be in a mode of not interested in learning something they didn’t understand.
On reflection, was there anything you would have done or looked for differently in the 3 junior devs? Something you think would actually have changed your outcome? Do you blame yourself in any way for not being able to develop the junior devs?
FWIW, I'm currently on this trajectory (as the mentor).
I’ve hired, mentored, developed, and sadly fired more devs than I can count at this point.
Activation energy cannot be trained. And that’s the prerequisite for just about everything, especially propensity for improvement.
We cannot develop talent in the same way pro sports teams do because there’s not a 50x difference between what we pay and junior or senior dev like there is in the NBA or a 1000x difference like in MLB or Euro soccer
The economics don’t support it. That’s the secret reason why schools matter still.
I mean, there probably should be a 50x difference. I've seen a single dev get done the work of 50 average devs many times. A single excellent engineer can produce immense business value.
It always baffles me how many places only pay sr engineers 3-5x more.
I didn't say "write 50x more code" I said "gets done the work of 50 average people". Think of all the meetings, admin, HR, accounting, meetings, stand-ups, one-on-ones, architects, code reviews, process improvements meetings, directors, and meetings needed to staff 50 engineers. Think of how much time is spent just keeping them vaguely aligned. For 50 engineers you need at least 4/5ths total effort just into keeping everyone and everything in sync and moving forward. There's tremendous waste.
It's not hard for one or two decently talented engineers to accomplish more in a year than 50 people.
If you are a 50x programmer working on a platform that others created (a business), you aren't really a 50x programmer. The environment for their productivity was created by someone else, not them.
I came to a similar conclusion. There is so much information and training out there, for free, that anyone motivated would have already taught themselves. This isn't to discount junior or beginner devs altogether, as everyone has to start somewhere, but discounting the idea you can magically mold them into something different.
When I got my start, I was the only engineer in a call center location. About 5 people a year would ask how they could do what I do.
What I learned after writing a long essay, with YouTube links and book references even, is that people just like the idea of it, without the work part. Not one did any of what I laid out.
After that, anyone who asked I just mumbled something about college, even though I never attended one.
Exactly the same happened, and I would add that those guys "soft"/social skills were more developed that the senior devs, so the non-technical people of the company tough they were really good.
You need to be able to identify junior devs that are self driven. Or to be more general, devs of any level that are self driven. I have developed several interns and was super happy with the result. But there were a lot of other interns and juniors (and seniors) where it was clear after a few months that they just don't have it.
Weirdly enough I've found some of the effects of talent development become most apparent when they're left to their own devices (as in no help is coming and they're aware of this).
Not that you can expect everyone to learn everything, or jump to a 'higher' level merely by having access the right information.
I had lazy experience people and self-driven interns. The experience on the has very little correlation with attitude. I’ll take the hard working, self motivated person regardless of claimed experience 100/100 times.
I think "talent development" is still valuable if you find genuinely high agency/curious/hard-working people. I bet you that senior dev, when they were less experienced, would have been a rewarding person to help develop.
I think the problem is that it's really hard to identify people worth taking a risk on developing, because during interviews everybody puts their best foot forward. Typically people use some kind of proxy for this like education or prior achievements, but those are far from perfect (and in fact, both are heavily gamed such that they are rapidly declining in value as a signal) because people will have varying levels of motivation throughout their life and in different environments, and people lie/exaggerate. You can also filter on how much they've developed themselves/been developed, eg how well they perform in a coding interview or what kind of personal projects they've done, but that's arguably just filtering on experience and also subject to gaming (people do these things just to get a high paying SWE job and that drive isn't necessarily there after they have one).
Also, you have to be willing to let people fail or struggle with tasks (you think are/that are) beyond their current skillset to let them grow. To a certain extent people can be trained to persevere through or creatively work around problems, although I do think there is a lot of variance in how well people pick that up. I've found that being too willing to help with these problems is a major reason people don't develop those skills themselves - it's just hard because they're often a source of frustration or stress for the other person, and you know you can probably solve it, and they might know you can probably solve it, so you have to be the bad guy and make them do it anyway.
