Front-end Developers read this

We recently gone into a process of hiring front-end developers for our platform - B2storefront, posted job ads and start getting submissions. Because our needs are pretty specific and current shape of the market created by coding bootcamps and React-rush I do have following conclusions and things to share.

Career switchers

This group is somewhat intersects with Bootcamp grads because in many cases they actually took part into some sort of courses or paid bootcamps, while keeping their initial role and working in an origin company (which obviously mean their pace of evolving and consuming knowledge is impacted by being tired after a work week)

I like them more than Bootcamp grads and here is why: they actually worked somewhere, they got hired, they got education and they have experience working with other people, working on the projects and maintain the common base that is the same for any job and any vertical - communication.

Hint for Career switches though is to find their Dev-related role in the product SaaS that is in their niche, so if you were Construction Design Engineer apply for work in related field SaaS, you will have industry context that will fill up the gaps in the tech field experience.

Bootcamp grads

People who got on the hook of spend 5 weeks and earn X, can be clearly distinguished from the Career switchers by not having any other experience, not having a role they maintain, extremely nice visual CV, 2-3-5 Github boilerplate projects from bootcamp. And completely nothing above that, their approach is:

I did the bootcamp I paid for it now I'm getting the job where someone will teach me for X and 6 months later I would be able to switch into 2X etc.

Self-taught practicioners

Often times someone who study and started making some freelance projects, they done a lot, they do have a lot of links to show their past work, they doing coding because they enjoy and they doing projects because they know how to solve problems, gather knowledge about the topics they lack and solve problems, this type of person is skilled in learning what they don't know and decomposing tasks properly.

How to stand out

Now market is extremely saturated by grads, by layoffs and companies that looking to sell their bench.

Simple answer more examples of work you did. Don't have specific project right away? Use Front-end challenges available online, to get that project.

There is a lot of it out there, here is a subset of what I was gone through and liked

As a bonus here a nice guide about behavioral part of the screening

when there is a lot of candidates with same level of experience (and let's be honest in case of junior level it's not the thing that allow to rank anyone) the one who would be better to work with, require less effort to communicate and present common sense would win

On top of it pls look into System Design Questions you should be aware where your part of the app belongs to, how it is placed in a larger scheme.

Maybe if source from partners it would be different?

Above we talked about people who applied to us by themselves and replied to our job ad and advertized job ad on FB, but what if we use additional channels? Recruiters and other devshops bench candidates?

Below results:

Sourcers

They don't pay attention at all to what requirements are, so main thing you should be prepared to experience is to be signed up for a newsletter with a random profiles being sent to you.

Submitting portraits of good candidate and bad candidate does not help.

Want specific stack? React? cool you will get .NET guy who worked in a project where React was also present so he added all hashtags to his profile, no one cares what his main skillset is.

Want specific type of projects? Nope you will get a React guy who was not only not doing any web but was inside a React Native app for 2 years coding API requests and using a lib of ready made components.

Want specific rate and experience? Nope you will get someone x2 the rate with 0 experience and note that he/she eager and super motivated to learn and try new technology

3rd party vendors

We have devs, pay X, we will submit timesheets, you will have someone who is spreaded super thin on at least 2 projects given by the company itself and his own sidegigs, so hiring someone meaningful from external company means - company would use that person for firefighting of something burning in other projects, training their newcomers, and your project, and this person on top if moonlighting on sidegigs.

To sum up

• nothing new do good things and you will succeed, hard work pays off bla bla bla - applicable to all the part of the landscape
• Never ending learning, never ending self-marketing, and never ending hustle, things changing too fast, every week new framework, new startup hired a new CTO who never been CTO and he want's to try that new shiny framework with 5 stars on Github your insights from bootcamp are expired the first day you started learning
• Learn from free resources, they are out there, if you are so open to gather knowledge when submitting a form with a resume, what prevented you from gathering it on practical implementations?
• Learn fundamental things, show responsibility, responsiveness, ability to communicate, respect to other people time and general respect to the environment you joined, I know it's sounds boring but it is a miracle and tears on eyes when someone simply say X will be done by time Y and then at time Y you see exact X as described, every time it happens to me I'm double checking is it hallucinations or not...