What personality traits companies are looking for in a Junior Developer
It is easy to say that tech companies are looking for strong developers that can crush code, but sometimes just being good at coding isn’t going to check all of the boxes for a company.
Now, this is totally subjective and many people may disagree with me, but I believe there are 3 core personality traits that every good developer has, regardless of skill level. I’ll walk you through what they are and ways to communicate these traits in a behavioural job interview setting for a junior developer role.
The traits
1- Coachable
Why: Junior developers entering the job force have generally only experienced a small drop in the bucket when it comes to the ocean of things to learn as a developer. Having a dev join your team who is open minded and ready to learn creates a great team dynamic and helps move code along in a way that works best for the company and their practices.
How: Try to talk about moments of growth or learning experiences you have had while in the development process. This can be alone doing solo projects or maybe in a group project or a class assignment. Be okay with not knowing 100% of the technical questions that might get thrown at you — you are still new and learning so much, it is normal to not have seen every single thing in any given coding language. When you are confronted with a technical question that is out of reach, try responding with:
I haven’t encountered that yet, but could I explain to you how I have tackled what I believe is a similar concept in past?
This response (in contrast to a simple ‘I don’t know’) shows the interviewer that while maybe you haven’t used XYZ before, you are thinking about similar topics and how to put them together. Also offer them the option to say no to a potentially unrelated topic because you want to be respectful of their time.
2- Self sufficient (within reason)
Why: As a junior dev on a team, you have a lot of learning to do — and quickly. There is a delicate line you have to worry about: On one hand, developers who are either too afraid or too cocky to ask for help when they need it end up wasting a lot of company time. On the other, if you are asking for help every 4 minutes, you really disrupt the workflow of a mentor or senior on your team. You want to demonstrate that you are capable of being left to your own devices and learning independently, but know when to be humble and ask for assistance.
How: Talk about times where you have debugged or learned something about a piece of technology that you worked with. Dig into the tech talk and nerd out on the solution and what the process was like to figure it out. Did you use a debugger? Do you understand the solution that you implemented or was it a copy/paste from StackOverflow?
3- Cool 😎
Why: This may sound like a joke, but hear me out: the people who are mentoring you are going to be spending a lot of time with you. It helps to know that someone they will be spending 40 hours with every week has interests and can be honest and themselves in even the most stressful situations (ie job interviews). And I don’t mean textbook-cool-smoking-a-cigarette-in-a-leather-jacket, just someone who is able to communicate effectively be it about Dr. Who or football, or even coding likes and dislikes.
How: Be at ease in your interview! Practice answers to some more predictable questions, be ready with your own questions. When given the opportunity to ask questions back to the company, ask about workflow and testing practices and development process so they know that you also have to want to work for the company and not just the other way around. If the mood is right, maybe make a joke (ex: my entire online presence and all of my usernames are just a coding joke about concatenation, it’s a great ice breaker). Keep it PG and don’t waste time, but sometimes it’s those little quirks or special interests that people really pay attention to.