I recently made the first hires at my startup and handled everything from the job description to talent sourcing to interviewing to onboarding, looking at early career people. Because the hiring market is so favorable to employers right now, I got a ton of applications and managed to hire some really great people. One thing I noticed is that the best candidates tended to be "unique" in their resumes or even their way of contacting me about the position, and they also had strong interests such that they had deliberately gone out of their way to learn new things beyond trivial stuff like "side projects" that amount to following a tutorial. Sometimes a resume might suggest that, but in an interview you could see that those interests were purely surface level; I also designed a pair-programming interview designed to put them way out of their comfort zone as a way to evaluate their perseverance and creativty. So far the agency and curiosity my hires demonstrated has extended into their jobs, and I'm really happy to be able to develop them further, because I can trust that they're going to be active participants and not just "some person who wants a job" that expects to be spoonfed.
I love the intent behind this letter. So often talented people are just below the "cut off" for whatever opportunity they are seeking, and they see themselves as unworthy. Some may give up, especially if they are young and have not had other forms of recognition.
I think this is why YC sends notes to rejected applicants who are in "the top 10%" by whatever standard they are grading folks on, and encourage them to apply again.
Not to mention that the “top 10%” shifts year-to-year as much or more than HYPS admissions.
Talent _development_ requires substantive feedback, or at least substantial visibility into the competition versus a binary outcome. For example, tell Founders if they have the substance or right fidelity but poor sense of timing. (And market timing often in the hands of the VCs anyways).
Without real feedback, it’s much closer to a real estate license than an academic math program.
There are organizations which develop talent in-house. Most military forces work that way. The Union Pacific Railroad is unusually explicit about it. The path to management starts by working in a freight yard in Chicago at 5 AM in a snowstorm.[1] The current CEO of Union Pacific started as a laborer in maintenance of way.
It would be much easier to develop talent in an org if your employees were not allowed to leave on a whim, and you have a lot of availability of unpleasant "grunt" work that can be assigned, that people are not allowed to refuse.
Ans what a shit show every railway is. Amtrack can't run on time because freight trains are too long and would rather block the tracks than pay for a third shift of workers. Shit floats
It seems that I’m the minority in this thread, but Talent Development has always gotten me much further than search. It’s also the Moneyball approach. People are remarkable when they are put in the right situations in which they can learn. It sets up a win-win situation helping people grow and teams get stronger. It also builds much more loyalty.
I generally think math competitions do more harm than good for math outreach, especially if only 60(!!) students for a country the size of the US are being given any actual development after the initial tests.
I took part in math competitions as part of a math club in High School during the 70s. It was fun, made me think and was a bit of a social outlet. I don't think any one test was that important - we took a bunch of standard and experimental national tests and monthly meetups had their own problems.
All that said, my impression is current math clubs and competitions have been taken over by kids just wanting credit for college rather than the kids of my era, who were there 'cause they actually enjoyed math.
If the only purpose you can see for math competitions is find a few very talented kids, yeah, well then they would qualify as counter-productive.
Talent Development happens in AoPS now, via classes, books, and forums.
Also there is a network of high-school student-run math contests, with older students coaching junior students. There are several active Discord Servers.
There are paid online courses as well as free purses run by students, some of whom are trying to polish their resumes for college apps.
We are in a golden age for student mathematics study.
What's missing is a strong environment for youth mathematical research. There is a collection of summer camps, but they are too few and expensive.
In a world based on talent search, you as a talent can get incontrovertible evidence of what works and what doesn't, by looking at who gets picked. But in a world of talent development, you get that evidence filtered through the mind of the person trying to "develop" you. And speaking as someone who was on the receiving end of attempted "talent development" from someone not very good, I freakin wish they'd gone with talent search. It'd have been more honest and saved everyone a lot of time.
The problem with development of talent is that the outcomes can be so variable, and the cost so high when it fails. Identifying the individuals that are worth investing in seems to be the most important skill here, but it's extremely hard to do reliably. Nothing in my career has ever burned worse than spending years of time and effort to develop someone who simply never gets it or gives up.
Developing talent in house makes no economic sense if you can find affordable talent already developed somewhere else. Especially since your in house developed talent can bail once they got some talent.
I think the bigger point is that in a functioning economy, companies would not have any choice but to train in house, because skilled labour looking for work would not be found in excess.
I don’t think there’s any real cost to failure in this case - the worst case scenario is a high school student does a bit more extracurricular mathematics before going into a different field, where they will likely still benefit from that extra mathematical training.
The cost being the time and effort of a senior dev to mentor, which ostensibly should pay itself back as an investment over years. Sadly this rarely happens.
During the past 5 years I spent untold hours helping 3 junior devs level up in a very supporting and encouraging environment. In the end, it did not work. The devs were not self driven or motivated enough to make a difference. They would make small incremental improvements, but nothing that allowed them to work on a task independently. They have up too quickly when they ran into a difficult situation or immediately wanted to jump to a subpar solution.
