I think it depends, I have been coding for about 15 years, shipped a lot of Java applications, a lot of Rails, shipped a react system so some Javascript, and done some Python scripting. I applied for a job that said it was heavy OO Python, I said I had some some scripting but hadn't done much large scale Python. I didn't quite complete the coding task as I didn't realize they wanted Python 3 and I was having a few weird problems as I was used to Python 2.
If they needed somebody fluent in Python/Django/Flask from day 1 and didn't have room for me to learn then I wasn't the right candidate. If they did and wanted my other experience in the domain area then this was a pointless box check test that I clearly communicated I may not do well on.
Funny enough that position is still open a year later and I am doing the same job at a different company in Python/Django. I said in the interview I would need time to learn and they said it wasn't a problem.
Hello, I am currently hiring for 2 junior positions. There are a few different things I look for in juniors.
First is smart and gets things done, any history you can show of building your own projects, from what the motivation was, how you established a goal of "finished" and how you got it there. Also what as the person shown a lot of interest in, and where does it look like their career is going. If you have been doing a lot of graphic programming or building software interfaces for hardware then why are you applying to my web dev position? Do I think the few years of training you will get me more years for productivity, so try to look for roles that align with your interests.
Second technical skills stuff. Do you know how to use any IDE, bonus points if you are familiar with the one that is commonly used in our group. We make heavy use of GitHub so you would get bonus points if you are familiar with it but won't get penalized if you aren't, I assume that hiring a junior is hiring somebody that needs to be taught everything, and anything that you are already familiar with will be great.
Third soft skills, especially for junior positions, I am way more interested in somebody that is bright, easy to work with, and will fit into the team well than I am looking for a diamond in the rough that will turn into a 10x engineer but is also a giant pain to work with. After 2 years of working together if I need get a ping that is you asking for help am I going to feel excited for the chance to teach and work together or am I going to clench my teeth and try to punt it until later.
As for getting through the HR/recruiter screening each manager should have a sense of what their tolerance for teaching is. You should apply to any job that seems interesting to you, and let them tell you no. Very rarely are position metrics hard requirements 1-2 years could also accept candidates fresh out of school or boot camp.
I am in the same position. First completely self driven research project end in two different academic spend about 80k each fighting over which of them controlled the IP (the decided to share it), and totally fail to commercialize it (the both kept asking me how to do it while I had zero financial incentive). Second after a successful grant funding project which I was told I could not PI because I had not yet completed my PhD, while I was the lead inventor and developer on for 2 years and getting zero naming on the publications. I left academic to make almost twice as much at a soul crushingly boring job. I really felt like I was working on something important but hated the grant funding cycles (I was told if I wanted one I would have to write it in my own time and could not ask for support), and was tired of seeing people up and down the ladder claim ownership of my ideas and work.
Maybe if someone's passionate enough they can fund their own science? Surely you could have earned 80k quickly enough in your private sector job. Similar to poets and artists who usually get paid nothing for a long time/ever.
Oh, maybe I misread you. They spent 80k just on fighting for IP rights?
We need to leverage our current knowledge to deliver actionable results to regular people. Data generation is pretty reasonable from the standpoint of time and costs, data storage who owns it, has rights to it, and how to deliver incites from that data to regular providers (see family practitioners) that aren't deeply knowledgeable about genomics and their interpretation.
> The better you know a language, the more tempting it is to take shortcuts. When you don't know a language well enough to write really gross things that work "for now", you have to think carefully about the simplest possible solution to a problem that you can express clearly in an unfamiliar language.
I have the opposite experience, the worst performance bottle necks I have had to trouble shoot are from principal engineers (and tech leads) that use medium to high level abstractions in a ruby on rails that don't actually understand what how many sql commands they are triggering by writing clever one liners that taco my db, from a rails 2.4 method that has a much better rails 5 system they don't know about.
I'm confused by your example. Sounds like someone who knows (or thinks they know) a language well writing code that is "good enough for now" and causing problems down the road?
