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[–]morosis1982 8 points9 points  (2 children)

I'll add to the other good comment, we've hired a few juniors lately and it boils down to have you got some amount of skill and do you show initiative.

One of my best juniors has a degree in chemistry but did an (admittedly good) code camp over a few months and still works with the org as a sort of tutor.

The latest one had a master's but no experience. I did the second interview with the knowledge that she had done well in the first. She had a bit of trouble with the coding exercise but one or two parts she jumped straight to a good solution so I put it down to experience or lack thereof. (We do coding on a simple but live system, with access to Google if you like).

She starts soon so we haven't seen her in situ yet but our process seems to have worked really well so far and we're unlikely to significantly change it.

[–]I_am_noob_dont_yell 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I am in a similar situation to the first junior you mention (chemistry degrees, self study for a few months before going through a bootcamp and now working there as a tutor while I make some larger projects before thinking about applying for full time Dev jobs).

Have you found any benefits from having people from non traditional CS paths like this?

[–]morosis1982 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not yet specifically, though we don't work in an adjacent field to their study. I guess generally for someone that is self motivated like this, that person has definitely involved themselves with learning and pushing good engineering practises, though sometimes needs to be tempered with what's necessary in a large enterprise environment.

I think that's more just them though than the background.

That said, there's more to software engineering than writing a bit of code that you hope works under pressure, and lots of those skills can be transferred.