We had to let them go. Then we hired an experienced dev who was self driven and the difference is night and day. The senior dev costs slightly more than the junior dev.
I don't think I will ever try the "talent development" approach again. The talent needs to do that work itself. If it is unwilling or unable, then so am I.
My conclusion from your story is that you needed to cut your losses earlier.
Put them in a situation where they need to produce a result, give them support, but if they need hand holding give them that feedback: you need to be independent on this or you will not be retained.
It sucks, but one or two experiences writing code for a junior dev and then seeing they do not even move on from there was enough. You can have the same kind of issues with crappy “senior” colleagues too, though…
Of course, if you don’t have the right kind of task for an “advanced beginner” (so to speak), that is a problem on the management end.
Bringing up junior colleagues is a fraught business, but when it succeeds you get a LOT of results out of it.
In the end, I try to keep in mind that it is all about money and time. From an individual project point of view, though, it can be very satisfying.
Your story is not about talent but attitude.
Talent does not grow on tree on its own but in organizations like yours, but not everyone is destined to be a talent. Those without the proper attitude for becoming a talent had to be let go, so the outcome is the same, only arguing the conclusion. You had bad luck with 3 bad ones for one good, but the usual ratio is not too far from this actually for other organizations. When you find the good attitude people it is a joy, especially if they grow into your environment, being tailor made for your figure. That will even be better than the one reused from elsewhere. ; )
I think there's a good chance that stories like these often come from situations where the one being "supported" have little to no functioning feedback cycle. Much of the time a manager just never reflects on their own communication style or that of the corporate system they're a part of, and don't realize how ambiguous someone's progression or success is. Although I am not suggesting this is OP, but in general
Attitude is an important part of talent and perhaps the easiest to sniff out rather quickly.
From that experience, it makes total sense that you wouldn't want to work with juniors like that again.
But I have the complete opposite experience. I'm a junior dev working on an embedded linux system, and some associated test applications. I have an extremely good mentor/boss who's helping me develop skills for those environments, and other associated skills that are absolutely invaluable to my career.
Now the difference of course is I am highly motivated. I love the work I do, and because it's so enjoyable and fun, I absolutely take a lot of my personal time to play around with work-related or at least work-adjacent projects.
My worry is that when I do eventually move to my next company/product, Ill be assigned to a manager that has had too many poor experiences with unmotivated juniors, and is unwilling to share their experience with me (in a cooperative manner, not just a one-sided relationship of course).
In your next job you will be a senior dev
In my last job I mentored someone who was super-receptive to feedback including some that was a bit more nitpicky that I would have just let slide with a more senior person. I’ve also had a more senior person in a somewhat similar non-coding role who always seemed to be in a mode of not interested in learning something they didn’t understand.
If you are as motivated as you say you are you will have options when you move to your next job.
On reflection, was there anything you would have done or looked for differently in the 3 junior devs? Something you think would actually have changed your outcome? Do you blame yourself in any way for not being able to develop the junior devs?
FWIW, I'm currently on this trajectory (as the mentor).
I’ve hired, mentored, developed, and sadly fired more devs than I can count at this point.
Activation energy cannot be trained. And that’s the prerequisite for just about everything, especially propensity for improvement.
We cannot develop talent in the same way pro sports teams do because there’s not a 50x difference between what we pay and junior or senior dev like there is in the NBA or a 1000x difference like in MLB or Euro soccer
The economics don’t support it. That’s the secret reason why schools matter still.
I mean, there probably should be a 50x difference. I've seen a single dev get done the work of 50 average devs many times. A single excellent engineer can produce immense business value.
It always baffles me how many places only pay sr engineers 3-5x more.
A 50x dev should work for himself and make more money than the business hiring them. IF they cant make it work, they weren't 50x after all
This is obviously untrue on its face. Just because you’re a great programmer does not mean you’re a good entrepreneur
Maybe it would be more valuable for this company to hire someone who could create value rather than someone who can write 50x more code.
I have worked with those people and most of what they created was a heap of code that someone had to maintain after they left.
I didn't say "write 50x more code" I said "gets done the work of 50 average people". Think of all the meetings, admin, HR, accounting, meetings, stand-ups, one-on-ones, architects, code reviews, process improvements meetings, directors, and meetings needed to staff 50 engineers. Think of how much time is spent just keeping them vaguely aligned. For 50 engineers you need at least 4/5ths total effort just into keeping everyone and everything in sync and moving forward. There's tremendous waste.
