Help Wanted: Junior developer with 3 years of experience …

Does that sound familiar? Many such job postings frequently continue the fantasy parade with additional requirements like

… Mastery of JavaScript, TypeScript, Machine Learning and quantum computing design, along with a demonstrable track record of defining the universe.

(We’re exaggerating here, but not by much.)

What Those Job Postings Really Mean

Wanted: A junior (i.e., inexpensive) developer who can productively contribute to a real software project immediately after joining our team.

We all know being an effective software developer is hard. The dirty little secret out there is that many experienced developers know how to code, but they don’t know how to actually deliver working software. Junior developers almost certainly can’t know how to do that–and most don’t know how to work on a software development team, so the perceived risk of hiring the typical junior makes even the most well-funded and visionary firms very reluctant to make that bet.

A related blocker is team bandwidth. Most development teams do not have the time and available talent to effectively mentor junior developers, so–although they wish they could find a junior developer who doesn’t need this–they can’t seem to find any of these unicorns.

So what is the solution?

The obvious solution is to create junior unicorns.

• We need to get junior developers the real-world software development team experiences they need so they will be immediately productive when hired by their next software development team.

We are creating a way for aspiring Elixir/Phoenix juniors to become the obvious hiring choice.

The Elixirized Mentorship Model

Elixirized was formed to do essentially this for our founders; we are all members of the “beta tester” cohort of the Dockyard Academy, the leading Elixir/Phoenix programming bootcamp. Some of us had no previous software development experience; others had some experience; others had decades of software development experience. What we shared equally was the need to become proficient at “industrial-strength” commercial competencies in Elixir/Phoenix software development so we could be productive members of real development teams.

Learn and Earn

We are calling our mentorship program for Elixir/Phoenix junior developers “Learn and Earn.”

Learn

The basic idea is doing real work on a software development team to produce and support a real software product–but not limited to “junior” level tasks.

• Being able to be immediately productive on a development team means having credible experience in the full software development lifecycle (SDLC).

• Put another way, “Been there; done that. Let me show you.” will be the answer to just about all interview questions that can be thrown at one of our “Unicorn Juniors.”

The Elixirized mentorship program will give juniors real-world experience in:

• Product/feature planning (“product roadmap”), backlog grooming, etc.
  • Creating user stories (“build the backlog”)
  • Contribute to the backlog prioritization process
    • Understand prioritization trade-offs
• Software delivery
  • Document and defend implementation choices (design)
  • Implement features (development)
  • Create “just enough” tests to be confident of making future changes
• Configuration management
  • Git skills: branching, pull requests (PRs), merge conflict resolution, merging
• Team collaboration
  • Pair programming
  • Peer reviews (of design and code)
• Deployment/Dev Ops
  • Dev Ops is a career in itself, but developers need to know how to get an app into production
• Support
  • Evil-genius secret: Supporting our own code accelerates our maturity as developers
• SaaS Marketing
  • Appreciating the business side of software is a developer superpower

Earn

As a pre-revenue startup ourselves, we won’t have money to pay mentorship participants–until we have revenue coming in. However, our hypothesis is that going through our mentorship will dramatically accelerate the job-hunting process.

That said, we believe that labor should be compensated. We are still working out the details (which we will complete before we launch), but the core principles include:

Revenue Sharing

• Share in the earnings (revenue) from the product(s) worked on
  • Amounts and duration will be based on (objective measures of) effort and duration of work on a given project/product, along with a factor relating to how long someone had to wait for the revenue to start.
    • For example, working on a new product will mean a longer wait for revenue-share than working on a more mature product (that is presumably closer to revenue).
      • There is math to be worked out that makes someone mathematically indifferent to this time difference. (Google “present value” for more on this general financial concept.)

Exit Proceeds Sharing

• “Exit” is another word for “sale” in the SaaS world. If a product is sold, mentorship participants who worked to build/support that product will share in those sale proceeds.
  • How such proceeds are allocated will be determined in proportion to (like revenue sharing) objective measures of effort and duration of working on that product.

These calculations will be defined prior to the launch of the mentorship program.

Timing

Before launching our mentorship program, we are modeling this process–externally and internally–to firm up our processes and methodology. Our external exercise is an actual job hunt for one or our founders. For this solo exercise, he is building a demonstration application and documenting the SDLC processes he is following (which track to the outline listed above).

Internally, we are working as a team to build Mindery, a simple SaaS product. “Simple” does not mean trivial. We already have a few early-adopter users waiting, and we intend for Mindery to make money. We will be supporting real users, fixing production bugs and making product roadmap decisions, so the stakes will be quite real.

In conjunction with these exercises, we will be collaborating with industry advisors to tune our mentorship processes to the latest needs of hiring companies.

• Stay tuned here for updates as we get closer to launch. (Coming Soon: Email list sign-up and/or Discord server join link)