It's not hard for one or two decently talented engineers to accomplish more in a year than 50 people.
Why not both. If you’re 50x, or even 2x better at anything than average you should probably be hired in a heartbeat
If you are a 50x programmer working on a platform that others created (a business), you aren't really a 50x programmer. The environment for their productivity was created by someone else, not them.
Many do in fact go into business for themselves. A lot of my former colleagues all started their own businesses and are doing very well.
I came to a similar conclusion. There is so much information and training out there, for free, that anyone motivated would have already taught themselves. This isn't to discount junior or beginner devs altogether, as everyone has to start somewhere, but discounting the idea you can magically mold them into something different.
When I got my start, I was the only engineer in a call center location. About 5 people a year would ask how they could do what I do.
What I learned after writing a long essay, with YouTube links and book references even, is that people just like the idea of it, without the work part. Not one did any of what I laid out.
After that, anyone who asked I just mumbled something about college, even though I never attended one.
Exactly the same happened, and I would add that those guys "soft"/social skills were more developed that the senior devs, so the non-technical people of the company tough they were really good.
You need to be able to identify junior devs that are self driven. Or to be more general, devs of any level that are self driven. I have developed several interns and was super happy with the result. But there were a lot of other interns and juniors (and seniors) where it was clear after a few months that they just don't have it.
Agreed. You also sometimes have to let them struggle or even fail at tasks to let them grow.
Weirdly enough I've found some of the effects of talent development become most apparent when they're left to their own devices (as in no help is coming and they're aware of this).
Not that you can expect everyone to learn everything, or jump to a 'higher' level merely by having access the right information.
I had lazy experience people and self-driven interns. The experience on the has very little correlation with attitude. I’ll take the hard working, self motivated person regardless of claimed experience 100/100 times.
This has nothing to do with the article, which is about supporting talented students by providing them a venue to learn.
I think "talent development" is still valuable if you find genuinely high agency/curious/hard-working people. I bet you that senior dev, when they were less experienced, would have been a rewarding person to help develop.
I think the problem is that it's really hard to identify people worth taking a risk on developing, because during interviews everybody puts their best foot forward. Typically people use some kind of proxy for this like education or prior achievements, but those are far from perfect (and in fact, both are heavily gamed such that they are rapidly declining in value as a signal) because people will have varying levels of motivation throughout their life and in different environments, and people lie/exaggerate. You can also filter on how much they've developed themselves/been developed, eg how well they perform in a coding interview or what kind of personal projects they've done, but that's arguably just filtering on experience and also subject to gaming (people do these things just to get a high paying SWE job and that drive isn't necessarily there after they have one).
Also, you have to be willing to let people fail or struggle with tasks (you think are/that are) beyond their current skillset to let them grow. To a certain extent people can be trained to persevere through or creatively work around problems, although I do think there is a lot of variance in how well people pick that up. I've found that being too willing to help with these problems is a major reason people don't develop those skills themselves - it's just hard because they're often a source of frustration or stress for the other person, and you know you can probably solve it, and they might know you can probably solve it, so you have to be the bad guy and make them do it anyway.
I recently made the first hires at my startup and handled everything from the job description to talent sourcing to interviewing to onboarding, looking at early career people. Because the hiring market is so favorable to employers right now, I got a ton of applications and managed to hire some really great people. One thing I noticed is that the best candidates tended to be "unique" in their resumes or even their way of contacting me about the position, and they also had strong interests such that they had deliberately gone out of their way to learn new things beyond trivial stuff like "side projects" that amount to following a tutorial. Sometimes a resume might suggest that, but in an interview you could see that those interests were purely surface level; I also designed a pair-programming interview designed to put them way out of their comfort zone as a way to evaluate their perseverance and creativty. So far the agency and curiosity my hires demonstrated has extended into their jobs, and I'm really happy to be able to develop them further, because I can trust that they're going to be active participants and not just "some person who wants a job" that expects to be spoonfed.
I love the intent behind this letter. So often talented people are just below the "cut off" for whatever opportunity they are seeking, and they see themselves as unworthy. Some may give up, especially if they are young and have not had other forms of recognition.
I think this is why YC sends notes to rejected applicants who are in "the top 10%" by whatever standard they are grading folks on, and encourage them to apply again.
Is that message from YC truthful? I ask because I've seen a lot of people receiving it, probably a bias towards sharing it if you receive it though.
Not to mention that the “top 10%” shifts year-to-year as much or more than HYPS admissions.
Talent _development_ requires substantive feedback, or at least substantial visibility into the competition versus a binary outcome. For example, tell Founders if they have the substance or right fidelity but poor sense of timing. (And market timing often in the hands of the VCs anyways).
Without real feedback, it’s much closer to a real estate license than an academic math program.
Assuming Gaussian distribution, how many criteria should be graded, so that 90% of applicants are in top 10% for at least one criterion?
There is only one overall criteria in this case.
There are organizations which develop talent in-house. Most military forces work that way. The Union Pacific Railroad is unusually explicit about it. The path to management starts by working in a freight yard in Chicago at 5 AM in a snowstorm.[1] The current CEO of Union Pacific started as a laborer in maintenance of way.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMViWazEYoc
It would be much easier to develop talent in an org if your employees were not allowed to leave on a whim, and you have a lot of availability of unpleasant "grunt" work that can be assigned, that people are not allowed to refuse.
Ans what a shit show every railway is. Amtrack can't run on time because freight trains are too long and would rather block the tracks than pay for a third shift of workers. Shit floats
In the US
It seems that I’m the minority in this thread, but Talent Development has always gotten me much further than search. It’s also the Moneyball approach. People are remarkable when they are put in the right situations in which they can learn. It sets up a win-win situation helping people grow and teams get stronger. It also builds much more loyalty.
I’m not sure that’s really the Moneyball approach though which was more about identifying non-obvious (by traditional metrics) talent.
I generally think math competitions do more harm than good for math outreach, especially if only 60(!!) students for a country the size of the US are being given any actual development after the initial tests.
I took part in math competitions as part of a math club in High School during the 70s. It was fun, made me think and was a bit of a social outlet. I don't think any one test was that important - we took a bunch of standard and experimental national tests and monthly meetups had their own problems.
All that said, my impression is current math clubs and competitions have been taken over by kids just wanting credit for college rather than the kids of my era, who were there 'cause they actually enjoyed math.
If the only purpose you can see for math competitions is find a few very talented kids, yeah, well then they would qualify as counter-productive.
> my impression is current math clubs and competitions have been taken over by kids just wanting credit for college
I work directly with students in this field and my experience is that most are involved for the interest, challenge, or social aspect.
If you are involved with “pay to play” programs like AoPS, you probably see more resume-grooming.
Nobody I know would continue to donate their time if they perceived it was primarily fluff.
Good Hear!
Outside the few hundred top mathematicians, how many advance the field much?
Every now and again, a tardy student writes down an impossible to solve problem and solves it because he thought it was just homework.
> Every now and again
As far as I can tell, this has only happened once, in 1939 [1].
[1]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-proble...
Depends what you mean by advance. If nobody but those few hundred mathematicians was even aware of mathematics then what would be the point?
Talent Development happens in AoPS now, via classes, books, and forums. Also there is a network of high-school student-run math contests, with older students coaching junior students. There are several active Discord Servers.
There are paid online courses as well as free purses run by students, some of whom are trying to polish their resumes for college apps.
We are in a golden age for student mathematics study.
What's missing is a strong environment for youth mathematical research. There is a collection of summer camps, but they are too few and expensive.
In a world based on talent search, you as a talent can get incontrovertible evidence of what works and what doesn't, by looking at who gets picked. But in a world of talent development, you get that evidence filtered through the mind of the person trying to "develop" you. And speaking as someone who was on the receiving end of attempted "talent development" from someone not very good, I freakin wish they'd gone with talent search. It'd have been more honest and saved everyone a lot of time.
The problem with development of talent is that the outcomes can be so variable, and the cost so high when it fails. Identifying the individuals that are worth investing in seems to be the most important skill here, but it's extremely hard to do reliably. Nothing in my career has ever burned worse than spending years of time and effort to develop someone who simply never gets it or gives up.
Developing talent in house makes no economic sense if you can find affordable talent already developed somewhere else. Especially since your in house developed talent can bail once they got some talent.
I think the bigger point is that in a functioning economy, companies would not have any choice but to train in house, because skilled labour looking for work would not be found in excess.
I don’t think there’s any real cost to failure in this case - the worst case scenario is a high school student does a bit more extracurricular mathematics before going into a different field, where they will likely still benefit from that extra mathematical training.
The cost being the time and effort of a senior dev to mentor, which ostensibly should pay itself back as an investment over years. Sadly this rarely happens.
Right, but you get that is really nothing like coaching high school math students, right?
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